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They will run it at a loss until they can kill off game ownership, then they will force devs to run at a loss a la Spotify and fatten up their margins.
We should absolutely avoid it. Subscription services are wreaking havoc in many other parts of the media landscape. The deal is good now because they're subsidizing the hell out of it, but just like what happened with streaming services the deal will get shittier and shittier until we're stuck with a horrible deal.
Hemorrhage money to kill or buy smaller studios, then jack the price and tank the quality. Shove some AI in it for good measure.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy about it
Piracy always exists and will always be there once you get an awful deal as a customer. That's what's already happening to streaming services. If they don't learn from that, they'll just suffer later on.
I hear what you're saying and would normally agree with you. But it's the smaller developers that will suffer, not Microsoft or other giant corporations. And they will not always be there...
Music streaming is still pretty good. There’s competition, the catalogues are extremely similar, and the price is affordable as well.
And artists are getting paid peanuts in return.
Album sales have plummeted and Spotify are slowly replacing real artists with AI generated music to avoid needing to pay them.
Music streaming is an excellent example of what we don’t want to happen to another art form.
Counterpoint: Without music streaming or pirating I wouldn't have discovered most of the artists I listen to. Artists of which I have bought concert tickets and merch (and in one case recurring support through youtube membership), and even just buying songs on bandcamp outright in spite of only listening via streaming.
Streaming is shit at generating revenue, but far far better at allowing artists to get noticed, which puts more power into the artists' hands rather than labels. "Support what you like through donations and merch" seems like a much better model overall (and has been proven to work), which also allows people with less money to enjoy the music while those with money to spare support it (and usually artists would want nothing more than for everyone to be able to enjoy their work, but they also have to live off something).
Though this is an outside perspective and I'd be interested in what actual musicians have to say about it, particularly those that have been making a living/significant money off it both before and after the event of streaming (and not the huge ones, because they never had any exposure issues).
There's also a chance that as a result of the discoverability, even if total money reaching the artists was unchanged, it's split over more recipients, so it's harder to actually make a living off it, but maybe easier to see at least some returns instead of it only being a money sink. Whether that'd be good or bad overall I can't say.
Also since this thread is about games, I don't think it really applies there since games are on average MUCH more expensive to make.
Of course its better for consumers, thats why they do it. Its worse for artists, that was the original point.
And my point was that it might not necessarily be worse for artists outside of the extremelg successful ones.
The confusion of products and services has been awful in general. Publishers demand continuing revenue. A fixed subscription is at least an honest economic exchange, for customers - unlike any form of "microtransactions."
I don't see how gamepass is particularly bad, I can still buy games without it (I don't sub to gamepass) and as long as there's no exclusivity crap where I literally can't play the game otherwise...
It's nice when I want to play a game with a friend and the game happens to be on gp, thus I don't have to buy the game for them lol.
But why would you buy a game if game pass exists?
Not having to pay a subscription to access my games is the simple answer lol
If I plan to play the game long term and potentially play it on my Deck. The only reason I have Game Pass is for CoD because the player base for that game dies in less than a year when a new one is about to come out.
I'm willing to bet game pass will come to the steam deck. Also, that's fair. Subscription models for tentative and unsustainable game series makes sense. My issue is more with normal games having to compete with game pass.
Game pass isn't going to come to steam deck. Not as a native app that installs games locally. You can already stream games through the web browser that's all you will get.
The fact they are making changes to windows and partnering with Asus on releasing Xbox hardware in the same space is more than enough evidence, but also, the steam deck is a tiny part of the market(it might be the best but it is still tiny).
Linux as a whole is also nothing for Microsoft to worry about, it is slowly increasing in market share, sure. But it is nothing on the scale of windows, and won't be for years at the current growth rate.
The fact they are making changes to windows and partnering with Asus on releasing Xbox hardware in the same space is more than enough evidence, but also, the steam deck is a tiny part of the market(it might be the best but it is still tiny).
I do wonder how this works for offline play which is fairly common for handheld PCs. Does Game Pass work offline?
I think(but it has been a long time since I touched gamepass) there is a timeframe between login checks.
So you might be able to download something, use it for a week, then have to re-authorise again.
But I don't know the time frame, so might be 48 hours or a month.
I don't think it will simply because the way game pass is implemented is via the MS Store version of those games. Using Steam would likely require them to switch to the Steam version of games and might not be that straightforward? Who knows.
It seems MS are killing off their hardware production. I guess we might be stuck with the subscriptions... I do get that you can still buy a whole game yourself instead of streaming, but not all of the catalogue is offered as an own-it cloud stream version.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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