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THEY put all thier resources on AI/DATACENTERS, so every other department was NEGLECTED.
I actually liked the Game Pass approach initially.
You could pick between PC, Xbox or both.
You had the option for a cheap sub, or a slightly more expensive one, with appropriate feature parity.
The included games - especially the early access for many of them - were a solid mix of AAA titles and indie games that deserved the recognition.
And the funny thing is, Microsoft could've reached the target subscriber numbers if they didn't pricejack tbe service while fucking over the customers AND the plans. I understand the need of capitalising a subscriber base, but doing a "from tomorrow, this shit will cost 3x as much" bullcrap move ain't it.
Honestly I was never going to get in on gamepass no matter how good a deal it was because I would lose access to games no matter how long I had been paying to play them. In the same respect I don't like leasing a car, I would rather buy used and accept all the problems that come out of it because eventually I could stop making payments.
I can see why people would enjoy it but it was never for me.
Understandable. I for one dislike owning games I won't play, so GamePass was a good way to dip my toes, discover games, trial them for days/weeks at my own leisure, and move on.
mind you a the time the ANNUAL price was an AAA title's price, not 3 months.
There is really only a couple of games I decided would have been better as a buy. If you like to play a game for 2-3 weeks then move on it was good. You could also try stuff that didn't have demos etc and decide if it was worth your time. After a year I'd seen most of the catalogue I was interested in and it was really only new releases that I kept it for, soon after I stopped it and now play my backlog.
Although you needed the disk space and bandwidth to be able use it like that.
I wouldn't sign up again, but I got what I wanted.
Same here. I was a subscriber from Xbox to PC but then...
Game Pass was a mistake.
I'm not sure it was a mistake. Netflix but games is a pretty compelling offer but the industry has just constantly mistepped over and over with jumping the gun on ending disk based sales and it has poisoned the well a little bit on digital offerings.
Plus the game industry constantly makes ridiculous projections they fail to meet. MS was always going to have to burn money for years to get this off the ground if they even manage it.
To their credit at least they didn't Google it up like Stadia.
You can't compare it to Google Stadia or Netflix in the sense of, that these companies don't have anything else to sell as games. So they didn't hurt their existing business. In example Netflix did hurt traditional business, they just didn't have one themselves. Like Game Pass hurt traditional business, and XBOX has a traditional business. And Stadia itself wasn't actually like Game Pass, because one had to buy the games and it was streaming only. So totally different category here.
I think that Game Pass wasn't healthy for the XBOX structure, because there was less incentive to buy games. And Game Pass wouldn't make much sense with low profile and indie games only, so they had to include blockbusters. And Game Pass needs a quick stream of games from first party. But blockbuster games are also extremely expensive and take a long time to make. So they had to be sold enough to be profitable, because including them in Game Pass alone is not enough (Call of Duty is the proof).
It's almost like raising prices while reducing the offerings is a good way to lower the number of paying customers
But, but... Copilot for Xbox!
let ai play for you, for a small admin charge of 4.99 per attempt
We are not quite there yet but I'm sure there are at least a couple LLM powered vtubers kicking around that can pay a few tokens to while you watch them play games badly.
not there yet, but there are patents https://www.ign.com/articles/playstation-patents-ai-assist-feature-that-can-take-over-if-you-get-stuck
That's why I canceled!
I was getting $60 a year plans and then they started moving features to their "Ultimate" tier while making it four times the price.
Wtf? 4x? I, personally, find 60 already way too much for not owning a single fucking game. Also way too much for some casual gamers who play an hour a day or so at maximum. Which I assume are their target demographic.
I feel like $5 per month to rent a ton of games (if they are games you are interested in) is a damn good deal. Not sustainable, but a damn good deal. Heck we used to rent one game from blockbuster for $4 for like 5 days.
I had gamepass for awhile because of some glitch where I could get 3 years for the price of 1, and even at the heavily discounted price I didn't feel it was worth renewing once it expired.
So many filler games I have no interest in playing! I still have it since I only game casually these days but really it's holding on by the day 1 releases and that's about it for me.
They didn't understand the only reason people used it was because it was really cheap before they raised the prices. Most aren't super hardcore and play games over a few months so it became cheaper to just buy games again. It's stupid because they had no reason to try to make a sub model except that MBAs are morons and value recurring revenue more than just revenue in general
thats right, the average ‘gamer’ is casual. they’ll purchase a couple games per year and maybe a handful more on special.
gaming itself is a leisure activity so when other aspects of life starts getting expensive or free time is reduced then what gets dropped first is an overpriced subscription service.
Yeah they really forgot games are something I would buy on a whim during good times. Now? I'm not going to spend even $60 on a game, or a subscription, until well after any game as released to make sure it's worth it. I'd much rather replay red dead or mass effect or Skyrim again then spend $60 on some lame boring corporate game
It was great for trying out games you weren’t sure about. But I don’t wanna pay $30/month for that.
Yeah, if they made it like $10 per month and you could only rent 1 at a time that would be great. I would love a digital rental service to try out games.
But if you give everyone a free trial you'll have millions in "recurring revenue", which you can tell your shareholders and inflate your share price.
That's okay, Microsoft can just have Copilot subscribe 40 million times to pad out the numbers.
But they got RID of Features while RAISING Prices! That's the EXACT Recipe for Success!
Spending 70 billion dollars for gamepass content never seemed like a viable strategy.
There’s also the issue that I don’t think there are enough customers that would trust Microsoft in a pure rental situation.
MS’s other money makers have all turned to complete trash. The only business strategy that MS understands is monopoly.
Spending 70 billion dollars for gamepass content never seemed like a viable strategy.
It wasn't just for Game Pass. Those games get and got released on other platforms too, and they included lot of high profile single player and high value multiplayer games too. It's about controlling (Embrace) a big chunk of the market that is part of the strategy. Suddenly Sony and Nintendo have to do deals with Microsoft to get some of the biggest IPs on their system. Remember how much Sony was freaking out about Call of Duty? Such big takeovers are never a short term plan, but planned for generations, including smartphones and streaming on TV in example. It was never just about Game Pass only.
The entire point was gamepass.
The sell was with gamepass all these games are “free” on day one. If they release on other platform, they are full price.
All the other stuff is just temporary drama that would get resolved once the competition dies. The long term plan was for all the Activision Blizzard and Zenimax fans to buy Xboxes and be locked in that ecosystem until the end of time.
The takeover wasn't just a few games for Game Pass. Those games were planned to be sold on other platforms the entire time. Many live service games would continue pumping money on all platforms, as they did before, such as WoW and Call of Duty. Plus it included way more than that, such as King part of the deal with Candy Crush and the foot on smartphones and mobile gaming.
Ha ha!
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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