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
Just be careful that irrecoverable damage hasn’t been dealt to the game industry and traditional distribution methods by the point that the enshittification starts. What I’m really concerned about is that Microsoft will do everything in their power to smash the current games industry to bits and then rule the ashes. The games industry will end up smaller and worse off, but Microsoft still makes more money since they control a larger share even if the pie shrinks and shrivels.
Enshittification is the process of squeezing money out of both sides of the transaction after you have built a sufficient customer and supplier base with initially attractive offerings that were possibly made at a loss.
First the service is great for consumers (and likely bleeding money). People flock to it.
Then they use that consumer base to lure more suppliers to the platform. Phase two. The service is great for suppliers because it means easy access to a big customer base.
When both a lot of customers and a lot of suppliers are using the platform they start making changes that redirect revenue from both sides to the platform itself. Prices increase, fees for suppliers increase or their cut decreases, maybe they have to sign that they won’t sell under a certain price elsewhere, customers can’t use all things on the platform anymore without paying extra, they introduce ads, maybe exclusives, that stuff. Customers won’t leave because they are used to the platform, there are network effects (all my friends use it), sunk cost fallacies (I have paid them x dollars over the years and if I leave I keep nothing for it) in the case of gamepass they have maybe stopped buying games elsewhere and wouldn’t have a library at all if they lost access. Suppliers won’t leave because the customer base is huge and they have no other simple way to reach those customers. Both are the literal frog in slowly boiling water. “What’s a few more bucks a month, what’s a little additional ad before my game loads, what’s a few more % to MS when the alternative is losing all those customers”. That’s the enshittification part.
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though? I’ve been a Game Pass subscriber for something like 8 years and it’s still crushing it as far as services go - probably moreso now than any year prior.
Will it last / remain a good deal forever? Nope. But nothing does/is. Might as well enjoy the great variety of games I’d never purchase (like Blue Prince, Arcade Paradise, Shipbreaker, South of Midnight, Expedition 33, etc.) along with the convenience of access to games I totally would pay for (like THPS 1+2, Gears, Diablo, etc.). Plus the built-in rewards subsidize like 1/4 of the cost.
When (not “if”, when) they jack up the price to a point that’s not worth the games or I don’t have enough time to play to justify the spend, I’ll just cancel.
i get the feeling gamepass gives you access to the library of games that my library has. fantastic if your library doesn’t have video games or you have difficulty getting out of the house, but i love my local library
3 is my favorite personally. Heavily depends on if you are looking for fun gameplay or immersive story IMO. Don’t go in expecting the most complex story known to man. I never played them as a kid and picked them up about 3 years ago and really enjoyed the entire collection.
Well the same level where she blasts more chimps than the Cincinnati Zoo, a rival tomb raider confronts Lara and she just takes him out like another monkey.
She is definitely a little underrepresented when it comes to death machine 90s game protagonists, pair her with Duke Nukem or Doomguy and she could hold her own.
I’ve recently bought a Steam Deck and have been getting back into gaming after a long hiatus.
I used to play competitive online games (mostly Counter-Strike) and got kinda burnt out on them. It made me not want to game for a while, so I’m diving into slower-paced, single-player games.
Speaking of Portal, I’ve also started https://store.steampowered.com/app/601360/Portal_Revolution/ which is a fan-made mod whose story takes place between the two official games. For what it is, it’s honestly quite excellent, the puzzles are challenging and fun. Not quite as well-polished as Portal 2, but so far it’s giving the first game a run for its money.
I’ve also been emulating a ton of Mario Kart 8, trying to git gud, my friend group often breaks it out at get-togethers and I want to surprise them with my sudden increase in skill!
EDIT: I forgot, I’ve also been playing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1332010/Stray/ which is honestly such a chill game, you play as a stray cat in this kinda post-apocalyptic world, which you slowly uncover more info about as you hop around. 10/10 so far, might become a catgirl.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot depends on how you use it and how accessible it is to the outside internet.
I have a few smart devices, but they are all controlled locally. If my internet connection stops working, I still have full control of everything. I also have manual options in case my home network stops working.
Not advice, do your own research: I don’t see a big problem it Bluetooth. It can be hacked, but the person hacking has to be near you. That alone protects you from about 8 billion people.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable about IT but I avoid IoT like the plague. Everything should run locally and if I want to control it from away I’ll use a VPN to home.
Haha that’s exactly what I do. 99% is local, the 1% is either “off site” in such a way it can’t be moved local, or I’m moving it to a local solution when possible.
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.
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”
I played maybe five hours of 3 and maybe it was because I was older than for the previous two, but the sunny “we’re friends and everything is so positive and love and sunshine” was really really grating. It felt like it was way more excessive than the first two, but, again, could be the ages I played them at.
