I’m interested in the economics of it, and I’m no expert so would be great for some insight.
In years gone by, the quality and popularity of a game would directly correlate to it’s sales. Whereas for gamepass games, I assume that studios get a kick back percentage of revenue for installs, play hours, etc.
As the investment needed by a player to install is zero (barring a download and install, it’s all sunk cost from already having a gamepass), their threshold to try a game is a lot lower, therefore the requirements for the studio to ensure high quality is much lower for a similar return on investment. (I.e. more speculative downloads with lower return than lower hard sales with higher return).
What do you think?
Here’s the reality of the economics. It’s not free to host a server. it’s not cheap to host a server. the reason why online games in the past were free was because the peers were hosting it. 1 person hosted the lobby, everybody joined it, and they were strained by his connection.
This was why games like World of Warcraft had subscriptions but games like call of duty 1 through 4 didn’t.
Battlepass is just another model of subscription. It runs on the principle that you only need a handful of suckers who will buy the battle pass to make it free for everybody else instead of charging every player 15 dollars a month.
But believe me, if everybody in the world stopped buying fortnite battle passes and skins, epic games would either shut down the game, include adware and datamining and take a facebook/google approach to profiting off your data, or just straight up go to a 15 dollar a month subscription.