It’s official, the Game Pass "cannibalize" video game sales

Game News It’s official, the Game Pass is “cannibalizing” video game sales

The Game Pass, an attractive service…

For a few years now, the Xbox brand has not only bet on the sale of machines to compete with PlayStation, but also offers a service that can be found on almost all media… We are obviously talking about the Game Pass which, against a ten euros per month, makes it possible to find a complete catalog of games on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, but also on telephone thanks to the XCloud functionality. One of the great promises of this service is to make games available from their first day of launch, starting with all Microsoft productions such as Halo Infinite, Starfield or Forza Motorsport, but also by lower budget or lower impact productions; we are thinking here of independent games like Midnight Fight Express and Immortality or AA like Signalis, Trek to Yomi or Atomic Heart. Yes, the Mundfish FPS that has been making a lot of noise lately will be available in Game Pass on February 21, the day of its launch on all gaming platforms.

With the arrival of such a service, many players wondered if such an advantageous offer would not slow down game sales, and rightly so. At first, the words of Phil Spencer, the president of Xbox Game Studios, but also many independent creators like Mike Ross, the developer behind Descenders, have long asserted the opposite.

Belonging to Game Pass means being constantly featured on Xbox. Your game is always on the home screen. People see your game every day. It’s for this reason that in the month of launch, our Xbox game sales quadrupled without any promotion, and we’re now at about three times more sales than before. This is actually direct advertising. Mike Ross, creator of Descenders

We have over 15 million subscribers and a very consuming player base. Everyone can see what everyone else is playing on Xbox Live. When a game comes to Game Pass, it gets more exposure on the network, which is huge viral marketing. We see this with our first-party games. We’re at the inflection point where that’s becoming a reality, and that’s already true for a lot of developers. Phil Spencer, President of Xbox Game Studios

Nevertheless, we learn today that Descenders is one of the rare examples where we can see the sales of a game explode after its arrival on the Game Pass. In general, it would just happen the opposite…

… But who cannibalizes sales

It is within the framework of an investigation in connection with the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard by Microsoft that the American giant makes a confession. The latter indicates very clearly that putting a production on the Game Pass negatively impacts its sales. A statement that was supported by a report published by the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority). It demonstrates that a game will see its sales decline for twelve months after its arrival on the Game Pass.

In this same report, we learn that Microsoft has said that Activision is far from favorable to seeing its games arrive on the Game Pass or any other subscription service since it “severely cannibalizes sales”. Rather worrying statements knowing that Microsoft has made a promise to put all Xbox games on the service… If Activision is against it, this could therefore bring some complications.