Newer, cheaper competitors like the FPGBC are finally muscling in on the Analogue Pocket’s market, so I guess they’ve decided to double down on being the ‘premium option’.
Yea, if you look at your purchases you probably spend less than 20/month on average for games. Plus many of the “big” games aren’t on game pass, so you are paying even more.
I’ve done the math; for what I currently pay if I play two full price games on gamepass a year I come out ahead. Now that’s only because codes are cheap on cdkeys and eneba but once that changes I’ll jump ship
That also assumes you benefit from playing them day one.
There are plenty of games that I would play day one if it’s available. But if not, then I would happily wait and buy it when it’s cheaper. Also, the ownership adds to the value if I’m not keeping it all the time.
So if I would have waited until the game is $40, I’m saving $40 max. But also, I’ll still have it 2 years from now when it’s worth $25, assuming I want to play it again. So it maybe saved me $15, depending how you look at it.
Agreed. I guess it’s that value proposition: if you have the time to play, and you play their whole catalog and have a blast, that’s $16.99 well spent.
As for me I love owning my games (where possible due to licensing and DRM), so the value isn’t there. But my spouse and I certainly took advantage of the heavy discounts they offered like the $1 month. I planned it so that I could try as many games as I could during that period and ended up buying them on GOG or Steam if I really loved them.
If their whole catalog is refreshed and they have another heavily discounted offer for 1 month, I’ll pick up a month just to try those games. But I definitely would never be a long term customer, I’d be a parasite loss-leader lol.
The problem with these things is that it usually works out being a net positive for the company. Like when Netflix stopped allowing households to share passwords. I cancelled, and hoped that drives of other people would cancel too. But Netflix did their research just like any other company would, and they ended up getting more subscribers and more money because of it. The era of good deals is over. The era of squeezing customers for everything they’re worth is here. There is no more competition, and thus no reason for them to offer good deals.
Yeah I pirated a lot when I was younger, then things became more easily available and cheaper so I started buying all my games and movies again. And now they’re going in a backwards direction and making things sorta expensive again and there are a dozen different subscription services so now I’m back to pirating again.
Same here man. We were up to about $70 per month for streaming services, which was right back to cable TV type of shit. When Netflix pulled the password stunt that pushed us over the edge and we’ve been real-debrid ever since.
And games are gimped on gamepass. When palworld released I had to purchase it on steam anyway to be able to play with my buddies. Also patches are late. Very late. I will not be renewing.
Yeah Xbox game pass uses the Xbox version of the game which is sometimes different. Deep rock galactic on game pass won’t let you play with deep rock steam players and vice versa.
Or just do what I do. Sign up for game pass once in a blue moon when friend wants to play games. Cancel it after 1-2 months once friend eclipses into non gaming mode for a while. Dispute the charge on card and say MSFT didn’t cancel trial. Get money back every time. Rinse and repeat as needed.
Regardless of how you feel about Game Pass, shouldn’t Microsoft (and the game’s publisher and dev) get paid for a game rental service you fully used and benefited from?
With my morals, that’s not something I could do. Definitely doesn’t sit right with me.
Fair enough, megacorps certainly are amoral in their decisions, which generally leads to evil outcomes.
Have you considered what happens to indie game devs, which aren’t megacorps? They list games on Gamepass to increase exposure. Microsoft takes a cut of the monthly fee and the rest is dispersed to the publishers and then all the way down to the game devs getting a small slice of the monthly fee.
When OP issues a charge back, the game devs aren’t getting paid. Is that fair to indie game devs? They don’t get paid if Microsoft and the various publishers don’t get paid.
Granted, I’m not justifying subscriptions. I personally dislike Games-as-a-Service as I prefer to own my games. But using a paid service, and then charging back against the company? Especially when it’s smaller game devs on that platform, too, hoping to make it big one day.
I don’t think indie devs should eat your ass, or the original commenter’s ass. Frankly, they need money to eat and pay their bills just like us plebs.
I think it’s a pretty good deal. As a dad who has limited amount of time to play, I’ve had an Xbox for 16 months and bought it with game pass.
In that time I’ve played > 50 games and played about 15 of them to the credits.
In that time I’ve not actually bought a game. At the new price of $20 is have paid $320 which is the cost of about 5 or 6 games, Maybe 10 or a 11 if I’d aimed for sales.
I mean console games are always more expensive. There’s always something amusing about getting about 20 good games for five bucks on PC. Also epic games is still trying to bribe us with free games.
What drivers issues, don’t consoles require just as many updates? I distinctly remember console update taking upwards of a half an hour to install like 300Mb. Refusing to update would log you out and disable digitally purchased games. It often killed the mood when I just wanted to play some games after work, the steam deck filled that spot nicely.
Besides I use Linux so my drivers are built in and updates are unintrusive and take no time to apply. I have it set to remind me once a month, I get a little icon in the taskbar and I apply them before shutting down. It takes like two minutes.
I’m not judging if you like console but modern consoles are just as annoying as any other internet appliances. They need updates, they need regular Internet access to work, they can’t really do anything else, when it shits the bed your expected to throw it away get a new one, and often have tack on a monthly fee for basic features.
