Part of this article just feels like the capitalistic notion that profits should only increase and anything but that is failing:
"Expectations for Devolver this financial year were $115 million to $120 million, and they’ve had to go back to $90 million. The majority of that is the delay of big releases into 2024. I think those are decision for the right reasons, although investors won’t like it in the short term.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscription model WAS actually hurting smaller developers. I remember hearing people hypothesizing that would be the case for a long time.
If you have Gamepass or PlayStation Plus Ultra, you can play almost any small publisher game for free. With that set up, there’s a very large incentive to only play the games on the subscription service, instead of buying a full priced game to try out.
The problem is that once a small game is on the service, a large number of potential sales are going to be cannibalized by people playing on the subscription service instead of buying the game.
This leads to a scenario where your game needs to be on the subscription service and you have less sales because of it. This means that Microsoft and Sony have a large amount of power over the small publishers’ vitality, since a lot of money now needs to come from deals with them.
As Microsoft starts tightening its purse strings trying to make Gamepass profitable, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more small publishers suffering as a result.