Otherwise it played… Okay? The Disney things were stupid. It felt pretty blah otherwise. Nothing remarkable.
Both are past 100k now! I want to issue a special “fuck you” to all the idiot streamers that tried to kill SKG. And of course a special “go fuck yourself” to PirateSoftware and Asmongold for being fuckwit right wing tools for corporations. You have a special place in my heart as illiterate lapdogs to shitty corporations and right wing shills.
Yep they actively campaigned against the petition and fundamentally misrepresented it.
10 months ago PirateSoftware started a campaign against it starting here-ish: youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y
Also 10 months Asmongold did a react video that supported PirateSoftware: youtu.be/AhVsyhjcndw
PirateSoftware refused to acknowledge that he got several things wrong, and even refused to acknowledge it when confronted. He actively bans people with dissenting opinions in his stream so it wasn’t surprising that he refused to acknowledge that he was wrong. About a week ago Charlie (aka Penguinz0) confronted him about it and he still refused respond to basic factual inaccuracies: youtu.be/6sJpTCitKqw
Ross did a video talking about the whole thing last week as well: youtu.be/HIfRLujXtUo
There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the broad strokes. I hope PirateSoftware’s stream keeps declining until he is relegated to complete obscurity. Also, PirateSoftware can eat my entire ass.
Asmonpoop is a moronic bum and people went from “this weirdo is strangely entertaining” to " let me hear what my moronic hobo-idol has to say about this".
It is a little bit like how people supported Drumpf as a joke first.
PirateSoftware is what dumb people thinks a smart person acts like. His audience can’t even pay attention unless he draws boxes in paint. I do understand how he can seem initially likeable, but if you watch him for more than a couple of hours you’ll see his knowledge is shallower than a spilled glass of water.
Still in disbelief people think SKG is going to work. The premise fucking genocides the MMORPG genre. You kill games by implementing this horrible understanding of how games work.
I have never seen more people support games who have no fucking idea how games work and it’s the most frustrating shit ever. Pirate Software is right. It’s not even a debate.
And if a company refuses? They’re dead anyway. This is not well thought out and PS called it out. You have no actionable solution but are calling for one to just appear.
I can literally play WOW private servers right now. I can host my own private server and play it single-player.
What is being required is not complicated or difficult.
If a developer wants to destroy their own project instead of taking the extra week of work it takes to let people locally host then that sounds like a really dumb decision.
No, it’s much more reasonable to make devs put the hosting oprions they use in the code of the game for others to use instead of a community having to reverse engineer the net code and build their own tool.
Your contradictions are destroying your argument dude. This is why nobody takes you seriously.
Lol you not understanding why that can’t happen is what’s sending me. There are so many issues with just the PREMISE of this that you don’t even address.
At what point is a game considered dead? When is a company obligated to provide access? Will the company be legally obligated to release character profiles? If yes, how does one stop third parties from modifying it/cheating prior to hosting? If no, it’s everyone expected to restart ion company death? How will this access be granted or hosted? How long will this need to be available for? Who pays to keep this information hosted for that duration?
There are so many fucking questions unanswered because you seem to think you can just throw fucking LAN ports on a game and it just work. Your brain is stuck in 2004 where all you needed was an IP address and port number. Games aren’t that simple anymore and the ones that are, already fucking have it.
Hold on there buddy! There’s no reason to be derogatory towards hobos like that. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so offended on the internet as to have someone associate my good (user)name with the likes of Asmongold. If you don’t bring that down a notch I’m gonna send the ghost of Woody Guthrie to haunt you until your dying days.
Asmongold does that. Like the dude doesn’t have any real opinions other than what gets views. If he sees the winds changing he’ll pull a 180 in order to take the heat off himself. He also has hoards of followers and youtube minions to make him seem far more centerist than he is. He’s like the personification of the alt-right playbook for dummies.
Asmongold is a megaphone for shitty opinions. Like I posted elsewhere he’ll change his opinion if he gets called out, but the damage was done when he put it on the megaphone in the first place. His take on the “never play defense” is to not have any actual opinions when confronted then just go right back to saying other right wing bullshit.
The premise itself is flawed, of course Gamepass impact sales, that’s the whole point. The question is does it negatively affect profit? Well for AAA games it might, for AA and indies it might affect positively and those make up the bulk of the gamepass library. Matter of fact there’s barely any AAA games released on GP that aren’t Microsoft’s own games.
I don’t have a game right now. I spent the weekend searching Gamepass and testing out some games I wouldn’t have bought blindly, trying to find my next obsession.
None have grabbed me yet. DOOM Middle Ages was starting to get fun but it kept crashing on me. Sorry developer’s, if your game doesn’t get my attention in the first ten minutes, you never deserved my money, but if I find the game on Gamepass and enjoy it, I tend to let others know.
