If you sell individual games, creating a high-quality game is the best way to maximize profits. You must convince your customers to spend between 60 and 80 euros for the game.

However, with subscription services, the value lies not in the individual games but in the size of the offering. People sign up for Game Pass because it promises a lot of games for little. A good single game won’t have much of an impact on the number of subscribers, and a bad game certainly won’t (because there are hundreds of other games). Leaked documents from the FTC’s investigation into the Activision Blizzard acquisition also show that there is no growth in the number of GP subscribers.

Since a single game has little or no impact on the number of subscribers, creating a very good game is no way to increase your profits. The value proposition of a subscription service lies primarily in the amount of content it offers, not the quality of the content.

So you have 3 ways to increase your earnings for a service like Game Pass:

• Price hike (disambiguation)
• Increase the number of subscribers
• Cut costs

You can’t increase the price infinitely, so that leaves the other two options. Since the value proposition lies in the amount of content (500 games for 10 euros per month sell better than 50 games for 10 euros per month) and the quality of the games has little impact on this, the only way to really increase profits is through more cheaply produced games. Maybe with a higher budget title every now and then to give people the idea that they’ll be missing out on something if they cancel their subscription.

Quality decreases because this is the only way to increase profits. We see exactly the same thing with video streaming services, except they are a few years ahead. At first I watched a lot of good and relatively recent movies on Netflix. The new content is now largely low-budget “Netflix Original” films and series, with high-budget spin-off series in between.