Not everyone is entirely positive about Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass monthly subscription service: there are some critical voices.

Shawn Layden was previously one of the more important Sony executives. We used the past tense because he left the company in 2019 even though he was the head of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE, the predecessor to SIE, or Sony Interactive Entertainment) America, or the vice president of SCE Europe, and he also spent a few years as the president of the Japanese branch of SCE. You might remember him from E3: he was effectively the host of Sony’s press conferences between 2014 and 2018, and yes, he was the one who wore a Crash Bandicoot T-shirt before Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy was announced.

Layden, who is set to return to the gaming industry via Streamline Media Group, told Gamesindustry that he is sceptical about the Xbox Game Pass, and he doesn’t believe it is the best deal in gaming: „People don’t buy consoles because they want more steel and plastic in the living room. People buy consoles because they want access to content. If you can find a way to get content into people’s homes without a box, then yes, indeed. Everyone has a streaming solution of some form.

Most of it is limited by whether you have a decent internet connection. And they haven’t constructed the business model that works for that yet,” Layden said. Here, he pretty much hinted that ISPs in North America still tend to use data cap, and streaming can chew through your allocation fairly quickly.

„It’s very hard to launch a $120m [budget] game on a subscription service charging $9.99 a month. You pencil it out, you’re going to have to have 500 million subscribers before you start to recoup your investment…If you only have 250 million consoles out there, you’re not going to get a half-billion subscribers. So how do you circle that square? Nobody has figured that out yet,” Layden added.

Layden forgot one aspect: Microsoft can afford to lose money, as they happen to have Windows and Office, which both print money for them…

Source: PSU