‘People Are Less Willing to Pay’: Dev Speaks Out Against Day One Releases on PS Plus, Xbox Game Pass

Revenge of the Savage Planet launched day one with Xbox Game Pass, but maker Raccoon Logic’s boss Alex Hutchinson has said developers shouldn’t take the deals.

Speaking with Gamer Social Club, he admitted that while sales for the title “have been good”, most of its “traffic” is coming through Microsoft’s subscription. He said that if the industry keeps doing day one releases like this, it’ll “devalue” the industry at large.

Hutchinson continued that his studio initially took the deal with Microsoft in the hope that the extra exposure would lead to greater DLC sales. But that hasn’t been the case.

“We haven’t seen that, or at least not yet,” he admitted. “What we’ve seen is that content has been devalued and that people are less willing to pay for things, which in the long run will likely mean less games being made and a lot more studios going under.”

Perhaps somewhat hypocritically, Hutchinson argued that the “whole industry should agree to only allow games on subscription services a year after release”. He likened the idea to the film industry, where movies generally launch first in theatres, before eventually ending up on Blu-ray or on streaming platforms.

It’s worth noting that Raccoon Logic did get paid upfront for putting its game into Xbox Game Pass, although Hutchinson implied that the payouts aren’t as big as they once were.

Sony, of course, has always been reluctant to release its games into PS Plus.

Throughout the start of the generation the company was under intense pressure to copy Microsoft’s business model, but it maintained that the shift was unsustainable and stuck to its guns.