With GP, I tend to dwell on older AA, indies games that I had my eyes on, but not committed enough to buy or good but too janky to spend money on. I found that I have more tolerance this way.
You don’t have to have an expensive PC, and even if you do, the amount you would save on software would far outweigh that cost in a year or less. And then every year after that, 6 bucks for 3 games dude
I mean from a consumer perspective no, but this isn’t something the consumer would even need to be concerned with. The conversation is from a business point of view.
AAA vs AA vs whatever else never had anything to do with business aside from marketing, and marketing doesn’t mean shit for the consumer if the game sucks. Just make a good game.
It describes the budget of the game. It’s always relative to the average budget in the industry but it is a business term.
I still don’t know why you keep bringing the consumer into this. The consumer doesn’t and should not care whether Gamepass hurts sales, only that it is a good deal for them. And it is. Whether sales are affected (obviously they are) is an industry conversation, but the real question is whether it boosts profitability or not.
Quality of games etc etc is all irrelevant in this specific conversation.
That’s the exact problem that we’re talking about.
Being so shortsighted for this quarters numbers, while also not giving a shit about the only thing that actually brings you money.
The consumer.
This is failing because business doesn’t take that into account, and down the line it absolutely plays a part. Let’s keep focusing on milking these 4 “AAA” franchises, and also buy up as many independent studios as we can just to shut them down, that surely won’t have an effect on the industry.
The consumer is the whole godamn point. You don’t get profit without them. They (we) smell this bullshit, and it doesn’t smell good.
It’s not a long term strategy and it never was supposed to be.
Edit: anytime I say you, I just mean companies, not you, I think thats obvious, but I just want to point out I’m not coming at you
I disagree, because fundamentally Gamepass is a great deal for consumers. And it’s also a good deal for developers if they know how to use it strategically. Like if your game came out a year ago, and its sales are stalling you can go to Microsoft and ask for a big lump sum, put your game there and stop worrying about month to month sales while you develop the next thing. People like me get to play a game they wouldn’t have never bought otherwise and they get the money to develop the next thing.
It’s not the best deals for all consumers, but it is for many. For example I don’t give a rats ass about owning a “library” because I very very rarely replay games, I have very little time for gaming and the type of game I prefer tend to be on the longer side. Gamepass is great because in between those 50+ hour games I have a large selection of games to choose from and I get to play a bunch of games that I wouldn’t have played otherwise because I wasn’t willing to pay $50 or more for them, like for example Lies of P. Then there’s the exclusive AAA from Microsoft which I happen to enjoy like Doom, Halo, and Gears of War. It saves me a lot of money.
Will Gamepass die at some point? Maybe. Probably. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s no signs that it is dying right now, nor that it is harming the industry at all. In fact it has allowed games that otherwise not see the light of day to become viable.
I’m a bit very hammered, let me get back to you here in a little while. Spoiler, I did read some of your first paragraph and I’m pretty sure there’s a middle ground coming up.
Oooo, still not ready to respond, but I did read all of it. Hit me up if you’re trying to get your shit ran in that gears remaster, I’m pretty stoked about that all irony aside.
I am tryina drink some water and rest a little bit but I promise I’ll get back to this thread. I appreciate you talking it out.
Yeah I don’t know where exactly I was going with that, but you’re right in the sense that for industry itself it’s good because it’s profitable. it makes sense, although there have been issues with large corporations like Microsoft shit canning everyone at the first sign of a new sparkly thing. Game pass can be and is beneficial in a lot of cases, but what it takes to create something like game pass and it be profitable has its downsides for people that work in the industry, studios that have been bought and abandoned, and in turn the consumers.
That’s the thing, for the big publishers, the end user (consumer) is only part of the puzzle. Investors and business partners (such as licensees) are more important, and have been for years. They bring in the wealth.
End users are neither organized nor informed enough to have a seat at the table. The masses will gravitate towards their big properties and marketing will be shaped to that effect. Acquire said big properties if you don’t have them, and make sure all the potential investors know you did.
I like indie games for walking sim and story heavy games only. Outside of that, 99% of indie games feel like some pixel art bs retro rip off roguelike nostalgia cash grab. I hate garbage ware like meatboy, etc.
If AAA studios weren’t so shitty, I feel like half of the indie studios wouldn’t have a chance.
Your opinion is valid, but “AAA” studios have lit themselves on fire, and a shit ton of objectively great games have come out and absolutely dunked on them.
A great example of this is balatro. It’s none of what you described, it’s nowhere near your typical cash grab AAA and it’s just a good game that did extremely well.
Another example would be Hades, just a monster of a good game.
Blasphemous 1 & 2, unknown studio, fucking killed it.
Also if you prefer not AAA games for story, what actually is a AAA game?
