For a long time, I have this idea how Microsoft should structure and price the Game Pass. I am thinking of making it modular with a cheap entry price, and then having basically DLCs to enable certain services. This would also allow Microsoft to add in new services without restructuring everything again or screwing up the names.
The below list is just an idea how it could be structure and priced, I’m not saying this has to be exactly like that. What do you think?
--- Base ---
$7,99 Game Pass
(pc and console, includes console multiplayer,
50+ games dynamic library)
--- DLCs ---
+ $4,99 Plus Expansion
(full set 500+ games, including EA Play and Ubisoft+)
+ $9,99 Day 1 Ultimate
(including all first party games except Call of Duty,
plus day 1 premium games from third parties,
additional benefits, perks and rewards)
+ $1,99 Cloud Streaming S
(for supported titles of all your own games,
plus all Game Pass games)
+ $3,99 Cloud Streaming X
(like S but higher quality streaming, shorter wait times)
$10/month for just the cloud streaming of games you already paid for elsewhere (and if I’m not mistaken, there are still limits on which ones you’re allowed to play), which isn’t attractive for many people given the latency and image quality compromises that come along with cloud streaming. You put your fantasy price at $4/month. Maybe that’s what you’re willing to pay, but given that Google put their premium sub at about the same $10/month price, I’d wager the math doesn’t work out to supply it at $4.
Google, notably, also had a hard time delivering the high-end hardware that they promised in their pitch, where you’d never need to fork up hundreds of dollars for a powerful console or graphics card as the end user, because you’d always be sent a stream of the game running on highest settings. In reality, they were often running on much lower settings, because it’s expensive to cyclically upgrade your fleet of gaming PCs to keep up with the latest games.
But its not just $4 in this example (which should be priced higher probably, at least for the premium Series X based streaming). In this example there is a base price on top of it, which would add to 12,99, not just a supply at 4. Have in mind that Game Pass has streaming builtin already, even at the the current base price of 9,99. So my suggestion is just, to make it modular. And the suggested prices are just here to give an idea what I’m talking about, not exact numbers to compare to their actual value. I was more interested in sharing the idea, rather than the exact plan. Just sayin.