The Xbox boss, Phil Spencer, recently took up an interview with Insomniac CEO Ted Price and discussed how adopting “fresh business models” will increase creativity among devs in the games industry and will help attract new players — especially in emerging markets.
In other words, Spencer wants to explore monetization methods, and subscriptions in places where people don’t typically own consoles or have a gaming PC — and I’m 100% sure this also applies to people that own said hardware too.
In addition to the above, Spencer wants to bring something like Xbox Game Pass to places like Internet cafes or other spots in emerging markets to increase revenue.
We know this thanks to a new piece on videogameschronicle.com, which sees Spencer saying he visited Africa last year to check on the opening of several Microsoft development centers and has the following idea regarding “diverse” monetization methods and subscriptions:
“They have a model in Africa—and it’s probably not just in Africa—of basically earning credit that they can use to use the internet, so you might be in a taxi or on a bus and you watch an ad and it gives you five minutes of value to go and browse the open internet.
And you think of it as kind of pay to earn, or play to earn, where I’m actually earning stored currency through things that I realise other people are monetising, whether it’s showing me ads or whatever it might be. And I said, could that be a model that works in games? Absolutely I think it could.
I don’t know if it’s going to completely mirror the business models that we have today – it’s not necessarily free-to-play, it’s not necessarily ad funded, it’s something different, but I think as we reach new pockets of the planet with new players with their own lifestyles and kinds of monetisation and the [differing] amount of cashflow they want to apply to gaming, we as an industry should be flexible.”
Nevertheless, the website also cites Spencer during the interview, warning the dangers of viewing the world of games as a fixed pie. On the other side, the site also highlights Spencer’s thoughts on the benefits of monetization:
“We have to be careful. I think if you view the gaming world as a fixed pie, if you say there are 200 million people that will buy a gaming console in any generation—which is about the number—and in order to grow the business we need to get more per user and that’s the only path to growth for the business, where it’s a fixed number of players and it’s just how much you monetise each hour and each minute someone is playing, I think that’s dangerous for us as an industry.
So I think we need to find new players and new forms of monetisation to open up those new player bases and new ways to build new games, new creativity. And that’s a great path to growth.”
Right now, Spencer thinks that the best choice is to find new players and form new monetization methods. This path will eventually “open up” a passage to those new players so that devs can build new types of games. Spencer believes this initiative will supposedly bring in more revenue and “creativity” in said medium.
