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Maybe it says more about me than about game pass, but even at 5€ a month it would be significantly more money than I spend on games every year.
Not that I couldn't afford it, but I mostly play games that are at least 5 to 10 years old, either on second-hand physical copies or heavily discounted sales/keyshops. The most recent game I've bought is Elden Ring, even then only recently because I found a cheap physical copy.
Game pass is good for one month and playing like 3 single player games. But it’s really been the final nail, last gasp whatever you want to call it for XBOX. Its not sustainable, has stalled out and larger developers have had enough of getting f**** over.
Isn't this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
It is classic tech company strategy.
We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors. Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis. Google Photos offering unlimited free storage
If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there's a rug there.
Of Microsoft? That's like business 101 my dude, and mostly why business schools should be burned to the ground. The system we have stifles innovation and promotes greed. We fucked.
Except now it's just spyware
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
How many times have we already seen this?
One of the shit thing is that all the games that I've bought in the last 5 years all has come into game pass.
It's the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
We haven't seen antitrust with teeths for a while now.
Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple should have been broken up in a million little pieces a long time ago, but it won't happen.
Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google.
lol, feel free to let me know when any actual consequences come from that
The consequences so far have been a warm feeling on hearing the news but I'm starting to doubt that feeling. Shawty, are they playing me like a fiddle?
Sooo... Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They've got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
Games are a lot more expensive to make now. While the tooling has improved, the cost of labor has risen-sadly not enough to keep pace with the cost of living. The cost of a game to the consumer is also a lot cheaper than it was in even the 90’s. So you have a lead gen strategy in gamepass that forces them to recoup in other areas but they still aren’t able to recoup enough. Because of political monetary policies which gamers don’t really want to think about, currencies are worth less (USD lost 7% this year already-$100 bill is now worth $93) and the game prices haven’t adjusted to compensate. In short, games are hitting a similar wall to movies where in a world with Netflix, everything is going to end up looking like mediocre trash if it has to be basically free.
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but distribution is way cheaper and the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
Yet another example of:
C Suite / Upper Management doesn't listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they're being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
The goal is to lose money to capture the market and once it is done, to recoup their loss and bleed the market dry.
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn't as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn't killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the "wait for a sale" people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that's a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I thought that was during Covid.
I'm honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn't all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5...
And as an industry they return less than the sp500 so not only is movie viewing horrible, movie making is a terrible investment .
What's a gamepass?
Instead of buying a license for a game for $70 you subscribe to a rental service that gives you access to 500 games for $10/month.
Or, instead of buying a $500 console or a $800 PC you just buy a $60 controller and you stream those games running on "the cloud" (=someone else's console) for $15/month
Problem is that the service is provided by Microsoft at a loss and when they'll get enough critical mass, they'll enshittify it.
The economic proposition is good, but I think it's just to teach gamers that "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy"
A pass for games.
Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I'm not falling for it twice.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don't even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.
I'll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.
I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.
The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.
Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.
It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.
I saw this all coming from miles away. I don't blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It's a great deal, and I don't blame anyone for using it... But I don't see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well.
So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn't going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.
The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they're in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn't mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.
Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
Microsoft is literally killing off game studios and dev jobs to fund AI. There’s absolutely no way that customers don’t get fucked when the end goal of game pass is met. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Plus, since SKG is a trending topic, you think they’ll think twice about killing games exclusively under GP or just dropping them? You’re not even paying for the games, just access. I got it a couple times when it was $1. After it went up I realised “oh cool so my entire library would be hostage for future price hikes”. Fuck that.
Fawkes is doing this. An indie studio, Buying out IPs that have shutdown their service. They re-released Defiance back in April and it's been a huge success.
What is SKG?
Stop Killing Games, in short it's a campaign that's pushing petitions to force developers to keep games playable when currently if a developer is done with it they will just shut servers and there can be o way to play the games any more, or provide code for someone else to be able to set up a way for them to still be played.
Gamepass is going to continue betting worse until we end up with the mess that are streaming services right now.
I sincerely hope it fails.
Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don't care.
Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it's so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won't or can't think ahead
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
"But if you offer all these old games to play, why would anyone bother buying the new stuff?" - some corpo director
Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.
