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I know; the idea may sound ridiculous. When is a bad or mediocre game ever a good thing? I understand that sentiment but hear me out. The October release of Scorn, an Xbox Game Pass title that has been heavily marketed for the service over the last couple of years, has reignited a conversation about Xbox Game Pass and if the service is detrimental to the gaming industry.
Since the early days of Xbox game pass, there have been detractors of the service who claim that Xbox Game Pass will primarily be a vehicle for low-quality games. One of the main arguments for this theory is that Microsoft will be in a rush to push out any kind of content, good or bad, just so they can keep churning out new titles to keep subscribers satiated and paying monthly.
In theory, this would work kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet, with lots of variety in choice of what you can eat but few of those food options being anything of high quality. You can stuff yourself with an endless amount of ok, low-quality food, and some people will be happy with that but if you want fine dining, an unforgettable culinary experience that leaves you wholly delighted, you probably won’t get it at the buffet.
Many who don’t like the idea of subscription services in games think of them as similar to a buffet. They see a plethora of mediocre games being created and pushed out to subscribers and quality game experiences being left by the wayside. They believe that in a world where Game Pass becomes a major service and a primary way that a significant portion of gamers play games, the overall caliber of major production video games will take a hit.
We won’t see high-quality AAA games the likes of God of War Ragnorok (Metacritic 94), Horizon Forbidden West (Metacritic 88), or Elden Ring (Metacritic 96) anymore, and we will mostly get games like Scorn (Metacritic 71) The Medium (Metacritic 71), and Outriders (Metacritic 73), the latter three all being games that were heavily promoted by and have launched day one on Xbox Game Pass.
I can see where people are coming from with this line of thinking, but I believe they are being short-sighted. The fact that Xbox Game Pass needs a lot of continuously fresh content to retain and grow its subscriber base is a very good thing and not all that different from what major game console companies such as Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo have always done in the past.
I’ll even go one step further and say the fact that even smaller games may be getting pushed out and in the process, some mediocre games will get greenlit and made is also a good thing. Let me tell you why.
The Videogame Industry Will Grow Through Experimentation
The gaming industry is a highly competitive and cutthroat business. As most gamers who pay any attention to industry trends are aware, the creation of games is getting more and more expensive every year. It can be difficult for developers to find funding for their latest projects, and even when they do make games, it can be hard for them to find an audience that is willing to buy their games.
On one hand, that’s just life in any business and marketplace. Some ventures are going to succeed, but most will fail. On the other hand, some really brilliant minds and talented people never get a chance to get their projects off the ground, or they never get a chance to learn and grow into their talent because they have no room for failure.
Services like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus Extra, and others can become patrons for smaller development teams that need funding to get their ideas off the ground and into players’ hands. A lot of these games won’t be masterpieces, and they may not meet the original vision that their creators had ultimately set their sights on but more games will get made, more experience will be gained, and future, better games can be born off of the minor success of these middling predecessors.
A game like The Medium was not terrible by any means, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I also recognize it is not a game most people would label a killer app. That said, I am sure Bloober team will use the finances and experience they gained from making The Medium to help them make their current game, Silent Hill 2 remake, and it will be a better game for it.
Scorn has not set the gaming world on fire with rave reviews and millions of quality hours played, but there are certainly people out there who really enjoy the H. R. Giger-inspired horror and creepy atmosphere. Future games from Scorn developers will likewise see a benefit as the studio continues to grow.
The success and failures of Scorn will prove to be an invaluable tool for developer Ebb Software, and thanks to the likely healthy amount of capital they received from Microsoft for launching their game on Xbox Game Pass, they are probably in a position to make another, hopefully, better game, in the future.
We have already seen the creation of great games thanks to these services
While there are people who feel that these services are a breeding ground for mediocre and bad games, they often overlook some of the quality games we have already seen being created through the benefit of these services.
Stray, a PlayStation console-exclusive game that is about playing as a stray cat, was a critical darling and it got a huge amount of exposure in part because it spearheaded the launch of the revamped PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium service. Many new subscribers downloaded the game and enjoyed it, many people who would have probably passed on it if it was a normal release, and Sony’s marketing and funding for including the game into their PlayStation Plus service, likely benefited the studio behind Stray greatly.
Stray saw record-breaking numbers on Steam, the largest PC gaming platform, and that is also likely related to the marketing and exposure push the game received from being attached to PlayStation. Would Stray have been made without PlayStation Plus? Probably, but would it have been as big of a success or as much of a known quantity as it is now? I don’t think so.
In November of 2022, Microsoft and Obsidian Studios released the small-budget adventure game, Pentiment as an Xbox console exclusive. This is one of the highest-rated Microsoft studio-developed games in years sitting at an 86 Metacritic score and it has received a perfect score from several outlets.
