So imagine deciding to spend $10 on that game, then realizing it's on GamePass. You now can choose wither to spend that same $10 to have access to 150+ games (including that one that's on sale), or just that game.
Sure, that $10 gets you only 1 month, but will you buy a different $10 game next month? Will you play this game for more than a month?
Pretty soon the GamePass ROI becomes difficult to ignore. (This coming from someone that doesn't have GamePass but is very impressed by the business model and value proposition around it).
The big difference with Game Pass is that the $10 gets me all those games just for that month, whereas my Steam library is full of games I've bought over the years, usually for <$10/each. If I were to have paid $10/mo over the same period of time, I would have paid significantly more -- and I'd have to keep paying it in order to play those games.
I subscribe to Game Pass occasionally and it sucks every time to lose access to all the games I'm playing. It becomes a balancing act of "I can buy this game for $30 or I can play it (and others) for 3 months at the same price... but what if I want to play it again in the future?" Like most rental models, most times it's easier and cheaper to just buy the game upfront if you can afford it, especially when it's on sale, which is easy to predict (and be notified of) on stores like Steam.
>> and I'd have to keep paying it in order to play those games.
But how long do you play these games for, and how often do you replay them? There are definitely games I replay a lot (Resident Evil games, for one) but there are many where I'm done after one playthrough. I'm totally okay "renting" it and moving on with Game Pass for a lot of titles.
This might be specific to my tastes, but most of the games I play don't really have an "end" to playthroughs (and for the ones that do, it's very rare that I dedicate the time to play it start to finish without taking breaks to play other games, which usually drags playthroughs on for much longer than less casual players). And sometimes I just come back to old games years later for nostalgia.
Some of my most-played on Game Pass are Crusader Kings 3, ARK, Dragon Age, My Time at Portia, and No Man's Sky, which are basically what I go back to every time I resubscribe. But after getting up near a dozen months subscribed at $10/mo, I'm now really wishing I would have just dished out the cash earlier to buy the games instead, especially if I want to keep playing them over time. I'm very much in a sunk cost mindset though: "I've already paid to play the game so much, surely this month is the month I'll 'finish' it and get to stop paying, right? Therefore, I shouldn't pay full price to own it when I can just pay the $10..."
It's very much a digital Blockbuster all over again. There, too, I spent many more hundreds of dollars on repeatedly renting games that I should have just bought. But, like Blockbuster, Game Pass is really good for discovering new games because it's such a low cost to try anything in the library once.
The nice thing about Game Pass is that after a game has been on the service for a number of months, you get a 20% discount if you choose to buy it. It's useful for instances where a game you want to keep playing is about to leave the service, or you want to get off the subscription plan.
look at this way: a business makes a change (in this case buying vs subscription). do they do it in their own interest or yours?
super simple stuff.
steam presented a bit of an issue about owning what you pay for. because, if their service is down, you can't access your "assets". some people called it a type of subscription model.
with this shift in the industry, outright paying a subscription for temporary access, we move even further away from owning what we pay for.
imagine never buying a house but always renting. why be against it? who is that business model good for? what kind of world are we voting for when we buy into these types of businesses?
in the long term, a subscription model puts us, the customers, at a loss. and a successful business plans for long term.
There's a very long tail of interesting games, 150 games at a time just doesn't cut it. When the urge to replay an old favorite comes along, I'm incredibly uninterested in doing the equivalent of checking Netflix to see if it's still in the library. They'd have to have coverage at Spotify levels to make that start to seem interesting.
I don't have GamePass but do find it intriguing. The value prop is completely on the other end. It's not wondering if you can play (or replay) some older game that you want in particular. It's when a new game comes out or you are in the mood for something you haven't played before, you can go to the page and find something to at least try for zero marginal cost. If you play or are interested in a broad swath of games, eliminating that initial hump of whether you want to invest money into it is a different ball game.
It's really is literally just Netflix of games. Not great at all when you want to watch Movie X, better if you want to just watch some movie, and the only way when you want their in house productions which in theory are striving to be high quality. GamePass isn't to that final level of exclusivity yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some game goes "Only on GamePass" in the nearish future.
It's also similar to Netflix in that if your usecase was the old "Just streaming The Office only" you could probably just purchase it. A mono game player would definitely be better served just buying the title they want for $60 rather than a monthly fee, but it starts to get more attractive at just a few games per year.
I'd still rather own my games than rent it out, especially since I know that there's also a constant stream of games leaving Game Pass.
This month, Game Pass subscribers will lose access to Cyber Shadow (launched January 2021), Nowhere Prophet (launched July 2020), Prison Architect (launched January 2021) and Xeno Crisis (launched August 2020).
I'm also having trouble believing that Game Pass will remain $10 for long. At some point Microsoft will want to start recouping its investments and it's gonna start hiking prices. I personally got pretty tired of the constant Netflix price updates and I'd rather not do the same to my video game collection. I didn't actually have a gaming PC between January 2014 and March 2021, and it was actually pretty nice to install Steam and see all of the games that I bought between 2006 and 2014 still waiting for me in my library.
I paid $20 for Valheim and played that for about 6 months.
Got Conan Exiles for $12 and played it for 3 months.
If you really like playing a wide variety of games, and like to rent them, then a $10/mo deal is excellent. I like to buy inexpensive games and play them for a long time. Should I even mention the 15 years I got out of StarCraft?
I'll go in waves, playing one game like crazy for a couple months, and then maybe not playing anything for a few. I like going back to the games I already know I enjoy and playing them some more, so I don't want to rent them.
I think a very reliable method here would be to use Gamepass for trying games out and see what the landscape looks like without having to scout around much and also not paying just to try things. We used to do this with demos but they became very impopular and really, if you can play a full game instead of a demo, isn't that better?
So you get access to these games to try them, and if you really, really like them, you can buy them when they go on sale for cheap on Steam.
I don't use Gamepass because it somehow has eluded me, but it seems like a good deal even if I tend to buy games for cheap on Steam.
