While Pete Hines has left behind his position as head of publishing and communications at Bethesda for a couple of years now, he still has some strong feelings about the current state of the gaming industry and how subscription services fit into the overall picture. In an interview with Dbltap, Hines spoke about his career in the industry, and how he believes subscription services like Game Pass may not properly balance the “needs of the service” and those running it with those of content providers.
“I’m not working in any of these companies anymore, and so I don’t assume that everything I knew while I was in the industry still holds true today,” said Hines. “At the same time, I’m involved enough to know I saw what I considered to be some short sighted decision making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said. Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can’t buy a product anymore.”
“When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don’t figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content – without which your subscription is worth jack s*** – then you have a real problem. You need to properly acknowledge, compensate and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product. That tension is hurting a lot of people, including the content creators themselves, because they’re fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they’re making.”
Interestingly, former Xbox executive Shannon Loftis agrees with Hines. Loftis, for context, has worked with the company in a host of positions, ranging from VP of Xbox Game Studios, studio head of World’s Edge Studio, general manager of Global Games Publishing, and even general manager at Xbox Entertainment Studios. In a LinkedIn comment, she wrote about how the adoption of Game Pass came at the expense of game sales.
“As a longtime first party Xbox developer, I can attest that Pete is correct,” wrote Loftis. “While Game Pass can claim a few victories with games that otherwise would have sunk beneath the waves (human fall flat, e.g.), the majority of game adoption on Game Pass comes at the expense of retail revenue, unless the game is engineered from the ground up for post-release monetization. I could (and may someday) write pages on the weird inner tensions this creates.”
In the same interview, Hines also spoke about a host of other subjects, including the poorly-received marketing decisions surrounding Arkane’s Prey. Hines noted that he even “p****d some people off internally over that because I fought so hard against using that name. I’m the head of the spear, but I had a lot of people across my team – brand, PR and community – and we feel like we’re burdening it with a name where we spend more time explaining why it’s called Prey than we do talking about the game. I regret that I lost that battle. But nobody on this planet could have put more of a good faith effort into changing minds on that.”
Ultimately, he noted that the marketing surrounding Prey could best be described as “wasted excitement”, since Bethesda would have been better served by marketing the title better with regards to its title, as well as its gameplay, story, and themes.