Against Subscription Distro & “Games for Everyone”
I propose that subscription-based distribution is antithetical to the making of long-form, story-based single-player video games, which are time-consuming, content-specific and inaccessible. It instead precipitates “games for everyone”. I will verify this assertion with reference to recent history and the words of "industry professionals". My theoretical basis is the proportionality, in any made thing, between form and matter, with business considerations interpreted as part of the work's material element.
Xbox Game Pass (“GP”), the standard of subscription distribution, has captivated gaming media since 2019. It accounts for ~1/5 of Xbox’s revenue[i] and its reception has been positive. Microsoft is now a "gamer-friendly provider of great value"[ii]. As indicated [in a manifesto-like post] by Xbox head Phil Spencer[iii], MS has shifted to publishing "safe" and "ethically informed" games… "games for everyone". By making products that everyone can access without alienating content or differential barriers to consumption, game makers "amplify joy together", instead of "dividing players and creators" in a world already "full of despair"[iv]. If only, Phil muses, we could unite, hold hands and sing kumbaya while consuming universally accessible Microsoft products! The media was convinced. Journalists embraced the charge of being bribed and started preaching "the gospel of game pass"[v].
The gauze of moral justification Phil drapes over [profit-seeking via] subscription distribution is unconvincing[vi]. But in Xbox's "goals" as Spencer states them, we can discern the shape of a new kind of game - a kind whose profit-making potential is restricted by neither content nor mode of delivery.
Sicart noted that "not every game is for every player"[vii]. The reasoning is clear: everything is received according to its receiver[viii]. There are two interrelated considerations here. Firstly, we are finite minds that can only relate to an object from the vantage of our own subjectivities. Further, in the case of made objects or artworks, art consists precisely in the regulation of matter by a determinate form. It necessarily follows that, insofar as knowers and things known are specific and vary, nothing CAN be beautiful nor evident to everyone[ix]: a proportion between knower and known is required which cannot always obtain[x].
So, the notion of a made thing which equally appeals to everyone is epistemically incoherent and contrary to the notion of making or art. It is not for the sake of making games well (as recent examples confirm) that Spencer promotes games for everyone. Instead, it is insofar as these games represent profit-making potential unrestricted by peculiarities of form or distribution [that Xbox promotes them].
What, then, IS a game for everyone?
A GP subscription ensures access to Microsoft's products which is unrestricted by historical pricing and distribution barriers. Xbox has solidly established this material infrastructure for universal access[xi]. Subscription distribution (with the business of game design), I argue, is a remote material cause of games as made things. It is one element by or through which the game as a formal cause is communicated (though not proximate like the playable aspects[xii]).
But it remains that not every game is "for everyone"... nor suited to subscription distribution. Re the latter, numerous industry figures have spoken out against launching traditional single player games on subscription services[xiii]. Such services are valuable as a back catalogue for legacy titles, not for releasing new ones. This for the obvious reason that the budget such games require cannot be satisfied by a steady trickle of subscription revenue. But, as an added reason (which Zelnick indicates), some games are committed undertakings unsuited to being experienced piecemeal alongside hundreds of others for a monthly fee. Streaming services imply superficial engagement with many offerings in a short period. These offerings, if specifically engineered for subscription services (not simply featured on them), will also be ongoing service games to encourage the retention of subscribers.
Zelnick approaches my argument. Subscription distro is novel both in terms of revenue and mode of consumption. For economic reasons, we can expect games designed for subscription distribution to accommodate its innovations. They will not be novel-style, 200+ hour worldbuilding exercises come to fruition after a decade of sweat and tears. Their budgets will be smaller, they will be more compact, accessible, ongoing. Their subject matter will be unobjectionable and amusing, their mechanics banal, their worlds shallow. These are games for everyone.
We need only look to titles released for GP by developers Microsoft has absorbed (who previously authored traditional single player works). Obsidian went from making Outer Worlds[xiv] to Grounded[xv], Tango from Ghostwire Tokyo[xvi] to Hi Fi Rush[xvii] and Arkane from Dishonored[xviii] to Redfall (complete with always-online requirements[xix] and future characters to purchase[xx]).
The precipitation of “games for everyone" by subscription distribution likewise makes sense from a theoretical vantage. I have said above that art or making consists in the determination of matter by a concept. It is true that said concept exhibits a priority over its matter. It is actual with what its matter will merely receive and convey. But material causality has temporal priority over form. It precedes the forms it receives in time, is extant in the world while form is still an intention in the mind of its designer[s][xxi]. Further, matter can only obtain form of which it is receptive; gas cannot be sculpted with a clay knife[xxii]. While it is incorrect to say, "matter actualizes form", it IS true that "the material cause will determine what kinds of forms can be made". Because the matter precedes the forms it might receive in time and is not receptive of all forms, certain material causes suggest and preclude certain forms.
These are empirical and theoretical reasons for asserting that subscription distribution is antithetical to single-player long-form games. “Industry professionals" have remarked (and recent games have demonstrated) the incompatibility of the former with the latter. Meanwhile we should expect the priority in time and modified receptivity of subscription distribution, as a material cause of the games Microsoft develops, to precipitate certain kinds of games and inhibit others.
References
[i] Makuch, Eddie. “Phil Spencer Says Xbox Game Pass Is Profitable, New Sign-Ups Slowing down on Console.” GameSpot. October 27, 2022. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/phil-spencer-says-xbox-game-pass-is-profitable-new-sign-ups-slowing-down-on-console/1100-6508670/.
