Are Sub Services Dying?

Game Pass is getting restructured. First party games are leaving PlayStation Plus, and there’s no evidence they’re coming back. The grand experiment is over, and it looks like the glory days are gone.

It was supposed to be a shake up on an industry that desperately needed shaking up. The traditional model of paying increasingly high amounts for increasingly safe and padded out video games was starting to feel hard to justify. Many of us were paying pennies for most video games, and getting better and bulkier experiences as a reward for waiting.

The sub service was the equaliser in that. In return for a regular fee, you could access the biggest games sooner. Maybe even on day one with Xbox. I can safely say both companies got more money out of me than they otherwise would have done.

This week has seen to blows to both console services. The first was on Xbox. Game Pass standard, its new lower tier service, will only get new first party games “up to 12 months or more” after release. That non-committal statement says it all – don’t expect Microsoft games on standard game pass and you won’t be disappointed. Ultimate, the more popular section of the service, will continue to get games day one.

But it’s not just Xbox subscribers who will have to get used to changing days. Further disappointment came from PlayStation. They’re removing Horizon Forbidden West from their own service. This is an odd move anyway, but no new first party game has been added since Forbidden West. If you subbed for the Sony games, you’ve been left wanting. That’s despite a major price increase.

The Death of Sub Services

It may be a bit premature to say that these services are dying. On the other hand, it’s hard to say they’re thriving. If you wanted a new, more accessible entry into this industry, you’ll soon be out of luck.

Detractors will say it’s a sign the business model wasn’t working. Perhaps that’s true to an extent, or at least at the scale we’re currently at. The Netflix of gaming is hard to get right when even Netflix is struggling to figure out what it is. There are enough people – tens of millions – who want to play games this way, and figuring out how to make that successful is going to be very lucrative.

On the other hand, there are other issues. Many people will subscribe to services, especially on PlayStation, regardless of if it’s their primary way to play. That’s fine – people can spend their money any way they want. But this leads to a double or even triple dip with PC, and Sony would be mad to cut that off day one.

Microsoft, who are less successful, are still managing to sell large numbers of copies on Steam and Xbox while Game Pass is in place. And I guess it was only a matter of time before someone asked what the numbers would look like without a subscription service and including PlayStation. Watch this space for when Indiana Jones is released on PlayStation in quarter one of 2025.

Sub services are going through a kind of death. The idea of what they are and what they could be has obviously been pushed out, and I’m not entirely sure we’ll ever have a solid reason for why. We need data that we just don’t have to get into the specifics. But actions speak louder than words.