Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It’s MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don’t care whether games are getting “devalued” or whatever, I’m simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can’t see that going away honestly. I can’t see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.
As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.
…
I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.
Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?
Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.
MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.
…
But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…
The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.
It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.
…
Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:
If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…
… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.
Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we’re comparing “the industry with Game Pass” to “games at face value”. That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was “the industry with game rentals”. Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.
But game rentals were often seen as a “try before you buy” case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don’t lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.
Yeah, it used to be quite common for PC gaming magazines to include a demo disk, basically, here’s the game and the first level or two, often you could fit a couple game’s demo versions on one cd.
GamesPass could easily do something like uh… hey, this game here, you can play for 2 or 5 or 10 hours, and then if you want more, you can buy it with… I dunno, a 1/4 to 1/3 discount if you’re subbed to GamesPass, and you’ve got the playtime.
The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.
Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.
It’s like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.
This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful…
…all for a game that’s either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a ‘core features’, or is just something wildly different from the studio’s previous work.
This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.
Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people’s successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr ‘gonzo- rand 19’.
Maybe it says more about me than about game pass, but even at 5€ a month it would be significantly more money than I spend on games every year.
Not that I couldn’t afford it, but I mostly play games that are at least 5 to 10 years old, either on second-hand physical copies or heavily discounted sales/keyshops. The most recent game I’ve bought is Elden Ring, even then only recently because I found a cheap physical copy.
Game pass is good for one month and playing like 3 single player games. But it’s really been the final nail, last gasp whatever you want to call it for XBOX. Its not sustainable, has stalled out and larger developers have had enough of getting f**** over.
Instead of buying a license for a game for $70 you subscribe to a rental service that gives you access to 500 games for $10/month.
Or, instead of buying a $500 console or a $800 PC you just buy a $60 controller and you stream those games running on “the cloud” (=someone else’s console) for $15/month
Problem is that the service is provided by Microsoft at a loss and when they’ll get enough critical mass, they’ll enshittify it.
The economic proposition is good, but I think it’s just to teach gamers that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
I’m not very inclined to take at face value what a studio founder has to say about a service that might make them less money, and might save their customers money.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Except for the hilarious number of studios owned by Microsoft. One would hope Microsoft takes the effect of Game Pass into account when they’re reviewing sales figures and shutting down studios. One would hope…
Sooo… Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They’ve got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but distribution is way cheaper and the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
Of Microsoft? That’s like business 101 my dude, and mostly why business schools should be burned to the ground. The system we have stifles innovation and promotes greed. We fucked.
We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors.
Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis.
Google Photos offering unlimited free storage
If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there’s a rug there.
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I’m honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
Game engines. Nobody is going to even try to reinvent that wheel. Unreal and Unity make a fuckton of cash whether a game does or not. Yeah I hear you, but but but they have income limits, studios release one good ish title, they’re expected to pay like it’ll always happen.
Stores. At least until recently there was not even a slight challenge against the stores control. Now with Apple versus Epic, everybody’s dying to funnel people into their own payment system, But honestly, stores are still making all the money, there’s still the primary method of advertising that works and they still hold all the cards for making sure you show up in their “searches”.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven’t already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it’s more than two guys in a garage, they’ve already all sold their sole adventure capital)
They really need to. I haven’t looked at them in quite a while now last time I looked I was hoping to move some Unity stuff over there, But it seem like anything other than Android was a significant hurdle.
I am subscribed here on Lemmy and they seem to be progressing quite a bit. I am not a game dev myself, but I have some ideas I have been contemplating dabbling in on there.
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Game pass is awesome. Played a fuck ton of games at that price. Hope it stays forever, especially with that stacking model lol.
Oh boy, have I got some news for you
I know, I know lmfao. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to leach the hell out of this until it goes away.
Hey, uh, is Uber still cheaper than a taxi?
Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It’s MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don’t care whether games are getting “devalued” or whatever, I’m simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can’t see that going away honestly. I can’t see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.
As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.
…
I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.
Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?
Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.
MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.
…
But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…
The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.
It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.
…
Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:
If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…
… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.
Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we’re comparing “the industry with Game Pass” to “games at face value”. That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was “the industry with game rentals”. Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.
But game rentals were often seen as a “try before you buy” case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don’t lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.
Yeah, honestly, what was wrong with games releasing Demos?
I think a lot of games would do well if they also bundled limited demos of other games with them too like back in the old days.
Yeah, it used to be quite common for PC gaming magazines to include a demo disk, basically, here’s the game and the first level or two, often you could fit a couple game’s demo versions on one cd.
