Xbox Game Pass may have hurt Outriders sales

Xbox Game Laissez passer may have hurt Outriders sales

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Remember Outriders? This cooperative multiplayer shooter from Smooth developer People Tin can Wing came out back in April to polite acclaim, and after the visitor addressed some pernicious bugs, in that location wasn't much else to say nigh it. The game aimed to be a looter-shooter while excising some of the genre's more repetitive aspects, and it mostly succeeded.

In that location was ane other interesting circumstance regarding Outriders' release, though: its day-i availability on Xbox Game Pass. Now, the devs accept called into question whether that was a good or bad motility.

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The story came out of a People Can Fly investor briefing, equally reported past IGN. In the briefing, CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski discussed Outriders' profitability — or, potentially, its lack thereof:

"We don't have any sales figures for Outriders," he said (translated from Shine by Google). "We estimate it at between ii and iii million units and assumed that this was a result that would ensure profitability for this project."

However, the game may not have sold every bit many copies every bit Wojciechowski estimated. Square Enix, the game'due south publisher, has not paid People Can Fly any royalties. That suggests that Outriders is not still profitable, equally Square Enix has to pay its own operating costs before the money starts channeling back to the developer.

The interesting chip for Xbox Game Pass fans comes next:

"Perhaps it was caused by some elements of Square Enix's sales policy, the details of which we do not know, such as partnerships ended by the publisher with distribution platforms or entities offering Outriders equally an addition to their products," Wojciechowski said.

Afterward on, the conference states that "on the mean solar day of its premiere, the game was offered 'for free' to subscribers of the Xbox Game Pass service."

To be crystal clear, neither People Can Fly nor Wojciechowski explicitly blamed Xbox Game Pass for Outriders' hazy sales figures. But Wojciechowski did allude to it, and the conference mentioned information technology explicitly. Whatever deal Square Enix and Microsoft came to regarding Outriders on Game Pass, information technology may not take generated the kind of profits that People Can Fly expected.

Of course, assuming that Outriders hasn't reached profitability all the same, pinning the whole thing on Xbox Game Pass may be premature. We don't know how many people bought Outriders outright; we don't know how many people played it on Game Pass; we don't know how many Game Pass players would take bought it, had the game not been available on Microsoft's subscription service.

Withal, Outriders was the showtime major 3rd-party title with day-one availability on Xbox Game Pass. From what we can tell, it doesn't seem to have paid off for the developer.

Whether this incident becomes an outlier or a trend, we'll have to wait and notice out. Xbox Game Laissez passer has a fair corporeality of third-party games with day-one availability planned for after this yr.

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Marshall Honorof is a senior editor for Tom's Guide, overseeing the site'due south coverage of gaming hardware and software. He comes from a science writing groundwork, having studied paleomammalogy, biological anthropology, and the history of scientific discipline and applied science. After hours, you can detect him practicing taekwondo or doing deep dives on classic sci-fi.