IT Blog | Mr. HiTech Tech Blog

At Microsoft’s big XO19 event in London yesterday, Xbox boss Phil Spencer told the gathered press all about Game Pass, the company’s video game subscription. He spoke about the Yakuza games coming to Xbox for the first time. He spoke about Final Fantasy games coming to Xbox for the first time, including even Final Fantasy 14. And he spoke about Project xCloud, Microsoft’s take on video game streaming, which already seems like a cool proposition as it plans integration with Game Pass in 2020.That’s a lot of Game Pass. And why not? It’s such an incredibly good deal for gamers, and, it seems, is doing the business for Xbox, so it feels right it should form the basis of Microsoft’s video game strategy in the near to medium term. And yet, it seems, doubts linger.In a recent interview with Eurogamer sister site GamesIndustry.biz, Spencer’s counterpart at Sony, Jim Ryan spoke about his company’s rival video game subscription service PlayStation Now, which is on the up after a recent price cut. Essentially it’s the same as Game Pass, but there is a stark point of difference: Sony will not put its big first-party PlayStation exclusives on PlayStation Now at launch. Microsoft puts all its big first-party games on Xbox Game Pass day and date with their launch in the shops. Why does Sony keep the likes of God of War, Spider-Man and Days Gone off PlayStation Now at launch? To have those launches be “clean and pure”, Ryan said.This was on my mind as I sat down to talk to Phil Spencer at XO19. This, his interest in streaming longer term, whether he’s done buying studios after aquiring the likes of Obsidian, Ninja Theory and inXile, and of course righting the wrongs of the terrible launch of Xbox One with Project Scarlett.Xbox boss Phil Spencer.Game Pass is clearly a big deal for you. What are you most interested in when you try to measure the success of a title on Game Pass? Is it engagement? Is it downloads? Are you just looking at pure subs? How do you work out if a thing that is on Game Pass that you’ve put there is successful?Phil Spencer: Players. How many people play a game. But I think we’ll get more sophisticated than that over time. As Game Pass continues to grow, I don’t want us to think that every game has to reach every subscriber. Because the subscriber base is already too big for that. What I love is when creators can understand that in a base of players that’s that large, there are sub-communities inside of Game Pass where you can say, hey, I’m gonna go do a black and white puzzle game because I know there are a few million people there who will go play that game. Somebody else can say, I’m gonna do a turn-based strategy game because I know there are enough people.I really want to foster diversity, not every game trying to reach every player from now
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