this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Game Pass is awesome. Back when I was a kid, you rented a game for a weekend and it cost you like $8. Now for around that price you rent a hundred games for a month.
Game Pass is just streaming for video games. It works and lets me try out so many games that I would never have spend money on, but ended up liking a lot of them.
Yeah, I get that gamepass is a good way to play games but the thing is when this is if I really like the game and want to purchase it, I can't. They won't ever sell me the game files, they'll only give me the key to rent it out and can revoke that whenever they want.
I can totally relate. Paying 30-100€ per game is something for rich people or something I'd do once or max twice a year on very carefully selected games, hoping these games are worth it. With Game Pass I spend 120€ a year to access a wide range of games.
Once I played through or once version 2 of a game comes out, I'm not likely to play it ever again.
Also I have phases where I play a lot and phases where I do not play at all. I can simply discontinue Game Pass in these cases.
And what about when Microsoft ups the price on their subscription, which is clearly their strategy as gamepass doesn't appear to be profitable?
At least if you'd spent that 120€ on 2-3 games you'd be able to keep them forever.
That 120€ subscription could easily become 200€, 250€, or more. Something people may feel compelled to pay for if MS continues buying up the industry and decides to make games exclusive, which is something they're already doing to some extent.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't think giving MS a disproportionate amount of power over the market is a good thing.
We can "what if" all day long, the fact remains that at the moment it is a very good deal. Last numbers anyone had as far as money goes is that MS was banking 50+mil a month on gamepass subs alone and that was last year. That number should be much higher now considering the amounts of high profile releases on the platform as of late.
It's not a crazy what if, it's a tried and tested, proven business strategy.
Currently Microsoft is losing money on gamepass. That's why they lump it in with other services in their financials, so you can't see the losses. The pricing as it stands is nowhere near sustainable
I never said it's not currently a good deal. Those are words that you're trying to shove into my mouth.
It's a good deal now because they're having the price low while they capture the market.
Yes, I totally agree with what you said.
They currently try to buy out the digital gaming space of the internet, sell it for cheap and later on up the price. That's what big corporations usually do nowadays. Same with X, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. It's a big issues that we as consumers and later on citizens of our planet face.
However, currently it is a sweet deal for me. And the argument that I'd own the game otherwise doesn't count for me as I would most probably never replay it. So what's the use of owning it if it's just collecting dust in the shelf?
The argument of whose property the item is is different for me for movies, series, and audiobooks. I'm surprised that this scheme was not yet applied for books / e-books. Or am I wrong?
It is applied to ebooks. Tons of subscription services for ebooks, the biggest being Amazon Prime and Scribd.
The point is it hasn't happened, you are just being pessimistic because "Microsoft Bad". You have no clue if gamepass is losing money, none whatsoever. Your pessimism wants it to go bad so you make up bullshit to support your opinion.
There's a reason why MS has never said gamepass is profitable and they hide its finances. Because it isn't profitable.
And if you genuinely don't think MS will increase the prices then you genuinely cannot be helped. It's how every digital subscription service is run.
Once again you are making assumptions. And I never said they wouldn't raise prices, you keep putting words in my mouth. The type of price increase you seem to think will happen is definitely beyond the realm of reality, at least at this time. There's no way they are going to double the subscription cost and expect to keep their current subscription numbers.
I'm not the one putting words into mouths.
It's not "what if", it's "when". Is it a good deal currently? Yeah, it always is at this point. Will it become untenably worse once it becomes more popular and corners the market? Yes, it always does in the end.