Xbox’s Chris Charla: Game Pass isn’t disruptive
Ahead of our interview with ID@Xbox director Chris Charla, we asked a few independent developers and publishers how they were feeling about Xbox.
The responses were largely very positive. The ID@Xbox programme – now celebrating its tenth anniversary – continues to be a success, and teams had nothing but good things to say about how Xbox works with them. But, as you'd expect, there were a few questions and concerns. And every single one of those was about one thing: Game Pass.
"Business people being worried about the direction of the business is a perfectly normal, natural, and healthy thing," Charla tells us during last week's Game Developer Conference..
"When free-to-play came to consoles, there were a lot of people who thought this was going to completely change everything, every game will become free-to-play and nobody will be able to get people to purchase a video game again. But that's not what happened. But were those concerns valid, rational, normal, and healthy? Absolutely. It is all our jobs in the games industry to take those concerns seriously, to think about them, and work together to make the industry work."
Charla says that concerns over subscriptions and how it might disrupt the games business isn't something that Xbox is seeing in its data.
"I wouldn't describe it as disruptive, because I don't think it is in the way that like Uber came in and got rid of all the taxis in that industry," Charla tells us.
"People still buy a lot of games and they still buy a lot of games on Xbox"
"It's additive. People still buy a lot of games and they still buy a lot of games on Xbox. They buy games through Game Pass at a discount, which is what they get as members. And so I don't think Game Pass has been a
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