Why would they need to release a new console for game streaming? The advantage is that it can run on anything. It would also guarantee that Sony wins that generation before it even begins.
Fuck microshit for their predatory pushing of game pass and not being able to own games. I would never buy an xbox and hope others don’t fall for it as well.
I didn’t say people wouldn’t be able to buy any games. Please don’t strawman.
What I said was that plenty of people won’t own games (due to gamepass being sold cheaply initially), then when MS massively jacks up prices, people will have to choose between swallowing that and buying all their games again at whatever the retail price happens to be.
It’s a trap designed to extort people in the long run.
The other thing I said was that some games will be exclusive.
Please address things that I’ve actually said, not things that you’ve imagined I’ve said.
I didn’t imagine you saying anything. I didn’t address anything you said because I didn’t reply to you. I just wanted OP to expand on what he meant by “not being able to own games”
Game Pass is awesome. Back when I was a kid, you rented a game for a weekend and it cost you like $8. Now for around that price you rent a hundred games for a month.
Game Pass is just streaming for video games. It works and lets me try out so many games that I would never have spend money on, but ended up liking a lot of them.
I can totally relate. Paying 30-100€ per game is something for rich people or something I’d do once or max twice a year on very carefully selected games, hoping these games are worth it. With Game Pass I spend 120€ a year to access a wide range of games.
Once I played through or once version 2 of a game comes out, I’m not likely to play it ever again.
Also I have phases where I play a lot and phases where I do not play at all. I can simply discontinue Game Pass in these cases.
And what about when Microsoft ups the price on their subscription, which is clearly their strategy as gamepass doesn’t appear to be profitable?
At least if you’d spent that 120€ on 2-3 games you’d be able to keep them forever.
That 120€ subscription could easily become 200€, 250€, or more. Something people may feel compelled to pay for if MS continues buying up the industry and decides to make games exclusive, which is something they’re already doing to some extent.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think giving MS a disproportionate amount of power over the market is a good thing.
We can “what if” all day long, the fact remains that at the moment it is a very good deal. Last numbers anyone had as far as money goes is that MS was banking 50+mil a month on gamepass subs alone and that was last year. That number should be much higher now considering the amounts of high profile releases on the platform as of late.
It’s not a crazy what if, it’s a tried and tested, proven business strategy.
Currently Microsoft is losing money on gamepass. That’s why they lump it in with other services in their financials, so you can’t see the losses. The pricing as it stands is nowhere near sustainable
I never said it’s not currently a good deal. Those are words that you’re trying to shove into my mouth.
It’s a good deal now because they’re having the price low while they capture the market.
They currently try to buy out the digital gaming space of the internet, sell it for cheap and later on up the price. That’s what big corporations usually do nowadays. Same with X, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. It’s a big issues that we as consumers and later on citizens of our planet face.
However, currently it is a sweet deal for me. And the argument that I’d own the game otherwise doesn’t count for me as I would most probably never replay it. So what’s the use of owning it if it’s just collecting dust in the shelf?
The argument of whose property the item is is different for me for movies, series, and audiobooks. I’m surprised that this scheme was not yet applied for books / e-books. Or am I wrong?
The point is it hasn’t happened, you are just being pessimistic because “Microsoft Bad”. You have no clue if gamepass is losing money, none whatsoever. Your pessimism wants it to go bad so you make up bullshit to support your opinion.
Once again you are making assumptions. And I never said they wouldn’t raise prices, you keep putting words in my mouth. The type of price increase you seem to think will happen is definitely beyond the realm of reality, at least at this time. There’s no way they are going to double the subscription cost and expect to keep their current subscription numbers.
It’s not “what if”, it’s “when”. Is it a good deal currently? Yeah, it always is at this point. Will it become untenably worse once it becomes more popular and corners the market? Yes, it always does in the end.
Yeah, I get that gamepass is a good way to play games but the thing is when this is if I really like the game and want to purchase it, I can’t. They won’t ever sell me the game files, they’ll only give me the key to rent it out and can revoke that whenever they want.
People also seem to genuinely believe MS won’t just massively inflate prices once they’ve cornered the market lmao
The current gamepass pricing is unsustainable. There’s a reason why MS refuses to say how much money they make from it (if any) and they lump it in with other stuff in their financials.
I can easily envision a future where gamepass is £30 a month or something, but because MS has bought a lot of studios and people don’t own their games, people have to choose between continually paying that price, or starting all over again with zero games, and not being able to buy a decent amount of the big games, because they’re only on gamepass.
Either that or it ends up like TV streaming where we have to have 5 different subscriptions to access all the games we want access to.
Fuck that. We shouldn’t let either of those things happen.
I remember when the current generation of consoles came out (Series X/S and PS5) that both MS and Sony and all the various gaming magazines were claiming that they would be the last hardware consoles ever. Uh huh.
Yeah, discs are still a thing for Xbox and PS5, steam decks just download these really big folders for each game’s files to your SD card like our PCs do and the Switch has its tiny cartridges you keep in a little box in your carrying case like previous nintendo handhelds.
Xbox - 2001
Xbox 360 - 2005
Xbox One - 2013
Xbox One S - 2016
Xbox One X - 2017
Xbox Series S|X - 2020
Though, seeing it laid out like this makes it look like the S|X(6) was intentional. But clearly that’s too much credit for whoever is constantly day drunk while naming.
The big problem with the Xbox One was that it was underpowered because of the Kinect requirement, so they ditched Kinect then rebranded as the Xbox One S, throwing in a 4K Blu Ray player.
Still wasn’t enough, so the One X had full 4K capabilities.
If they had launched with the One X things would have looked a lot different.
I don't know if I would see it as a pure money grab. Pretty sure game consoles, just like inkjet printers and the like are sold with zero or near zero profit (or even at a loss). The benefit the console manufacturer gains from the platform lock-in far outweighs whatever greed they might have trying to reap gains from the hardware. 10 year old hardware is roughly 30x slower in FLOPs, so we might be looking at a desire for better games or easier software development - I for sure would not envy the developer needing to target 10 year old hardware, though it's not exactly unheard of.
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