To be fair (and I used to like the gamepass. I recently started to change my mind on that) the PC offer for gamepass is better and less expensive than the XBOX
I’ve never played it. I guess it got popular before ingot back into gaming, and i had some backlog from humble bundle games when they concentrated on Linux games
This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.
Because they’re currently not doing the bare minimum.
If they weren’t so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.
Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn’t think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.
Invalid votes will be removed when it’s time for the final tally, so the initiative needs a solid buffer to still he over a million after.
There’s been a talk of some people using bots to inflate the numbers in a misguided attempt to help the initiative, so every vote is still very welcome.
Also, I kinda want to see just how high Finland can go above the threshold.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the game industry isn’t also using bots to inflate the numbers to make people procrastinating not feel the need to contribute and make the petition look less valid.
Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It’s MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don’t care whether games are getting “devalued” or whatever, I’m simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can’t see that going away honestly. I can’t see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.
As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.
…
I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.
Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?
Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.
MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.
…
But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…
The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.
It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.
…
Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:
If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…
… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.
Oh no?! It developer’s choices vs purchaser’s options. Who will win, it’s a mystery only time can solve. Just kidding, we all know who the courts will side with, as it is never “the people”.
It’s got Gareth Edwards on board at least. I’ll probably give it a watch at some point just for that. Plus action hero Chris Pratt is the worst Chris Pratt. I liked him better when he was fat.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more out of their depth than Colin Trevorrow. A real shame that, because I actually enjoyed Safety Not Guaranteed.
There was a good spoilerfree guide on the steam forum that I used to get more into the advanced stuff. But I think I’ve made all the totems without external help so maybe you’re missing something obvious
I played the 3DS Remaster when I first played OoT. I loved it. I have it set up so I might. I’m not sure though because Majora’s Mask is a very situational game for me
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.
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
MS may not have invented it (although I’d argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.
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