I had gamepass for awhile because of some glitch where I could get 3 years for the price of 1, and even at the heavily discounted price I didn’t feel it was worth renewing once it expired.
I actually liked the Game Pass approach initially.
You could pick between PC, Xbox or both.
You had the option for a cheap sub, or a slightly more expensive one, with appropriate feature parity.
The included games - especially the early access for many of them - were a solid mix of AAA titles and indie games that deserved the recognition.
And the funny thing is, Microsoft could’ve reached the target subscriber numbers if they didn’t pricejack tbe service while fucking over the customers AND the plans. I understand the need of capitalising a subscriber base, but doing a “from tomorrow, this shit will cost 3x as much” bullcrap move ain’t it.
Game Pass was a mistake.
I’m not sure it was a mistake. Netflix but games is a pretty compelling offer but the industry has just constantly mistepped over and over with jumping the gun on ending disk based sales and it has poisoned the well a little bit on digital offerings.
Plus the game industry constantly makes ridiculous projections they fail to meet. MS was always going to have to burn money for years to get this off the ground if they even manage it.
To their credit at least they didn’t Google it up like Stadia.
You can’t compare it to Google Stadia or Netflix in the sense of, that these companies don’t have anything else to sell as games. So they didn’t hurt their existing business. In example Netflix did hurt traditional business, they just didn’t have one themselves. Like Game Pass hurt traditional business, and XBOX has a traditional business. And Stadia itself wasn’t actually like Game Pass, because one had to buy the games and it was streaming only. So totally different category here.
I think that Game Pass wasn’t healthy for the XBOX structure, because there was less incentive to buy games. And Game Pass wouldn’t make much sense with low profile and indie games only, so they had to include blockbusters. And Game Pass needs a quick stream of games from first party. But blockbuster games are also extremely expensive and take a long time to make. So they had to be sold enough to be profitable, because including them in Game Pass alone is not enough (Call of Duty is the proof).
It’s almost like raising prices while reducing the offerings is a good way to lower the number of paying customers
But, but… Copilot for Xbox!
let ai play for you, for a small admin charge of 4.99 per attempt
We are not quite there yet but I’m sure there are at least a couple LLM powered vtubers kicking around that can pay a few tokens to while you watch them play games badly.
not there yet, but there are patents https://www.ign.com/articles/playstation-patents-ai-assist-feature-that-can-take-over-if-you-get-stuck
That’s why I canceled!
I was getting $60 a year plans and then they started moving features to their “Ultimate” tier while making it four times the price.
Wtf? 4x? I, personally, find 60 already way too much for not owning a single fucking game. Also way too much for some casual gamers who play an hour a day or so at maximum. Which I assume are their target demographic.
I don’t think the value was a problem before they raised them. 60 Dollars a year (or 12 Dollars a month) sounds good, if you take first party day one releases into account. If I think back to the video stores back in the 90s, where we had to pay daily for a single game around 2 Dollars, then Game Pass sounds good. Off course we can’t just compare everything to an unrelated time period, I get that. This is me just thinking back. While the price wasn’t the real issue, the real issue is as you said not having a permanent license (notice we don’t own digital games) after I stop paying. Free to play games aside, and those I purchased separately.
All in all in comes down to your playing habits. If you try a lot of single player games, blockbusters and indie too, then Game Pass is a good value. But if you mostly keep playing one or two games for long period, a RPG or multiplayer Free to Play game and don’t care the first party games of XBOX, then Game Pass isn’t a good value. I personally would have used Game Pass on PC sporadically for one month and cancel immediately. Still buy games, in addition to renting them like this. The problem for me was and is, as a Linux user Game Pass isn’t well suited.
I feel like $5 per month to rent a ton of games (if they are games you are interested in) is a damn good deal. Not sustainable, but a damn good deal. Heck we used to rent one game from blockbuster for $4 for like 5 days.
They didn’t understand the only reason people used it was because it was really cheap before they raised the prices. Most aren’t super hardcore and play games over a few months so it became cheaper to just buy games again. It’s stupid because they had no reason to try to make a sub model except that MBAs are morons and value recurring revenue more than just revenue in general
thats right, the average ‘gamer’ is casual. they’ll purchase a couple games per year and maybe a handful more on special.
gaming itself is a leisure activity so when other aspects of life starts getting expensive or free time is reduced then what gets dropped first is an overpriced subscription service.
Yeah they really forgot games are something I would buy on a whim during good times. Now? I’m not going to spend even $60 on a game, or a subscription, until well after any game as released to make sure it’s worth it. I’d much rather replay red dead or mass effect or Skyrim again then spend $60 on some lame boring corporate game
It was great for trying out games you weren’t sure about. But I don’t wanna pay $30/month for that.
Yeah, if they made it like $10 per month and you could only rent 1 at a time that would be great. I would love a digital rental service to try out games.
But if you give everyone a free trial you’ll have millions in “recurring revenue”, which you can tell your shareholders and inflate your share price.
But they got RID of Features while RAISING Prices! That’s the EXACT Recipe for Success!
That’s okay, Microsoft can just have Copilot subscribe 40 million times to pad out the numbers.
Spending 70 billion dollars for gamepass content never seemed like a viable strategy.
There’s also the issue that I don’t think there are enough customers that would trust Microsoft in a pure rental situation.
MS’s other money makers have all turned to complete trash. The only business strategy that MS understands is monopoly.
Spending 70 billion dollars for gamepass content never seemed like a viable strategy.
It wasn’t just for Game Pass. Those games get and got released on other platforms too, and they included lot of high profile single player and high value multiplayer games too. It’s about controlling (Embrace) a big chunk of the market that is part of the strategy. Suddenly Sony and Nintendo have to do deals with Microsoft to get some of the biggest IPs on their system. Remember how much Sony was freaking out about Call of Duty? Such big takeovers are never a short term plan, but planned for generations, including smartphones and streaming on TV in example. It was never just about Game Pass only.
Ha ha!
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Why? As if steam and co aren’t bad enough in the sense of renting-not-owning. This is literal renting.
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No mods
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Microsoft is so untrustworthy. Why subscribe to something that is probably gone tomorrow. They half-assed or killed so many projects…
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Pressure…when will the game vanish that I just installed?
Look I know it’s cool to hate on Microslop, but c’mon.
- People are largely fine with renting when they can rent a shit ton of stuff at the same time. This is Netflix for video games, and it’s actually done well (compared to whatever the fuck PS tries to do).
- Mods are niche. The type of person who buys a console already knows they aren’t going to get mods.
- Game Pass has a strong track record of giving plenty of advance notice for both additions and removals from service. And they offer discounts on all games that are about to go away.
- See #3. This is a made up strawman issue.
Microsoft is fucked from a business perspective, but Game Pass was a great idea and a great offering right up until they fucked themselves from a business perspective by buying Activision for an ocean of money.
There are also mods in some games on console, they just can’t use script extenders like PC modding often can.
Microsoft have already erased everyone’s library once before when they shut down the original Games for Windows store. They already have a track record of showing they’re perfectly willing to yank everyone’s licenses and shut everything down until they decide they actually they do want to be in the games space again.
Game Pass is already their second attempt at this, and there are a lot of people who don’t trust them not to rug pull again.
What rug pull? You pay a subscription and know exactly when they’re going to revoke your licenses.
Games on Game Pass can be modded. Granted, it’s not as easy as something from Steam for the older games but saying they can’t is blatently false. Older games still require to take ownership of files but newer games give you full access. There’s a number of Forza Horizon 6 mods already and the Game Pass version is modded the exact same way as the Steam version, just open the folder and change the files.
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