PS Plus, Xbox Live Gold, Luna Channels, Epic Games free weekly games and Stadia Pro. The only synonyms of all these named subscriptions is that people can claim temporarily free games and hold them free while the subscription exists.

But the antonym varies much and for developers a BIG DIFFERENCE is the compensation for temporarily not selling games on certain platforms.

Oddworld Inhabitants, the developers of the legendary series of games Oddworld recapped the year 1 for Oddworld Soulstorm and the experience of having a simultaneous launch with being a PS Plus games with their leader, Lorne Lanning, declaring it “devastating”.

During his interview at the Xbox Expansion Podcast, Lanning claims that the deal meant losing income by letting Sony make a deal to have Oddworld Soulstorm be available to be downloaded and while expectations were as high as 1000,000 copies downloaded, the game was downloaded 4 million times.

While it is big numbers, this didn’t mean nothing economically for the studios as the deal was on a one-term payment by Sony which was not publicly discussed.

But the genesis of the problem for the game started at the development phase, which  was already rocky according to the head of Odworl Inhabitants, and the COVID-19 pandemic just make matters worse, provoking the game to missed their January 2021 launch date and delaying it by April 2021.

Landing also revealed that by the end of 2020, the developmental budget was already depleted and it was just life siding with the studio as PS5 began to be more in the wild and an offer from Sony did arrive and saved the development of the game.

I mean, I can understand why he feels “devastated” as PS Plus Games are more for people that would not normally buy a game and maybe there was a notion that by the story of Oddworld Inhabitants, you would not expected a brand new game not to be offered without much investment, but why is not questioning the lack of funds prematurely by the end of 2020?