Nah, demos largely disappeared because they not only took a bunch of resources to make but also had a far better chance of convincing you not to buy a game than to buy it, especially if you had other means of marketing it. Many people even enjoyed the demo but felt that they got their fill and therefore didn't want to keep playing, or maybe they didn't want anything out of the game beyond what the demo offered.
We're listening and we hear you. We've been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.
Dread Delusion was one of the best games I've played at PAX. I was bummed to see it launch into early access, but I guess they needed funding in a hurry. I'm definitely going to pick it up once it's done.
I played a few hours of Palworld, and it's serving the role of a podcast or second-screen game quite well. It's still early goings, and I'm around level 10 or so, but it's doing for me what Pokemon hasn't done in decades while simultaneously combining it with aspects I really enjoy from Factorio.
I'm also coming close to the end of Pillars of Eternity, I think. I'm in the second DLC, and I hit a huge difficulty spike, as quests available around my level have seemingly started to dry up, but I ended up grinding a few bounties and got to level 14, which got me over one difficulty spike and hopefully paved the way to keep me moving.
Besides that, I picked up Tekken 8. This is the most I've enjoyed Tekken since the third game, and I also think I'm done with it. A lot of the game makes sense to me in a way that Tekken 7 didn't, and I've come to respect it more than its predecessor for that and other reasons, but I don't think it's for me as far as being a fighting game I'd like to compete in. I can see the path to improving from here, and it looks like a lot of memorization rather than application, where I just need to know what each move or string looks like to be ready to defend it, and until I reach that point, it's just a lot of frustration. So instead, I choose to avoid that frustration and go back to fighters that I enjoy more. It's a lot of fun at a casual level and in single player mode though.
I don't have a subscription to it either. Their games aren't exclusive to Game Pass, and you can still buy them a la carte. In fact, my point with Palworld is that many more people still opt to even though the intuitive answer is that it's cheaper to rent the game for one month than it is to buy it outright, but I think people have a pretty firm grasp at the value you're giving up to not own it outright. It was a long con to get people to buy games from the Windows Store too, and people rejected it. They can't squeeze blood from a stone if the market doesn't want something. The online subscription service that is doing the nasty stuff that you're afraid of is Nintendo's; there are games there only available via subscription. Not to say you're wrong for where you draw the line in the sand on what you will or will not buy, but nothing indicates we're anywhere close to that doomsday scenario.
By every metric we know of, they're very far from achieving it. Even with some of the largest companies by market cap now in their ownership, they're still nowhere close to owning the breadth of games that get made. Palworld still sold more copies on Steam than there were Game Pass subscribers who tried the game out as part of their subscription. Growth for Game Pass has slowed dramatically to something in the ballpark of a plateau, and subscription services for games only accounted for 10% of spending. This was two weeks ago that Matt Piscatella of Circana said that the idea that subscription services would take over gaming is unsupported by the data.
Which monetization scheme is that? It's not like Starfield, Hi-Fi Rush, or Psychonauts 2 had microtransactions, and those are just some of the games that actually had time to cook after Microsoft bought them. For how they've managed Halo and Gears, I don't believe microtransactions made their way into the campaigns, unlike an Assassin's Creed. I'm not sure I see the association here.
Perhaps, but the devs have now said that offline single player mode is a feature coming "soon after launch", which says to me that perhaps it's more coupled to a server than just a bit of telemetry, or they'd be far more reactive to the public response about the online requirement. Not to say that I know for sure; it's just a gut feeling.