Ben Decker likes to tell this one story. Xbox's head of gaming services has a group of friends from Junior High that gets together to play new Gears of War games. Well, they try to. Despite doing this for more than a decade, there's always one hold out – Kumar – who doesn't buy into the war on Sera right away. The rest of Decker's Delta Squad then needs to spend time, precious time that could be spent sawing through Locust, hassling their buddy to purchase the game, to get online, and to party up and play. That is, until Xbox Game Pass carved out the friction. Because
Gears 5 was available through the subscription service from day one, the full group was able to blast through it with little consternation, and, when they were done, they had an entire library of games that could keep them playing together.
