I don’t think they truly understand their audience. Everything before the endgame is just a tutorial in MH. Yet, they usually ship the endgame with the DLC .
Of course it is. First of many. The price will keep rising, since currently Microsoft is losing money on it. The number of games will decrease, the price will keep going up, the users will cancel, rinse and repeat.
Yeah I agree with you on thinking of it as a new game fly. The problem I have is MS’s plan is to make gamers comfortable with only renting games by making it cheap then when there is no other option. They jack up the price.
I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.
They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).
Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.
It’s more the trend of i have seen in the tech space of a deal too good to be true. A tech company taking a loss to gain marketshare and drive out competition on price or flat out buy them then when they have cornered the market drive up the price for insane profits and customers have no choice because you effectively become the platform.
The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.
They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.
There are not much possibilities to legally own games left. Physical releases are nearly full gone on PC (physical boxes only containing Steam Keys), and even on Consoles they become less and less common (or turned into something like the Switch 2 Game cards). On the digital release front only GOG comes to mind as as store where one could say that one owns the game after purchase and download. Everything else only sell licenses that can be revoked or removed any moment.
I feel like, though it doesn’t come up much, we should conceptually separate “owning the game” from “having a physical edition”. Some games give you a disc, but barely offer ownership (remember CD keys?) while other games are only sold digitally, but are ultra-permissive with what you do with them.
I get the sense many indie companies would like to give people as much control as possible, but also can’t afford printing box sets.
Hot take: gamepass is preferable to a digital storefront. Any game you “buy” digitally is only somewhat less temporary than gamepass. At least gamepass doesn’t fool you into thinking you own the games you’re playing
Buy physical. If you’re buying digital, only buy from GOG. Pirate everything you can, and seed that shit forever
I agree on GoG, buying physical only gets you the broken unpatched game they shipped. Steam i feel okay with since they are a private company and not all their games are DRMed and it’s clearly marked if they are.
At some point, it will only be worth it, if you either finish games at an alarming rate, or play so many different games, that buying them separately would make no sense
I think if you’re playing 1 new release game every month or two, you’re getting the value. I’m enjoying Avowed and Doom the Dark ages recently, but I’m very glad I didn’t pay for Doom.
Xbox has kind of been on a roll lately with the games they’ve added.
Indeed. I think the last 6 months have been great value for PC game pass. Of course it goes against the OP/thread sentiment that Xbox is ripping everyone off.
I buy on steam/key resellers at heavy discount most of the time, but game pass allows me to play new release games that are in the “looks interesting, but I’m not dropping full price to try this out” category of games.
But right now it is 20 bucks a month. Even at 30, that is “worth it” if you play two or three newly released games a year and random library games beyond that.
The issue is if people have multiple consoles or are in the PC space and also have access to steam sales and bundles and the like.
Oof. On the one hand, I’ve found games that I wouldn’t have bought that I really enjoyed. Like Avowed. I loved every second of it. Hi-fi Rush was like this for me too. I’ve barely heard any talk of both of these games.
Plus tons of Indy titles I’d never heard of. Can’t tell you how much time I spent in Power Wash Simulator
On the other hand…I hate buying games. It’s a big commitment when you don’t know if you’re going to like it. Most the time I end up not even playing half the game. So I end up going full PatientGamer, and wait for a good sale. (Still want to try Luigi’s Mansion some day…)
And, I go months without playing my Xbox as it is. Right now I’m finding myself getting back into WoW (I haven’t really played since wotlk …it’s a whole different game now). Why should I keep game pass?
GamePass is an awesome plan for people like me – casual gamers who don’t get a lot of replay value out of most games. Honestly I’d love to see similar or competing services.
What a shitshow it was from Sony. But I’m glad the games are back, especially The Last of Us 2. The second season of the show was underwhelming, but the game sits an 90% of positive reviews.
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