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Sarah Bond assures that the future of Game Pass will not be decided by an acquisition
You may very well not know Sarah Bond, she’s not as visible a face as Phil Spencer or Aaron Greenberg, but his role within Xbox is one of the most important. She is none other than Microsoft’s corporate vice president for the gaming experience and ecosystem on Xbox. Little joke. Every time Bond takes a microphone or is interviewed, I personally like to read or listen to her, because she doesn’t give off the typical corporatist speech, and she is usually quite direct in her interventions.
Recently and nothing, she has been interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine, and has left some cool headlines. Like the one that concerns us today, where she leaves two things expensive, the first of which is that Game Pass is the future of Xbox, and the second that this future does not depend entirely on the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.
Game models with advertising, diversity and much more
Although it is true that those of Redmond have bet a lot on this purchase, everything must be said. And it makes sense because his idea behind this is to be able to offer an alternative store on Android that would break Google’s monopoly in this regard, Amazon and Samsung have not managed to bring down the search giant for their comfort, perhaps Microsoft does have the resources for it .
But going back to the interview, your specific appointment already states that they will continue betting on the variety on your subscription service; something that I am personally glad about.
We’ve been very clear about our commitment to have our first-party portfolio shipped to Game Pass on day one. We understand that people really value that, but it’s also about offering diversity of content. It’s not really about any acquisition. It’s all about the depth and breadth of the portfolio; from great triple-A games, to indie titles and hidden gems. That’s really what makes Game Pass really valuable.
Game Pass is an option for developers. One thing that we talk about a lot internally, but have made an effort to share more externally, is that the business model associated with a game has an endemic link to the nature of the game. We spend a lot of time on how we introduce more diversity of business models; how we create more options. We talk a lot about Game Pass because subscription is the last option we scaled: you have pay-to-play, then there was free-to-play, and then we introduced Game Pass.
Bond also wonders if an ad-supported model could work on consoles, something that is only an idea, but that has been on American minds for some time.
We’ve talked about how we’re experimenting with other models, like what does it mean for in-game advertising that’s more prevalent on mobile, are there models of that that work well on PC and console? Are there other models where you could have timed portions of games and such? Providing creators with choice and choice allows them to experiment and do what they want, and create more immersive and creative experiences without having to fit into a mold.
What do you think of these statements? Of course, if there is something that Microsoft cannot be blamed for, it is the fact of thinking of new ways of distributing games.
