In the area for four years already, and with more than 23 million subscribers, the Game Pass now occupies a prominent place in the video game landscape. A natural extension for anyone with an Xbox, it has also entered the field of PC and, to a lesser extent, mobile to considerably lower the barriers of the medium.
Only the Game Pass gives me a contrasting feeling. Impossible to deny its virtues. Inexpensive, it allows people who have so far stayed away from video games to (re)discover it and take advantage of the latest innovations. But it also sketches out a disturbing future, in which, like Netflix or any other video-on-demand platform, we would literally be drowned in the mass of games available. And where, ultimately, we would make video games a disposable medium.
Read also:
Netflix will soon launch into video games
"The Netflix of video games"
At the time these lines are written, the Game Pass has exactly 382 games available on console and 275 accessible on PC. And all this without counting the titles also playable via the cloud (mobile, tablets, browser) with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription (€12,99 per month). In short: a great deal. Especially since Microsoft adds a dozen new titles monthly.
The Game Pass has already considerably thickened its catalog since its launch in 2017. Funny, moreover, to note that the official site of the service always promises access to "more than 100 exceptional games", as if it had not not himself anticipated the scale it would take today.
So where exactly is the limit? Interviewed by us last April, Jason Beaumont, Xbox Game Pass program manager, precisely felt that there should not be any. Or, at least, that it was necessary for the company to remain reasonable by betting big on curation. "The idea is not to say '180 games is good, but 200 games is too much.' We want players to be able to discover games. We therefore want the Game Pass to be a catalog with real curation. It is our responsibility to create a meeting between developers and players. It's not an all-you-can-eat buffet, he concludes, it's a well-considered selection. »
However, and even with "only 382 games", I admit to being already struck by the "Netflix syndrome" when I walk around the Game Pass stalls. So many games make me crave. New releases, titles that I missed when they came out, well-known games from genres that I'm not used to exploring. So I add without much conviction these games to my download list. Aware that, as with the majority of titles in my Steam, Epic, Gog toy library and so on, I would probably never have time to finish them – or even launch them.
Read also:Impressed by the DualSense, Xbox could be inspired by it for its controller
Evil of the century
You may answer me that it's a rich man's problem. Poor guy, he has too many games at his disposal. You wouldn't be wrong; the situation is enviable in more ways than one. But it is part of a time when "FOMO", an acronym for fear of missing out (the "fear of missing out on something", in good Spanish) is considered by many as the evil of the century.
You know that irresistible urge to open Twitter while you're on vacation and you promised yourself to disconnect? Or the irrepressible need to buy this game on sale because it is well rated, and at this price it would be a shame not to take advantage of it. Examples abound. And the Game Pass, in a way, maintains this machine by making a double sword of Damocles hang over our heads. On the one hand, the majority of the games available in the catalog are only temporarily available. So you have to find the time to finish them before they disappear. On the other hand, we know in advance that many new titles will soon join the platform. So let's hurry to finish those in progress so that we can enjoy them! Do you see the blackboard.
Will we, like the average Netflix user, end up spending around 17,8 minutes a day passively scrolling until we find a game we really like? I have to confess that it happens to me already. I have already caught myself turning on my computer or my console to simply scroll through the Game Pass games before turning off the machine, tired of war.
A golden deal for developers
We may find, on our player scale, that the Game Pass is already too big. But for developers and indie studios, it's probably the perfect size. Think about it: what's better when you're called Studio Koba (Narita Boy) or Eggnut (Backbone) and you're about to release your first game? Do it in relative anonymity on Steam, lost in the middle of a veritable jungle of other titles, or be featured on a platform that has no more than 400 games and will put you in the spotlight in front of more than 23 million of players?
And all this without mentioning the generous check signed by Microsoft to ensure that a game is included as soon as it is released on its subscription service. According to some developers, the Game Pass represents nothing less than the best deal imaginable for publishing your game. It's hard not to be happy about it.
Towards a formatted video game?
But I am a big pessimist. What if, by its nature, the Game Pass ends up conditioning the way the games of tomorrow are designed? What if being integrated into Game Pass became a compass for developers?
For the moment, we are very, very far from it. The editorial line of the Microsoft service is to say the least variegated. There are both AAA service games à la Outriders, wacky J-RPGs like the Yakuza, and intimate independent games like Night in the Woods or more recently The Wild at Heart.
Read also:Google Stadia is not dead and is looking to expand its catalog of games with an attractive affiliate program
But the industry is constantly changing. Microsoft may still be impervious to it, but its competitors are not hesitating to experiment with different remuneration models for developers.
Take Stadia, Google's cloud gaming service. Although in a (very) bad patch following the closure of its internal studios, the firm has just announced a program aimed at remunerating developers according to the time spent by players on their titles. Clearly, Google encourages studios to develop games designed to maximize user retention by waving the promise of better compensation under their noses. The video game casino, you dreamed of it?
The Game Pass, Microsoft's new laboratory
Subscription gaming platforms are not just all-you-can-eat buffets from which we will pick new games to discover. They serve, for their editors, as veritable laboratories which, in certain cases, make it possible to direct their future investments.
A few days ago, Phil Spencer, CEO of Xbox, was speaking precisely on this point in the Kinda Funny Gamecast. We learned – unsurprisingly – that the attendance data for games on the Game Pass are closely scrutinized by the company. To the point of encouraging the exhumation of licenses that were thought to have disappeared!
Read also:The popularity of "old games" on the Game Pass encourages Microsoft to consider reboots
This is precisely what happened for Fable, the next game of the license, this time developed by Playground Games. It is by noting the intact popularity of the first opuses on the Game Pass that Microsoft would have given the green light to a reboot, the release of which is unfortunately not about to arrive.
Contrasting feelings, therefore, towards a service whose attractiveness is growing, but whose disruptions it instills in the industry require us to remain cautious. In the meantime, I still have a good thirty games to finish before the arrival of the next batch of Game Pass. What an era!
S'abonner au Xbox Game Pass