[ii] Zak, Robert. “How Xbox and Microsoft Become the 'Gamer-Friendly' Company.” DualShockers, August 10, 2022. https://www.dualshockers.com/has-microsoft-xbox-become-gamer-friendly/.
[iii] Spencer, Phil. “Video Games: A Unifying Force for the World.” The Official Microsoft Blog, July 30, 2019. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/05/20/video-games-a-unifying-force-for-the-world/.
[iv] Kerry, Ben. “Xbox's Phil Spencer Wants to 'Inspire Joy' amid 'Culture of Criticism and Cancellation'.” Pure Xbox. Pure Xbox, January 19, 2023. https://www.purexbox.com/news/2023/01/xboxs-phil-spencer-wants-to-inspire-joy-amid-culture-of-criticism-and-cancellation.
[v] Tassi, Paul. “The Gospel of Xbox Game Pass.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, June 28, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/06/28/the-gospel-of-xbox-game-pass/?sh=6acfc07e2e1b.
[vi] That the world has improved for wider access to Microsoft products (as much as for the presence of racialized minorities in Marvel Cinema, board rooms or the CIA) is a truly laughable notion!
[vii] Sicart 147
[viii] “Every act inhering in another is terminated by that in which it inheres, since what is in another is in it according to the mode of the receiver” CG i.43.5 (Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles. Edited by Joseph Kenny. Isidore. New York: Hanover House, 1955. https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/ContraGentiles.htm.)
[ix] A+S ch 5 (Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism. Translated by Joseph V Evans. Notre Dame, Indiana, 1935.)
[x] The very notion of an object equally accessible to all subjectivities takes for granted an ontology of "fundamental underlying sameness". For something to be for everyone, the differences between our subject-perspectives must be accidental and provisional - historical contingencies which can be obviated. Natural multiplicity must be an illusion and difference the result of social and linguistic construction. See Zizek, The Real of Sexual Difference; Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire
[xi] Shearon, Andrea. “Sony Claims Xbox Game Pass Has Reached 29 Million Subscribers.” IGN. IGN, November 23, 2022. https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-claims-xbox-game-pass-subscriber-numbers.
[xii] On remote vs proximate matter in art, see A+S ch 7
[xiii] Dring, Christopher. “Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick Agrees with PlayStation's Subscription Plan.” GamesIndustry.biz. GamesIndustry.biz, June 13, 2022. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/take-two-ceo-strauss-zelnick-agrees-with-playstations-subscription-plan.
[xiv] An open-world sci-fi RPG with millions of written words, which explores dense philosophic themes like contingency, predetermination and the social consequences of capitalism: https://youtu.be/s4tiIhZnVqs
[xv] A cooperative multiplayer game inspired by “honey I shrunk the kids”: https://youtu.be/_BqgJ9nW468
[xvi] An open-world supernatural horror action game about consciousness, loss and death: https://youtu.be/XWpsAKYa7NQ
[xvii] A… “rhythm-action” game with western pop music and inane, “relatable” millennial characters. Ugh. https://youtu.be/pgd4aU56Kig
[xviii] The gold standard of modern, single-player immersive sims such as Sicart praises – multiple endings and ways to play, determination over the political outcomes of a meticulously-constructed fantasy world.
[xix] Bonthuys, Darryn. “Redfall Is an Always-Online Game, Even in Single-Player.” GameSpot. Gamespot, February 1, 2023. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/redfall-is-an-always-online-game-even-in-single-player/1100-6511054/.
[xx] Kerry, Ben. “Redfall's 'Bite Back Upgrade' Looks a Hard Sell Even for Xbox Game Pass Members.” Pure Xbox. Pure Xbox, January 27, 2023. https://www.purexbox.com/news/2023/01/redfalls-bite-back-upgrade-looks-a-hard-sell-even-for-xbox-game-pass-members.
[xxi] GV2 75 (Grenier, Henri. Thomistic Philosophy. Vol. II, Metaphysics. Translated by O'Hanley J P E. Charlottetown: St Dunstan's University, 1948.)
[xxii] A precondition of the reception of form is that “matter be disposed for form and capable of receiving it” (GV2 216). Texts to this effect:
· “Now, the necessity in the effect or thing moved, resulting from the efficient or moving cause, depends not only on the efficient cause, but also on the condition of the thing moved and of the recipient of the agent’s action; for the recipient is either in no way receptive of the effect of such action—as wool to be made into a saw—or else its receptivity is impeded by contrary agents or by contrary dispositions in the movable or by contrary forms, to such an extent that the agent’s power is ineffective; a feeble heat will not melt iron. In order that the effect follow, it is therefore necessary that receptivity exist in the patient, and that the patient be under the domination of the agent, so that the latter can transform it to a contrary disposition.” CG ii.30.13
· “Matter is required by an agent in order that it may receive the action of the agent. For the agent’s action, received in the patient, is an actuality of the patient’s, and a form, or some inception of a form, in it.” CG ii.16.7
· “It is evident, then, that in one sense the potency for acting and for being acted upon are one; for a thing is potential both because it itself has the potency for being acted upon, and because something else can be acted upon by it. And in another sense these potencies are different; for the one is in the patient, since it is because it has a principle, and because matter is a principle, that the patient is acted upon and changed by something else. For what is oily is capable of being burnt, and what is yielding in some way is capable of being broken (and the supposit is capable of being expressed)” Commentary Metaphysics 742
· “[An agent] has the power of acting when the patient is present and is so disposed that it can be acted upon; otherwise it could not act” Commentary Metaphysics 1820e reductive treatment of video games as mere gratification-inducing commodities.