LogInShe agrees with Bethesda's ex-executive that "your subscription is worth jack sh*t" if you don't support content creators.
Xbox
"Subscriptions have become the new four-letter word," says Pete Hines, Bethesda's former Head of Publishing and SVP of Global Marketing and Communications, who had worked there for 24 years before retiring in 2023. And it's impossible to disagree when everything around us requires a monthly fee: "You can't buy a product anymore."
But a good subscription system, like Xbox's Game Pass, must fulfill the needs of not only the managers but also the people who create content for it.
"When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don't figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack sh*t – then you have a real problem," he told DBLTAP.
Hines believes that subscription services need to "properly acknowledge, compensate and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product." He says that such tension is "hurting a lot of people, including the content creators themselves, because they're fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they're making."
He is not the only one to think so. Shannon Loftis, former VP of Xbox Games Studios, knows Game Pass inside out and agrees with Hines: "As a longtime first party Xbox developer, I can attest that Pete is correct."
While GP can definitely be beneficial for games "that otherwise would have sunk beneath the waves," like Human: Fall Flat, in her words, the majority of game adoption "comes at the expense of retail revenue, unless the game is engineered from the ground up for post-release monetization."
This, she claims, creates "weird inner tensions," which she might write about in the future and we are ready to hear more about.
Shawn Layden, former CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, is also of the same opinion: "I believe Pete's colorful quote hits this nail right on the head," he said on LinkedIn. "The question is not, 'Is the service profitable for the platform.' Is it healthy and helpful for the developer is what we need to ask."
"The people making the games are people," Hines added in the interview. "Yes, they are employees. But if you don't see them as people first and employees second, then I don't think you're going to understand how they're motivated. You're talking about highly creative artists, programmers, and designers, and they don't want to be hemmed into this tiny little box, painting the same picture again and again."
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