Xbox Game Pass-Style Subscriptions 'Bad for the Business' and Turn Developers Into 'Wage Slaves,' Former PlayStation Boss Shawn Layden Says

Shawn Layden, former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios, has blasted gaming subscription services such as Xbox Game Pass as bad for the video games industry and developers — who, he said, can end up being turned into "wage slaves."

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Layden criticised the impact of Xbox Game Pass becoming the "Netflix of gaming" by suggesting it had led to a new normal where paying for individual games had become less common — at a time where big live-services such as Roblox and Fortnite were already gobbling up attention spans and player spending.

Layden was also critical of the impact that launching a game into a subscription service had on its developers, with titles simply becoming content for the subscription's catalogue.

"I'm not a big supporter of the 'Netflix of gaming' idea," Layden said. "I think it is a danger. I mean, look what happened to music. In the popular mind, music costs nothing. Music should be free. Spotify, what is that? It's 15 bucks a month or something, but virtually no one buys music anymore."

While not an exact comparison, Layden is suggesting that the ubiquity of music via streaming catalogues has devalued individual releases. But while the music industry can adapt to make up revenues from live concerts, the same cannot be said for video games — something that makes day-one game launches via a subscription service "bad for the business," in his opinion.

"The problem with gaming is all we have is launch," Layden continued. "That's it. No one wants to pay money to come into the studio and watch people code."

There has been much debate recently over the profitability of Xbox Game Pass, which Microsoft itself has said makes money even when factoring in the development cost of the games that launch within it, and the lost sales of first-party games which people no longer need to pay individually for. But, Layden insisted, the profitability of it all is not the real issue.

"Is Game Pass profitable? Is Game Pass not profitable? What does that mean? That's really not the right question to ask anyway," he said. "You can do all kinds of financial jiggery-pokery for any sort of corporate service to make it look profitable if you wanted to. You take enough costs out and say that's off the balance sheet and, oh look, it's profitable now. The real issue for me on things like Game Pass is, is it healthy for the developer?"

It's here that Layden described developers working to launch games within a subscription as essentially becoming a "wage slave."

"They're not creating value, putting it in the marketplace, hoping it explodes, and profit sharing, and overages, and all that nice stuff," Layden said. "It's just, 'You pay me X dollars an hour, I built you a game, here, go put it on your servers.' I don't think it's really inspiring for game developers."

Regardless, Xbox Game Pass remains a huge profit driver for Microsoft, which said in June that the subcription service had reached a new annual record of "nearly $5 billion" in revenue for the first time, following the launches of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion: Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social