GamesPass could easily do something like uh… hey, this game here, you can play for 2 or 5 or 10 hours, and then if you want more, you can buy it with… I dunno, a 1/4 to 1/3 discount if you’re subbed to GamesPass, and you’ve got the playtime.
Wow, I totally missed the part where Microsoft had a gun to your head. Obviously sales go down when people don’t have to buy the game to play it.
Why does Arkane suck so much now?
The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.
Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.
It’s like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.
This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful…
…all for a game that’s either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a ‘core features’, or is just something wildly different from the studio’s previous work.
This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.
Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people’s successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr ‘gonzo- rand 19’.
deleted by creator
Maybe it says more about me than about game pass, but even at 5€ a month it would be significantly more money than I spend on games every year.
Not that I couldn’t afford it, but I mostly play games that are at least 5 to 10 years old, either on second-hand physical copies or heavily discounted sales/keyshops. The most recent game I’ve bought is Elden Ring, even then only recently because I found a cheap physical copy.
Game pass is good for one month and playing like 3 single player games. But it’s really been the final nail, last gasp whatever you want to call it for XBOX. Its not sustainable, has stalled out and larger developers have had enough of getting f**** over.
It stopped being just $1 and instantly became the worst thing ever. /s
What’s a gamepass?
A pass for games.
Instead of buying a license for a game for $70 you subscribe to a rental service that gives you access to 500 games for $10/month.
Or, instead of buying a $500 console or a $800 PC you just buy a $60 controller and you stream those games running on “the cloud” (=someone else’s console) for $15/month
Problem is that the service is provided by Microsoft at a loss and when they’ll get enough critical mass, they’ll enshittify it.
The economic proposition is good, but I think it’s just to teach gamers that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
Honestly who cares. Stop buying AAA slop and support indies.
Only open-sourced, homebrewed, and single-person is what we need!
10 people or less.
Captain of Industry is a gem with a 4 person team Risk of Rain was 2, expanded to 3
That’s still at a human scale.
Hedon, Cultic, Zortch I think were all solo devs.
I’m not very inclined to take at face value what a studio founder has to say about a service that might make them less money, and might save their customers money.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Yeah but on the other hand the dumping business model where you sell stuff below cost to kill competition has been a staple of Silicon Valley.
Amd I’d rather the studio earn more money than the publisher in any case.
Except for the hilarious number of studios owned by Microsoft. One would hope Microsoft takes the effect of Game Pass into account when they’re reviewing sales figures and shutting down studios. One would hope…
The number may be high but it’s an almost insignificant proportion of the industry. There’s no industry pressure to be on Gamepass.
Sooo… Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They’ve got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
deleted by creator
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but distribution is way cheaper and the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
Except now it’s just spyware
Of Microsoft? That’s like business 101 my dude, and mostly why business schools should be burned to the ground. The system we have stifles innovation and promotes greed. We fucked.
It is classic tech company strategy.
We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors. Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis. Google Photos offering unlimited free storage
If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there’s a rug there.
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
“But if you offer all these old games to play, why would anyone bother buying the new stuff?” - some corpo director
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I thought that was during Covid.
I’m honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
And as an industry they return less than the sp500 so not only is movie viewing horrible, movie making is a terrible investment .
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…
deleted by creator
Mobile gacha shit
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
Game engines. Nobody is going to even try to reinvent that wheel. Unreal and Unity make a fuckton of cash whether a game does or not. Yeah I hear you, but but but they have income limits, studios release one good ish title, they’re expected to pay like it’ll always happen.
Stores. At least until recently there was not even a slight challenge against the stores control. Now with Apple versus Epic, everybody’s dying to funnel people into their own payment system, But honestly, stores are still making all the money, there’s still the primary method of advertising that works and they still hold all the cards for making sure you show up in their “searches”.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven’t already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it’s more than two guys in a garage, they’ve already all sold their sole adventure capital)
On 2) Godot has entered the chat.
They really need to. I haven’t looked at them in quite a while now last time I looked I was hoping to move some Unity stuff over there, But it seem like anything other than Android was a significant hurdle.
I am subscribed here on Lemmy and they seem to be progressing quite a bit. I am not a game dev myself, but I have some ideas I have been contemplating dabbling in on there.
Looked them up. they JUST released something promising for IOS
https://christianselig.com/2025/05/godot-ios-interop/
You still need a lot of third-party help to get on a console, though.