News Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass became the destination for GamesIndustry

[Tek]

At some point over the last decade, subscription services completely changed the way I discover and listen to music.

I couldn't tell you exactly when the shift happened. It occurred slowly, steadily; regular purchases gave way to monthly payments, and my love of the album was rivalled and eventually subsumed by playlists and individual tracks. I was one kind of music enthusiast in 2010, and somewhere in the time since, I became another.

While it is perhaps too early to know for sure, it feels like the shift I find so difficult to pinpoint with music happened to me with video games in the course of the last 12 months. While I played many games I loved in 2020, the single product that mattered most to my playing habits was a subscription service: Xbox Game Pass.

Games of the Year 2020 | Xbox Game Pass

At some point over the last decade, subscription services completely changed the way I discover and listen to music. I …

www.gamesindustry.biz

 

[TechParadox]

The thing about Game Pass (and other things like it) is that it's just another shift into a service-based economy, whereby the content brokers and producers can repeatedly extract payment for the same product over the course of time. Call me a luddite, but if anything, recent changes in how companies can modify media on their services (e.g. Star Wars going "maclunky" or Netflix censoring stuff) or things get removed from availability (like how Microsoft cycles games out of the pass) have shown me more than ever that I should rely on purchasing physical media for things that I want to keep around and in the same state as when I bought them. Game Pass Is great for stuff where one may not be sure if they want to pay full price up front for a game (which is understandable, given the impending $70 price point for games in the US), but once I found one I like I'd be looking for a physical copy, if at all possible, pronto.

 

[Demon_skeith]

I won't deny it's a good service, but once a game leaves the service, good luck playing it again.