Saddest Sony generation with a weak exclusive line up due pivoting towards failed gaas instead of single player exclusives. PS4 backwards compatibility ended up being the most noteworthy thing about the PS5.
Exclusives are cancer to gamers, and lock people into ecosystems. All games should be available on all appropriate platforms, for greater consumer choice.
I would say it’s no coincidence we’ve seen a drought of good singleplayer games around the same time as a drought of console exclusives.
Technology-wise, there’s no “reason” to buy any particular console. They’re all PCs. So, console makers have to invent that reason; and little things like a screenshot button, or family features, don’t pull people into the store. Exclusive games do.
And one key thing is, those exclusive games can’t be F2P microtransactions-laden casinos or live-service games. No one is spending $500 just to play something free; they’ll try to install that on a device they have. The exclusives have to be full, complete, well-voice-acted, well-written masterpieces respected by the gaming public - making anyone without that console envious.
But couldn’t devs just sell those games without making them exclusive? Perhaps not. Look at the credits for the latest God of War and you get a sense of how much they’re spending to make those types of games.
Yes, the game alone is still profitable. But A) It’s paying for a dozen failures Sony has also put out - no-name experiments they greenlit, and B) It might not be as profitable as many other reliable industries investors could put their money into. Why not just buy an index fund?
Thankfully, the equation works out better for indie studios; their games aren’t so massive as to need to account for millions in costs. So we’ll keep getting those. But big-budget singleplayer arrangements aren’t as likely when they’re not pushing some bigger product like a game console.
It varies by location. But for me on brazil at least every single subscription doubled in price. PC Game Pass was 36 BRL, it is now 70. Ultimate was 60 BRL, now it’s 120. I cannot justify this shit.
This link has a pretty good comparison between the new and old gamepass features/prices. The cheapest tier is actually better than it used to be, but it looks like the more expensive ones are getting bundled with shit most people won’t want just so they can justify increasing the price.
There are four tiers to the gamepass: Core, Standard, PC, and Ultimate. The first two were exclusive to Xbox, the PC version was obviously exclusive to PCs, and Ultimate was available for both. All tiers aside from the PC gamepass are now being bundled with xbox’s cloud gaming, with higher tiers having shorter wait times and better quality.
This is all US pricing, so take it with a grain of salt considering the OP said their prices doubled:
Core, now called Essential, is a $10 tier that will now have double the games (from 25+ to 50+) and is newly available on PC as well with no price increase.
The $15 Standard tier, now called Premium, is likewise not seeing a price increase and will now be available on PC. However, it looks like Call of Duty will no longer be included in this tier, which I imagine is one of the biggest sellers of gamepass.
The previously $12 PC tier is increasing in price to $16.50. Looks like the only new “benefit” is it will come with Ubisoft+ classic (40+ games) now. Still exclusive to PC.
Then there’s the previously $20 Ultimate tier. It’s price is increasing to $30 a month, and it’s the one everyone’s upset about. The only new benefits are cloud gaming, Ubisoft+ classic, and a Fortnite subscription.
Between that, this, and Disney+ cancellation page “accidentally” going down during that fiasco, this is exactly why I’ve switched to using only virtual cards for subscriptions. Pause/Cancel the virtual card, voila, no more subscription.
Any Steam game that requires an EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, whatever account is a total non-starter for me. I’ve looked at some of the newer Battlefields when they’re on sale for like $2 and I still can’t be convinced. Likely never will.
Ok with me, there’s lots of other publishers out there, both independents and studios, that I’d much rather give my $2 to.
To be fair, those kinds of changes do not usually happen so rapidly after a purchase, and was likely already planned for implementation and started before the sale.
In other words, it is likely EA was already planning to make that change regardless of if the sale went through or not.
they dont want SA or kushner to hold an EMPTY bag, but i suspect they will get alot of cancellations in the future. wish they seperate westwood so a proper CNC can be revived.
The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.
To be fair it‘s as absurd as it was inevitable. Gamepass was always meant as this temporary thing you can try out to play some new games until everyone jumps ship because of increased prices. It has been preached for years. No one could‘ve seriously thought this was a long term alternative to buying games or at least buying licenses to games on Steam. All online subscriptions are scams in the process.
Why watch playthroughs at all? Just wait till the games are on sale. And only a year isn’t that long, wait more and get better deals with more complete games. There’s nothing saying you need to hurry in any way, and several things saying it’s a good idea to wait. There are more than enough games available for anyone to not have to constantly claw at the newest releases.
“watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch of YouTube”
welcome to my life for the last couple of many years lol. Not that I’ve been boycotting per se, but I haven’t bought a new game in years cuz my laptop is over a decade old so the best I can play is minecraft, or just use my xbox one for battlefield 4. the corporate greed from the last decade has caused me to never buy this crap again. I love videogames so much, thank god for emulators.
I don’t need any trash EsaudiaA dishes out. People need to go play old/vintage games, get back to the roots, before games were nothing but meaningless cash grabs.
Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They’re absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.
For a thought experiment let’s consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let’s assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let’s divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let’s subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.
For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.
The math doesn’t bode well for us who vote with our wallets.
One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft’s online support pages and the amount of support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.
I’m not a licensed math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscription totals are actually distributed per price tier.
I don’t doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don’t think it’s nearly as generous and wide as you’re calculating.
There probably is a very real churn limit that they’re trying to avoid, and my hunch is that there exists a breaking point that could be hit with an aggressive and sustained boycott / cancellation spree, but again, I’m not a math surgeon so I could be wrong. That’s just my gut feeling.
And it gets even better. Instead of up to 33% leaving, say 50% of that group convert to Premium instead of Ultimate. That isn’t any lost revenue since the price is going up to what Ultimate used to be. So that cushions their numbers even more.
Now factor in the cost savings from a lower server load and less staff to run the back end, and possibly the smaller licensing\use costs for the games available to play since less people would be accessing those games.
The same math is there too. They can afford to loose one third of new subscribers to get the same amount of money.
But their new customer acquisition cost wont get higher at the same pace and they get more valuable customers whose payback period will be shorter.
Also i dont think its relevant here, but less customers means less operating costs, so they will most likelly save some money on customer service and behind the scenes things like server upkeeps etc., but i dont think these make real difference here.
Also if for some reason things start to go bad they still have option to create “a budget version” for the people who see the normal subscrition as too expencive.
For years I’ve been warning whoever would listen that XboxGP, much like any other content subscription service owned by a public company would inevitably lead to a massive consumer squeeze. Fortunately it happened before MS managed to metastasise into a monopoly in gaming too. Good riddance.
Turned off my recurring billing. I’ll have about 3 months then it’s bye bye. I have been a customer since 360, but now will probably sign up for Playstation Network for the first time.
That’s a good callout - treating these game rental services more like we do with streaming video services by subbing to one for just a few months, then dropping it for another.
Oh I’m sorry, did Playstation start charging 30 bucks for their service? Oh, it’s actually CHEAPER than Xbox even was? Oh and it’s a massive back catalog of PS games I haven’t played due to being on Xbox? Fuck me right?
I don’t have a backlog of PS games due to mainly playing Xbox for the last 20 something years. That’s why subscription services can make sense, you play through games you’ve missed out on. Kind of like sub hopping for tv streaming, you build up a back log, sub for a few months then move to the next.
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