Shawn Layden, former Chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios, has made it clear during a chat with GamesIndustry.biz that he’s not too fond of subscription models such as Game Pass, describing them as a “danger.”
There’s a lot of debates going on. Is Game Pass profitable? Is Game Pass not profitable? What does that mean? That’s really not the right question to ask anyway. You can do all kinds of financial jiggery-pokery for any sort of corporate service to make it look profitable if you wanted to.
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I don’t think it’s really inspiring for game developers. They’re not creating value, putting it in the marketplace, hoping it explodes, and profit sharing, and overages, and all that nice stuff. It’s just, ‘You pay me X dollars an hour, I built you a game, here, go put it on your servers.'”
I’m not a big supporter of the ‘Netflix of gaming’ idea. I think it is a danger.” He even went one step further and argued that a developer under Game Pass essentially becomes a “wage slave.”
Speaking during an interview back in February with KiwiTalkz, Layden touched base on the as-yet unannounced PS6, which he believes won’t be entirely discless despite the increasing dominance of digital purchases nowadays.
In a separate interview with Save State Plus, the former PlayStation executive revealed that part of the reason he decided to leave the hardware manufacturer is because of Sony’s pivot towards live service products — something which hasn’t exactly panned out since Layden’s departure.
[Source – GamesIndustry.biz]