Worried More About the Green

IRecently Microsoft announced that Xbox Game Pass would get a price increase. For those that don’t pay too much attention, or maybe those that signed up back when it was cheap, have ignored it ever since, and don’t even realize they’re paying for it anymore, Xbox Game Pass is an online game service that, functionally, acts a lot like a NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). but for games. For a regularly monthly fee you get access to a bunch of games any time you want. This featured not only a large selection of older titles, like Assassin’s Creed games, and a few Final Fantasy titles, but also Day-One releases as well. Get new games to you without having to leave your house.

Understandably, many gamers thought this was a pretty good deal. It was an evolution of what Microsoft had been doing for years on the Xbox Gold accounts, where you’d get one free game a month on the 360, and then upped to two when the Xbox One came around. Back then, all you had to do was download that game during the month and it was yours for the life of your Xbox account. I have a ton of old games I downloaded, played an hour or so, and then put down after never to touch again. And, you know? That was great. The game was free to me, since I was already paying for Gold so I could take my console online, so why not get a little extra benefit.

I did test out Game Pass when it came out originally, upgrading my ten buck Gold account to a then-fifteen buck Game Pass account, and I used it for three months, right up until Microsoft said to keep the benefits I had to pay more for it as my “grace period” was over. That was when I cancelled it because, honestly, I just didn’t use it enough. I’m not the average gamer, I admit, because I have a large library of games on disc in my house, along with the consoles to use them. If I wanted to play Assassin’s Creed I could pull down my old 360 and play it there. Yes, having it on Game Pass was convenient, but paying for it every month for that convenience wasn’t a value proposition I cared about.

And the new games that came out weren’t all that great either. Does anyone even talk about the Day-One exclusive Redfall anymore except to note that it was a massive failure for developer Arkane and publisher Bethesda. It was a real black eye for all involved, and even being “free” on Game Pass didn’t help that game find users. Not all the titles on Game Pass were that bad, but it was indicative of a problem with the service: you don’t get a choice over what games are in the library, you just have to play whatever (good or bad) is listed. If the Day-One titles put out are ones you weren’t interested in anyway, your monthly fee likely felt a bit wasted.

I bring all this up because of the price increase. Back when the service was twenty bucks a month it already felt like it was on the edge of “do I need this or not?” But now the top tier version of Game Pass is going to be thirty bucks, and that’s a real hard value proposition to sell. It is, in effect, half the price of a new game. Sure, that sounds great if you wanted to play that game, and you only expect to play it for a few weeks. But if you’re still playing it two, three, four months later, you’ve functionally paid double (or more) for the game at that point. And that doesn’t take into account all the other games on the service that might come out during that time that you’re ignoring and still paying for. That’s a hard price to swallow month to month, even if we weren’t in a terrible economy right now.

I understand that physical media is dying. Most days I look at my collection of games and movies and feel a little like a dinosaur that saw the meteor fall and is just waiting for the end to come (shit, that was depressing). I know at some point every console is going to go digital only, and every movie studio is going to decide that DVDs and Blu-Rays aren’t worth making anymore. It’s hard to justify buying another console, with more physical games, when everything is going to be digital at some point.

Hell, most physical games you buy now don’t even have the full game on them anymore. When I loaded the Spider-man Remastered into my PS5 it effectively downloaded the whole game before I could play it. What I really had was a download code on the disc so the real game could be grabbed from a server. A lot of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo releases are like that now. Many Nintendo Switch 2 game cards don’t have the game on them, just a digital code to download the game. And when that’s the standard, who knows how long a physical disc is even going to work. Some time, a decade or two from now, I could load that Spider-man Remastered title into a PS5 and find it no longer has anything to download. Digital is impermanent.

So if that’s the way we’re going, some kind of online source sounds like a good deal. Getting games the day they’re released so you can play them right then is what every gamer wants. If your friends are playing a looter shooter and you’re not, there’s the FOMO of it all. You don’t want to be the only one standing around the watercooler discussing how terrible Redfall was, right? Everyone needed to experience how awful that title was, and with Game Pass you could. That’s one solution to the problem.

The thing is, it’s not the only one. There are other services, like Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store, that let you buy and download games. The difference here is that you have some level of control over what goes into your library and, with few exceptions, once it’s in your library it’s yours forever. If you get Game Pass you have the games for as long as Microsoft wants you to have them, and when console generations change, there’s a good chance many of the games you like aren’t making the jump over. Steam, GOG, and Epic, though, incentivize collecting because your games move from computer to computer. It’s easier to keep and maintain and you aren’t paying month to month for the privilege.

This wasn’t a discussion we had to have back when Game Pass was cheap. And in fairness to Microsoft, there are tiers of Game Pass that are cheaper. For $9.99 you get 50-plus games in a library, although there’s no guarantee any of them will be new. Five bucks more and you get 200-plus games a month, and within a year of their release you’ll eventually see new titles. But it’s only the much more expensive $30 plan that gets you those Day-One exclusives, along with a full 400-plus games a month.

That big number is enticing, but how many games can you play in a month? And how frequently does that library of games change? Are they mostly titles you’ve seen before, a bunch of classics and filler that are there to pump numbers? Probably, all so that Microsoft can charge a good chunk of change every month for those Day-Ones. And sure, development costs are high and Microsoft has to get their money somewhere. Game Pass actively discourages buying new games because why buy them when you’re paying monthly for them anyway. Everyone has to get paid.

In the end, what it boils down to is that Game Pass isn’t really a good value proposition. It’s now too expensive to get the new games when you want, to the point that you’re likely better off going to Steam or the like and buying a digital version there instead. It’s also a bad value for the game companies since they aren’t getting regular physical or digital sales anymore. If they put a game out on Steam they get most of the money from the sale. If they put it out on Game Pass, they get whatever amount Microsoft promised up front and maybe a sliver from residual play after. No one really wins on this except Microsoft… and with the way the Xbox console market is trending, maybe they don’t even really win on this anymore.

In short, from this writer’s perspective, it’s better to avoid Game Pass entirely. Hell, it's probably better to get out of the console ecosystem altogether. It hurts me to say that as I was a life long console fan, but I just don’t see the value in them anymore. Game Pass is now too expensive and you’re better off getting a PC and running games from Steam, Epic, of GOG instead. The value is simply better at that point.