High On Life has been taking Game Pass by storm and it has become the biggest third-party launch of all time on the service. The brains behind the game, Justin Roiland, has been so impressed that it looks like all of his future games are likely to release day one on Game Pass.
Speaking to Larry 'Major Nelson' Hryb in an episode of the Xbox Podcast, Roiland outlined how Game Pass has benefited Squanch Games. "We are an indie studio," Roiland says. "We’re small. And we do want a war chest to make a bunch more fun crazy games. And that was of consideration for us. It’s like, ‘Okay, we really want this game to get out there. We want it to do. We want sales to do well.’ And I think that from what I gathered in my little poking around and asking different folks, Game Pass was a huge value-add in that respect.”
Roiland thinks that because, if you're a Game Pass subscriber, you essentially get games for free when they release, then it helps a lot with visibility. "If someone’s on the fence or raising an eyebrow," he says. "what is this thing? And if they’re a Game Pass subscriber, well, they can just download it and dive in.”
When he was shipping High On Life around, Roiland talked to lots of other developers who had used Microsoft's service. They told him the marketing of the game and its inclusion in the subscription service meant that it would reach many more people than it would otherwise if players had to choose whether to pay for the game as a full-priced release.
"A lot of folks told me that non-Game Pass games that they ship versus Game Pass games, [they get] 7x sales,” Roiland explains in the podcast. This obviously provides clarity on the debate about whether games on Game Pass actually sell copies individually - it turns out they sell many more.
High On Life has been smashing records, then, and with Squanch Games' status as an indie studio, it would foolish for them not to put their future games on the service. And with Roiland's comments on wanting a big "war chest" to "make a bunch more fun crazy games," we can only hope that he gets his way and we see more stuttering eccentricity on our screens soon.