Looks like top management has completely given up on gaming following the disastrous acquisitions of Activision and Zenimax.
They’ve killed their first party studios, their hardware and now their last remaining thing which was the game pass.
Always remember, Fitgirl is free.
Game Pass was always doomed from the start. It’s not a Netflix situation where there’s functionally infinite content out there that would otherwise be more difficult/expensive to procure, so the price point of a subscription was never going to work long term. Why would you pay $30/month to play AAA releases when there’s only ever 4-6 AAA releases in a given year, and you probably only care about maybe 2 of them at $60 a piece? Why would you pay $30/month to rent indy games that cost $20 to own forever? You’d be better off taking that $30/month and throwing it into a savings account to pay for future games and pocketing whatever you don’t spend every few months.
Phil Spencer is a prime example of failsons never facing consequences for their ineptitude even when they’re objectively fucking over their fellow capitalists.
Phil Spencer did literally nothing good for Xbox it’s crazy. The 80 billion deal for Activision and 20 billion for Bethesda is crazy.
Gamefly makes it work with plans going from $9-$23 per month, but all of their tiers have more games than MS Game Pass does and has them available for all consoles + PC, so it’s a much better value proposition if you’re the kind of person who wants to play a different game every week or so. The only hangup is dealing with sending DVDs through the mail, but for a huge section of the market that’s still faster than downloading.
I always thought the point of Game Pass was to starve their competition, not to make money itself
no joke. i know there are doofuses out there that will happy keep adding to their subscriptions of various services/products, because $8, $10, $15, $30 a month “isn’t much”, and maybe im showing my age, but video games were generally a cheap proposition. systems were expensive, so you only got one and you buy a game a year, it ends up being pennies per hour.
i think most people who play video games are doing so on a pretty limited budget, because its a hobby that lends itself to people on a budget. you get a game a year and play the shit out if it. it ends up being far cheaper per hour than going to the movies or paying for cable tv, even back when movies were a few bucks and cable wasn’t like more than $40/mo.