Xbox Boss wants to preserve games, but Game Pass isn’t helping

In a recent interview with Kinda funnyXbox boss Phil Spencer spoke about preserving the game and how, “I really wish that as an industry we would come together and help preserve the history of the game, so that we don’t lose the opportunity to go back. “

Elevate the Paley center working with archiving television programs, continues Spencer, “As an industry, I would love to see us come together to help preserve the history of our industry, so that we don’t lose access to some of the things that have brought us to where we are today. “

Which one, cool, the same! Only, um.

The rise of subscription services over the past decade, from Netflix and Disney Plus to Spotify and Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, has been driven by value and convenience. These huge companies have rightly felt that people are much more willing to pay a small amount each month for a lot of things than they are occasionally spending a lot more to own just one thing.

This convenience comes at a cost, however: ownership. Buying cartridges, CDs, and DVDs was (relatively) expensive compared to subscription costs, but once you buy this thing, you at least own it. And there would be almost no preservation of the game as it exists today without this property.

Each container found in your mother’s attic, every bunch of PS2 games you had in a box in your closet, every pack of 3.5 inch discs on a shelf, that’s how people like it the game preservation society were able to do their fantastic job, because people owned these games, and could keep them, and then mostly transfer the ownership as they damn want.

Subscription services undermine this concept. When you sign up for Disney Plus and get access to all of these Star wars Pixar films and shorts you have access to them, but only as long as you pay for them, and even then only as long as Disney sees fit (or is legally able to) provide them.

Xbox Game Pass is no different. You pay for it, you can play tons of games, sometimes new ones appear, sometimes old ones go away. Its popularity is exploding for exactly the same reason that services like Netflix have exploded: because video games are expensive, there are a lot of people who want to play them, and therefore people prefer to pay $ 10-15 per month to access. to hundreds of games that pay $ 50 a time for just one.

The service has over 23 million people using it at the time of publication, up from just 10 million in April 2020, which is insane. Those are transformer levels of growth, which threaten to completely change almost every aspect of the video game industry, from the way games are made to how they are “sold” to how we budget and pay for them.

I understand that Spencer is speaking here on a personal level and even calling on the industry itself to somehow come together to help preserve the games. It could even be read as an acknowledgment that, yes, Game Pass is going to change the world, just as Netflix and Spotify have fundamentally changed their industries, and so it will require publishers to come together with preservation specifically in mind to counter that.

Which, cool, but it still lacks the big picture. You are not the spearhead of a movement that contributes to the erosion of the very idea of ​​the ownership of things, so also say that you care about the preservation of the game! You can never trust any industry, anywhere, to protect itself from the inside out (what will they choose? Would they leave the bad things out?), And that assumes the video game industry, which does not. can not even work together to get a cross play. right – might even handle that scale of collaboration in the first place. The point is that the more people who switch to Game Pass, the less there will be game purchases, and the longer it lasts, the more influential the idea becomes, the less the games will be sold, and so there will be less games than people clean.

What may sound alarmist to you considering how many people still buy games, but who the hell still buys a CD? And how things are going, you won’t be buying DVDs for long either..

Also, everything I said pertained to your owning a disc itself! There are other challenges associated with preserving modern games that are unrelated to Game Pass, but are still things executives (like Spencer) are responsible for like online DRM, digital sales, and a reliance on servers that will one day be shut down. These things don’t preserve the game impossible, but they make it more difficult. So even though we were all again by purchasing discs from GameStop, preservation would be an even greater challenge; having to deal with that and an attack on the property itself is like waging a war on two fronts.

This isn’t a full review of the Game Pass, or the subscription services as a whole (or Spencer, who at least talks about that stuff!). I’m much happier with my Spotify subscription than I’ve ever purchased – or let’s be real, piracy – CDs and TV services like Netflix and even Amazon Prime were just the biggest improvements over the garbage we used to watch on TV. I know there are tradeoffs and downsides to be made here, I am aware of them and am willing to accept them for the sake of value and convenience.

Just like tens of millions of people with Xbox Game Pass. Just know that as you use it, and despite Phil Spencer’s best hopes, you are part of a movement that has its own drawbacks, some that it shares with other mediums, and others. that are unique – like preservation – to video games.