let ai play for you, for a small admin charge of 4.99 per attempt

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.

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

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.

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.

Every streamer does the rug pull. I remember when my family was so shocked at the $5.99 ad free Disney+ sub. They fully believed that it was going to remain the best streaming deal forever. I mean this is Disney we’re talking about.

Make this claim about a city’s subway system. Or Market Basket’s rotisserie chicken.

Your numerical claim around profit is irrelevant because it gets people in the door - both new gamers, and new developers. They were making bank not just on game purchases, but DLC, games outside of Game Pass, etc.

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.

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).

DRM-free > Imaginary perpetual ownership > subscription > drink a verification can to start

I prefer to buy from GOG, itch, or anywhere else that offers explicitly DRM-free downloads. That being said, a surprising number of games on Steam are actually DRM-free (or as near as makes no difference). They don't make it easy; you need to dig through your Steam folders to copy the files out, and sometimes you need to jump through a well-documented hoop or two, but it's doable.

More info here: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam