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.

Gamepass is going to continue betting worse until we end up with the mess that are streaming services right now.

I sincerely hope it fails.

Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I'm not falling for it twice.

Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don't even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.

I'll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.

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

Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.

Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.

How many times have we already seen this?

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.

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.

I love renting games. Worked for me at block buster 🤷‍♂️.

I'm not very inclined to take at face value what a studio founder has to say about a service that might make them less money, and might save their customers money.

Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.

Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.

Honestly who cares. Stop buying AAA slop and support indies.

Yet another example of:

C Suite / Upper Management doesn't listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they're being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.

Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we're comparing "the industry with Game Pass" to "games at face value". That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was "the industry with game rentals". Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.

But game rentals were often seen as a "try before you buy" case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don't lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.

I like how this prophecy was foretold a clean 1 week after this shit really went downhill. Who could've thunk Microsoft would be a shitty money grubbing whore?

I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.

It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.

I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn't as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn't killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the "wait for a sale" people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that's a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.

Sooo... Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They've got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.

This has been so obvious from the beginning, and now that it’s too late is when they starting to complain.