There is a strange change of trends; just as Sony shelves its storied single-player storytelling to focus on a batch of games-as-a-service, Microsoft announces no less than 8 single player games. All of them, of course, will come to Game Pass at launch.

Historically, Microsoft has been the closest to this gaming model. It has several assets today like Minecraft, Sea of ​​Thieves, State of Decay, Grounded, and many more. So people were asking for single player games. In Redmond it seems that someone listened, and proof of this is what I just told you.

Creative freedom for your studies, the goal is to engage subscribers

In a recent interview with Polygon, Phil Spencer has assured that they are not forcing studios to make games as a service, only what they want to create. “A content subscription at scale means I don’t need to think about how a game is going to be monetized” the manager snapped when asked about this issue.

Spencer has been very clear on this issue, games of this type will continue to exist, but for Game Pass to be profitable, they do not need to. In addition, he points out that the metric they look at the most is commitment, so they will be based on what the players request to be committed and renew the subscription.

We started that journey a long time ago. And I think Matt Booty, who runs our first-party studios, pointed out that in the last five years we have 10 games that we’ve created that have over 10 million players. They almost create a platform for themselves.

There are individual things, like Monkey Island in Sea of ​​Thieves or like Dune in Flight Simulator, those unique opportunities come from the strength of the partnerships our teams have built. So they’re really organically driven at the team level.

I would say that for us in terms of how the business works, which is kind of what you’re asking as well, and it’s going to sound like a Game Pass announcement, the fact that it has a content subscription at scale means I don’t need to think about that each game monetizes each commitment. Because the success of Xbox Game Pass allows us to invest more in driving engagement than generating the dollars. The dollars will come from people who love the games they are playing. So we opened up opportunities for us not to be as incremental on each piece of content in terms of how we charge, and we thought, is this going to get some Sea of ​​Thieves players involved again? Are you bringing in new Sea of ​​Thieves players?

When game desEsports Extrasdoesn’t call for an in-game business model, we can just say, “Go build your game.” The Game Pass platform has a business model that these large narrative single player games will be able to fit into.

For a creator, you can say: “What am I trying to do? And is there a business model on this platform that allows me to do that?” And we want that answer to be almost always yes. And in the end, the player will decide if the creative side and the business model result in something that is successful, because they always vote with their time and money. In the end, the player always wins. Because the player can vote on what he plays.

The manager has left other great headlines in the interview that are worth reviewing, such as that Xbox makes a profit and barely accounts for 10% of all Microsoft operations, which guarantees them peace of mind in what they do.