That is part of the reason why i have never purchased it. Financially, selling Gamepass does not make sense, as the prices does not justify the buy-in to get a substantial amount of Games onto it, making it worthwhile. For Microsoft it only makes Sense, when they see additional Profitpoints Like the closed Market on it and Killing competition. Once that is done, the quality and amount of Games going to Gamepass will certainly worsen.
And we do Not need to forget that Microsoft is a Data Company. So by requiring the Gamepass service be installed onto your machine, they certainly get a load of Data about you from it. Which neither benefits the Game developers nor the consumers.
As for the Points of “Low barrier to entry, Games trying Out Games” - duh, thats what Demos are for
This is absolutely a case of getting in, killing the competition, then jacking the price and tanking the quality.
And because it’s a service, despite using it for years and paying all that money into it, as soon as you leave you have nothing. All those games are just gone.
I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.
The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren’t priced reasonably and it’s unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.
And it’d be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive… well, it’s not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don’t think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.
And that’s before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it’s just that they happen to be so strong that I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
Eh… You don’t “own” them in that the First Sale Doctrine doesn’t apply, sure, but plenty of Steam games are DRM free, so you can store your own backups, if you want to. That counts, in my books.
Like, how much more do you need? ETA: That’s more than you get with Switch 2 “physical games”, isn’t it?
What’s “plenty”? 50%? 40%? 10%?
I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.
I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that’s not the case.
I wouldn’t consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren’t the same thing.
Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don’t like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren’t full physical releases. It plays Nintendo’s game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.
Oh, that’s good to know. I read that Switch 2 games are just cryptographically unique keys to allow download and play of the games.
And good point about the installer vs. just having the game files in a folder. Yeah, it’s not like GOG where you can download an offline installer file.
Some are full games, some are an empty cartridge with a key to download the game (which you can resell but not download if the servers go down). Some are a box with a code inside printed on a piece of paper (which gets associated to your account and you can’t resell or download without servers).
There is a warning on the box for the two that don’t include the playable game, but the fact that you need to know that or read the warning is a bit of a problem. And I don’t particularly like the idea that Nintendo is deliberately confusing the issue to make people believe that buying the game in a box has no advantages.
I like the Switch 2 overall, but some of the weirdness they’ve done to make game licenses and physical games more complicated kinda sucks for reasons both intended and unintended.
The spin of it being positive for indie is absurd. Indie thrives on PC, not Xbox.
Hell yeah, he’s 1000% right
That there is no guarantee that I will always have access to a game I like is really what kills it for me as a user. Like, I’m basically paying them the equivalent of the cost of a game every 3 months, but I could loose access to a game I like at any time because it’s no longer on game pass, so I’d be better off just buying games I like outright with that money every three months.
I’d rather my money go directly to studios making things I like, rather than fractionalized among who ever Microsoft decides deserves to make games.
