Unfortunately that's already happening, I know a few people that are hard to convince to play something that isn't on GamePass — I never insisted, but it's still a bummer that I need M$'s blessing to play with people I know, considering I don't have an Xbox and cross-play games that we all like are hard to find.

Yeah it’s straight up the big tech playbook. Undermine competition with low subscription prices and a lot of content. Lure in developers with deals that are too good to be true. And then once the customers are invested in using GamePass and stop buying games, increase subscription prices. And since MS is by then the gatekeeper to the market they don’t have to pay out so much to the developers anymore. It’s basically what Uber has done, once they killed the taxi market in a city they increased prices and lowered payouts to drivers. And since customers are used to those ride hailing apps the normal taxi market will never bounce back and drivers are basically forced to work with Uber or change jobs.

Also once Microsoft has a large chunk of the market in hand they basically decide before hand which games become a success or not instead of letting the market decide. So yeah games critical of their customers like the Israeli government will probably never get on GamePass and thus never reach a large audience. We’ll be seeing way more censorship than what we’ve seen with Steam recently if GamePass becomes the default way to consume games.

I think that there's big enough chunk of gamers that wasn't own and support Indie games directly rather than rent them through gamepass that it hopefully won't have much impact.

I am hoping there won't be any exclusivity BS though, Epic has been bad enough with that already.