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Football Manager boss refutes PlayStation criticism of Xbox Game Pass

Football Manager boss refutes PlayStation criticism of Xbox Game Pass

The head of Football Manager maker Sports Interactive, Miles Jacobson, has defended Xbox Game Pass.

Speaking to Eurogamer, the industry vet said that his company had had a positive experience with Microsoft's subscription service. This comes in the wake of PlayStation boss Jim Ryan criticising the offering as being "value destructive" to video games.

"Every studio is going to have different opinions on this and different studios will have different data, because different games work well in different situations," Jacobson said.

"For us, it's nothing but positive on all three platforms."

He continued: "The simple fact is Game Pass and Apple Arcade have brought new people to the franchise that never played it before. I'm confident enough in our games to believe we will now have those consumers for a long time, whatever platforms we're on. Fiscally, it makes sense. Creatively, it makes sense.

"Learnings-wise, it makes sense as well," he explained. "We were looking at games as a service... Game Pass and Apple Arcade are games as a service platforms that we're in. So you're learning a lot more about that audience as well as you're going along. And there's no way we would have reached five million players on FM23 without the audiences on those platforms - with PlayStation being an added bonus on top, because we've done much better on PlayStation than we were expecting."

Jacobson concluded: "Every studio has to make decisions themselves, but I don't recognise some of the quotes that I see from other studios, and depositions. I don't recognise that in our business. It's all very sunny for us."

 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.