I need a computer so instead of splitting the cost between a computer that won’t be too slow to do any real work and a $500 game console I just get a more powerful computer and justify the cost with the money I’m saving.
That does sound like a pretty good deal. The thing is, it used to be a fantastic deal. And judging by the way they are acquiring multi billion studios and IPs left and right it’s clear as daylight that they want to monopolize the market and keep the subscription model for a long time, which means the deal will get ever worse. So yeah, this pricing change was definitely expected.
I know right. I get about an hour a day and was quite shocked as I just went back through my achievements to see how much I’d actually played in that time.
That’s how alot of these discoveries seem like. Partly it’s just science reporting hyping up anything that happens, but then for many of these astronomical discoveries, it’s just a couple of pixels on a screen. And then somehow they can infer all sorts of things about it based on that. It’s just mind-blowing to think of all the data they can get from that about stars that are millions of light years away.
I would like to understand how they infer these things without becoming a science major. Is it just math equations based on what they think is the distance to the planet and then more math based on what they think the atmosphere is, and so on? Because they can’t actually see the planet.
I can’t explain this one, but I’d like to offer some other identifiers used. When searching for likely planets, they observe stars for wobble in their position. Large planets like jupiter and Saturn have some hefty pull on our own star. The common orbital point between them, called the barycenter, is still inside the sun, but their great distance apart pulls that barycenter closer to the edge of the sun. Our sun has a pretty notable wobble as a result. That’s the kind of thing they look for elsewhere. If there’s no other star causing the wobble in a binary system, then it must be a planet pulling it.
By estimating the mass of the star by various observations of color, brightness, and brightness variation, they can do some “easy” algebra to calculate the size of the affecting planet. From there, they can scan for radiation frequencies in the darkness where they think a planet is sitting. Water has a frequency, hydrogen has a frequency, oxygen has a frequency, helium, etc. By stuffing objects close to home, we can extrapolate that info and apply it to further objects with some confidence. This is how organic compounds were discovered in Venus’ atmosphere.
A lot of it is based on what we have at home, meaning we’re largely looking for what we have and then identifying it as the same. There is uncertainty about some details, but that’s how it always goes with science. It’s always being updated. It’s takes a lot of creativity to imagine what else might be out there and to devise how to look for it. Black holes are a pretty notable example. Since they’re not observable directly, what do you look for? Well, you look for other things being eaten and hope the matter is hot enough to throw a lot of radiation. 80 years ago, they were just an idea. Now we have images of a few galactic-center black holes. Some have been observed free floating through space by distorting the apparent position of stars behind it. Do we absolutely know it was a black hole? No, but that’s what solid theories can identify it as given the darkness and huge mass required to cause that kind of effect. But, as a result, estimates for dark and cold objects vary greatly because they’re the hardest to observe. There’s talk of finding more “hot jupiters” than expected, but it’s totally valid that maybe wevre just missing the cold Jupiter’s because they’re hard to see.
I also feel like we don’t need to have more beautiful games than Last of Us 2
Remember when FarCry was released, and people were compairing the ingame screenshots with real photos? We all thought “Man, this is it. It can’t get any better than this”.
Well I’m not against games becoming more impressive visually per se, but against the fact that because of this games are becoming way more expensive to produce and companies are now risk averse.
But yeah I might have said « this is it » in front of quite a few games 😅
I don’t support a company that decided to increase price instead of reducing it. Also PS games are expensive. Then there was also non available and you had to put yourself on a year long waiting list, when at then end I said “nah, I don’t need it”. It’s Sony’s own fault I don’t have a PS5 yet.
No, there hasn’t been, but there is a distinction between currently experiencing high inflation and previously experiencing high inflation in the middle of a hardware product’s life cycle.
No it’s not. PlayStation costs money if you want to go online, PC not. PlayStation games are a lot more expensive than on PC and you lose access to your gamed with every new generation unless you want to store your old console. Also generally PC sales are much deeper then on the controlled PlayStation store. To believe your console is cheaper is really not true.
Why should the PC not have a blu-ray drive, it has all the freedom a console lacks. But I don’t remember the last time I needed one, because I can get just a few month old games for 5 bucks. So I didn’t even bother buying a drive. I buy games for 45 bucks while on console they cost 80 and more, on release day.
Yeah add the cost for the week PC on top, another reason why PC is cheaper, as you’ll likely need a PC regardless.
Not playing online would be the only reason why PS is cheaper and if you buy no games and only lend them from others. Price of PlayStation plus PS+ gets you a good PC if you use it for 5+ years, which most do.
Maybe if you see it that way. But just thinking about how much you need to upgrade your PC or tinker with it for everything to work is too much for me.
I already don’t like the fact that on ps5 you have to choose between performance and fidelity modes, so imagine if I had to choose settings on a pc.
Also on consoles, you just know a game is gonna work perfectly, which is not always the case on pc.
But PC is better for some players and console are better for some others.
I sometimes consider jumping to PC gaming, but I see too many inconveniences for now.
arstechnica.com
Aktywne