Ed Fries, former vice president of Xbox, takes a wary look at the success of Xbox Game Pass. The Microsoft service, which already has 25 million subscribers, continues to nurture its content catalog month after month. However, the director has indicated the danger that a product with these characteristics could end up damaging the industry. He has verbalized it on the Xbox Expansion podcast, where he has claimed to feel “nervous”.
“Game Pass scares me because it’s kind of analogous to something called Spotify, which was created by the music business. When Spotify took off it destroyed the music business”, says the former executive. “I mean, it literally cut the industry’s annual revenue in half, which made people stop buying songs.”
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A fragile industry?
According to Fries, industry must be cautious: “We don’t want to create the same system for the video game industry. These types of markets are more fragile than people think.” He gives the example of what happened in the early 1980s, when the business suffered a crisis unprecedented in its then very short existence.
He also witnessed how “the educational software business destroyed itself in the mid-1990s. That’s why Game Pass makes me nervous. As a customer I love it, just like I like Spotify as a consumer. I have all the issues where I want, so it’s a good thing for the customer, but it’s not necessarily a good thing for the industry.”
Fries has also assured that Spotify-style streaming services have led Apple not to sell more songs because “nobody buys them anymore”. Anyway, they publish in VGCSome people in the music industry have disputed his arguments, pointing out that the industry has grown and reaped close to $26 billion in profits. When Spotify debuted in 2011, that figure was much lower (about 15,000 million dollars).
These are the latest additions to the catalog of Xbox Game Pass.
Fuente | my box
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