Sony believes that Xbox Game Pass could be negative for the medium to long term

Shuhei Yoshida, former head of PlayStation and currently an ambassador for independent games at Sony, has expressed his concern about the growth of subscription models in the video game industry. During a recent interview at Gamescom LATAM, Yoshida emphasized that while these services can be beneficial under certain conditions, their normalization could limit creative diversity and hinder the development of new games.

PlayStation Plus will not imitate this model

The executive praised the PlayStation Plus strategy, highlighting its ability to preserve the initial value of games. According to Yoshida, this approach avoids overpromising and allows major releases to be reserved for traditional platforms before being integrated into the subscription service, thus avoiding the risk of saturating the market with titles that do not meet player expectations.

However, Yoshida warned that if the subscription model becomes the only way to access video games, this could be “really dangerous.” In his opinion, this could restrict the variety of available proposals and give large companies control over what types of games can be developed, which could stifle the creativity of small studios and, therefore, innovation in the industry.

Despite his reservations about the Xbox Game Pass proposal, Yoshida acknowledged Microsoft’s technical effort in areas such as backward compatibility, noting that they have done remarkable engineering work. Still, he emphasized that a healthy ecosystem must allow for the proliferation of new ideas coming from emerging developers, calling for a balance in the game offerings that benefits the entire community.

Xbox Game Pass DOWNLOAD