They need to bring back demos. It would help a ton if they did, but it seems so many companies and devs just completely skip the idea. I think some of it has to do with companies who kinda know their games aren’t going to be worth a fuck so they want people to buy at full price, so they’re not going to release a demo. Same with not releasing the game to reviewers early.
They could easily do so on a console or game streaming service, just give you like 2 hours and then switch it off.
I think Sony actually do that as part of one of the PSN tiers.
But I think the main driver behind no longer doing demos is that when they started analysing it, they found it mostly reduced sales. A lot of people were no longer interested enough to buy it after playing, at least not at full price. I gotta admit, back when demos were common on the front of magazines, there were very few that I actually purchased on the basis of the demo. The ones I did buy, I’d have probably got anyway, like Metal Gear Solid 2.
For a healthy mega publisher/platform with a lot of fingers in the pot? It will increase overall profits and, theoretically, those profits can be redistributed. This is effectively what EA did in the late 00s/early 10s where Madden and The Sims meant games like Mirror’s Edge (or… The Sims) could be created.
The problem being that once a few of the tentpoles collapse? it ALL collapses
Also, this ignores the companies that aren’t part of that megapublisher who now are fighting “just play Halo or Call of Duty, it is free with gamepass”. At best it creates an environment where it doesn’t really matter how well a game sells so long as you sold N licenses to Humble and MS and Sony and so forth. Which effectively incentivizes “streamer bait” games.
Also: We have seen exactly this play out in music and film/TV.
But Gamepass is not even close to being a tentpole. Halo and Call of Duty being in Gamepass has not limited the ability of games like BG3 being huge successes. If anything it frees up people to buy these type of games because their yearly COD is included in their monthly fee and now they can budget to buy other types of games.
Baldurs Gate 3? The game part of one of the bigger franchises in all of gaming (D&D) that is the sequel to one of the most celebrated franchises in all of gaming (Baldurs Gate) that had been in Early Access for years AND which was developed by one of the three best CRPG developers in all of gaming (Larian).
Well, you heard them: just make more Baldurs Gates!
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all? Because that’s frankly hilarious. If anything like in music and movies (which is now also tv in a way), what’s more at risk are the big franchises. They’ve become unsustainable.
Gaming is going to look a lot more like the music industry looks now, with lots of indie companies doing great stuff and just a few huge artists making slop for the masses.
The “big franchises” that are how people find success in a gamepass world? Or do you still think that Dungeons and Dragons Presents Baldurs Gate 3 By Larian Studios is a tiny indie game?
Also: Maybe you should check out how the music industry is doing as countless artists talk about how hard it is to break out at all and one of the more popular bands on spotify (?) is literally AI slop?
Also
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all?
Tell me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs without telling me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs.
If you want to discuss this? Either be open to learning or educate yourself ahead of time. But if you are just going to insist on vibes and how everything is going to just work out? You are wasting everyone’s time.
If you go back 20, 30 years ago you would never be able to make a living as a musician in an indie project. Nowadays you have an amazing and frankly mind blowing amount of very talented artists making wonderful and unique music that also affords them a living. I love music man, so I know that it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music especially if you like stuff that breaks boundaries. There is more difficulty becoming huge, but again that’s how it works now. huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé etc are basically a dying breed. The AI slop thing is more about chillhop artists etc having difficulty because their music is not differentiated in any way and the people who listen to it are not actually looking at who the artists is 99% of the time. Artists will have to adapt and make music that is more unique now instead of hoping that they get on the queue of people who are not paying attention to what they are listening to.
The layoffs are proof of what I’m saying. Huge studios with thousands of employees are no longer sustainable, therefore they need to shed weight. The era of AAA 500million+ budget video games is coming to a close. More studios will close, more people will lose their jobs. From there a lot of smaller companies will spring up and that will be the gaming environment for the next 10 years or so.
I’ve been gaming all my life, I turned 30 recently. And I think the last 5 years have been some of the best the industry has ever had, and it was all thanks to the indie scene and the AA scene. There has never been more variety at this level of quality ever before, that’s for sure. The only thing that may come close was the 90s when you basically had a similar scene to what we have now.
All of this to say that from the perspective of the consumer, gaming/music/movies and tv are fantastic right now. But it’s become much more atomized, you have lots of niche shows, music acts and videogames as opposed to what we had before were there were a lot of larger properties but they all were a little dumbed down because they had to appeal to a large demographic within its niche.
The people who most praise Gamepass are indie developers. All the time. The ones that complain the most are the AAA studio employees for a reason, it threatens their entire model.
Does it suck for the developers, yes, I feel for them. But this is the market shifting to reflect consumer behavior and preference.
Edit: Btw it really shows you haven’t even looked at gamepass, because it hardly has any AAA games that are not MS properties. And the ones it’s has are quite old. So it’s not how people find success in Gamepass, at all.
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