Though Pentiment is widely considered a very good game, being a historically accurate, primarily text-based adventure game set in 16th-century Bavaria, it is an extremely niche title that most gamers will not be very interested in. This is the kind of game that very likely would never have been made if it wasn’t for a service like Xbox Game Pass. Pentiment is a game that probably won’t see a wide audience and there aren’t a lot of game studios that could afford to make this game knowing they won’t see a significant financial return.
For the niche group of gamers who happen to love narrative themes and the historic world presented in Pentiment, they get a game that is wholly unique and not the same cookie-cutter experience that so many companies emulate because they have to chase big profits. Obsidian Entertainment and Pentiment director Josh Sawyer were able to flex their creative muscles and make a passion project because Xbox Game Pass afforded them some security and opportunity.
Speaking to Waypoint Radio, Sawyer himself said the game would not be made if it weren’t for Xbox Game Pass being a delivery platform they could utilize.
“I never would have proposed making Pentiment without Game Pass. Like, I literally just wouldn’t have done it. I just don’t think it would have been possible,” said Sawyer.
“The old mentality of publishers and developers is generally focused on larger investments with higher ROI, and that’s not the point in this environment, in this ecosystem.”
“[Game Pass] is the only way in which I conceive of [Pentiment] being viable.
“For my own sake, making a game so different, I’ve completely shifted my thinking for [Pentiment]. It is so unusual, so niche, it’s for a small audience, and as long as that audience is into it, that’s fine.”
Eurogamer.com Quoting Josh Sawyer from his appearance on the Waypoint Radio Podcast
Pentiment isn’t a mediocre game but it is a game that most gamers will not find appealing. It’s a game that is risky and different, something that isn’t an easy win, and it is the type of game we generally will not see companies take a chance making. Does that mean that a game like this shouldn’t exist? For a small contingent of gamers, this may be their game of the year, or one of their favorite games ever, I think it’s very cool that games like this have an opportunity to come into existence.
Mediocrity leads to success
We need room for mediocrity because we need room for failure because we need developers to have a space to experiment. For several years I lamented because it seemed like AA games had disappeared. AA games are the video games between Indie and AAA. Those games that live in the medium budget zone, games that aspire to play on the same field as their bigger, larger, and more popular counterparts but don’t have all the bells and whistles to get there.
In recent years, a lot of those games have come back and I am loving it because they tend to get a little more creative and feel a little fresher than their bigger budget counterparts. Games like Evil West, Outward, or a Plague Tale that want to do something ambitious, delight players with nice visuals, giant worlds, or great gameplay, but don’t quite have the budget to go all out in every area.
Games like that can become amazing franchises unto themselves or inspire new genres or other games to take bold new directions. They help influence our beloved, massive AAA budget titles, and they provide us with fun adventures to have on smaller scales.
Mediocrity having a space on Xbox Game Pass is good because development studios have a place where they can afford to experiment, fail, and learn. It’s a place where every game doesn’t have to be a hit to be viable, and thus every game doesn’t have as much incentive to be directly derivative of the latest major successful gaming product.
For all the middling to poor games that may be produced under something like Xbox Game Pass, there is a lot of fertile ground for hidden gems, and originality. On top of that, once Microsoft gets its first-party studios rolling consistently, there will be plenty of big AAA games hitting the service at a regular cadence so gamers of all predilections should have something to look forward to.
Will subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Extra help fund some disappointing games in the future? Yes, they will. It’s just the nature of mass production, not everything is going to be a banger. That said, they will also back a lot of success. They will also fund a lot of games that really appeal to some people, and not to others.
Xbox Game Pass is still going to have games like Starfield, Forza, Redfall, Fable, Perfect Dark, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, The Outer Worlds, and much more. PlayStation of course is still going to make their best in class third-person action-adventure games.
Those big massive games we love aren’t going anywhere and I think they will always be important for attracting massive swaths of hardcore gamers who live and die for their AAA-produced 30-hour adventures and multiplayer games.
The gaming industry is still one of the largest and fastest growing entities in entertainment and that means there is plenty of room for titles big and small, with mass appeal and niche, that people will want to play. A lot of people see subscription services as some kind of dark portent of gaming’s future or a threatening harbinger of change.
I see these services as an evolution of the medium, a new way to play, something like home video, the VCR in the 1980’s, a form of media that expanded the film industry so that it wasn’t just about major Hollywood pictures. With the VCR, independent films, straight-to-video movies, and theatrical movies that weren’t expected to rake in major box office dollars could be created because the VHS sales provided a new revenue stream that wasn’t available before.
Some of our favorite movies were made because they knew they had VHS and DVD sales to make money on even if people wouldn’t come out to the theaters to buy tickets at large. Games funded through Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, and any other services that similar can now reap some of these same benefits.
Speaking of the film industry, this brings to a famous quote from the renowned filmmaker Frank Capra. “There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.” I feel much the same way about video games. Gaming services unfortunately won’t put an end to dull games but afford creators broader opportunities to try and create gaming experiences that don’t have to be safe bets or appeal to the masses.
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