For a long time, I have this idea how Microsoft should structure and price the Game Pass. I am thinking of making it modular with a cheap entry price, and then having basically DLCs to enable certain services. This would also allow Microsoft to add in new services without restructuring everything again or screwing up the names.
The below list is just an idea how it could be structure and priced, I’m not saying this has to be exactly like that. What do you think?
--- Base ---
$7,99 Game Pass
(pc and console, includes console multiplayer,
50+ games dynamic library)
--- DLCs ---
+ $4,99 Plus Expansion
(full set 500+ games, including EA Play and Ubisoft+)
+ $9,99 Day 1 Ultimate
(including all first party games except Call of Duty,
plus day 1 premium games from third parties,
additional benefits, perks and rewards)
+ $1,99 Cloud Streaming S
(for supported titles of all your own games,
plus all Game Pass games)
+ $3,99 Cloud Streaming X
(like S but higher quality streaming, shorter wait times)
Any kind of subscription is just a trap for everyone involved in it except for the ones setting it up. It might not look like that at the beginning but rest assured that is it only purpose. Avoid it at all cost!
How about just bring back online MP for $5/mo at 12mo purchase of $60. I stupidly joined in the GP tiers and watched it skyrocket from $10 to $30 and when my grandfathered price tier ended at $20, I canceled everything. Just shy of 20 years on Xbox down the drain! At one point MS had a bundle of everything that was $20/mo and that was Gold, Office, Skype minutes,1TB SkyDrive (before rebrand), it was decent.
Now they went from getting an annual $240 GP, $150 Office, and me still buying a bunch of games to now ditching the ecosystem until further notice. Greedy bastards!
The money developers get for GamePass “sales” isn’t enough to keep them in business, look at Tango Gameworks, who did Hi-Fi Rush. Great game, well received, lots of players.
Studio closed 4 months later.
If someone like Tango can’t survive on a game like Hi-Fi Rush, it doesn’t speak well for the business model.
So what you end up with are fewer games and lower quality games, it’s a race to the bottom.
Also, the push to digital only reduces the footprint in stores, so when people go to buy consoles, all they see are a bunch of old games, or (worse) no games at all, as we see in the Xbox section in Target and Walmart recently.
So GamePass encourages fewer games, lower quality games, a reduced footprint at retail, and ultimately, lower sales.
It also undermines the Stop Killing Games movement because you’re not sold a product. You’re sold a service which means any game that exists solely for game pass (which eventually will happen if game pass becomes the predominant way to access games) doesn’t need an EOL plan for game preservation.
It will also create the streaming service problem, where instead of having the games you want to play in one place you will have 3/4 gamepass-like services that each have their own exclusive library so instead of X amount a month you’ll be paying 3x amount to access different services.
It also further normalizes not owning any games so you’ll end up being dependent on the services like gamepass. Which also makes it easier to control the price of the service down the line because what are you going to do, go play your non-existent library of games?
Overall I think Gamepass becoming successful would be a net negative for gaming and as such I’m completely against gamepass and all similar subscription services that might pop up.
Tango might have been fine if they were an independent developer, not owned by Microsoft who shut the studio down. Their shutdown likely had nothing to do with their sales, and everything to do with messing with margins for stockholders to see a line going up more.
So what you end up with are fewer games and lower quality games, it’s a race to the bottom.
I think Game Pass is a model where more games is beneficial for Microsoft, and diversity and short games that can be created easier. That’s because Game Pass wants to have a flood of games coming to keep subscription. I wouldn’t say that necessarily equates to lower quality. The risk is lower for each game, so they can experiment.
In the end I think Game Pass harms more than its useful, but I do not see this black and white, as it has its pros and cons. Overall I do not like subscription services where you pay for years and if you stop playing, you stop getting access. If you had purchased games, then after years you would have a library you can visit and play over and over again, without paying for access. But it has its pros too, as one can play ton of games in short period of time, especially if you like shorter small games.
It’s extremely easy to price something for customers when you’re not the one paying for its capital and operating expenses, so I’m not sure how much value there is in this exercise. Cloud gaming is one that I’m just about convinced will never be able to price itself in a way that people will actually want to pay for it, given those who have tried and failed already.
$10/month for just the cloud streaming of games you already paid for elsewhere (and if I’m not mistaken, there are still limits on which ones you’re allowed to play), which isn’t attractive for many people given the latency and image quality compromises that come along with cloud streaming. You put your fantasy price at $4/month. Maybe that’s what you’re willing to pay, but given that Google put their premium sub at about the same $10/month price, I’d wager the math doesn’t work out to supply it at $4.
Google, notably, also had a hard time delivering the high-end hardware that they promised in their pitch, where you’d never need to fork up hundreds of dollars for a powerful console or graphics card as the end user, because you’d always be sent a stream of the game running on highest settings. In reality, they were often running on much lower settings, because it’s expensive to cyclically upgrade your fleet of gaming PCs to keep up with the latest games.
But its not just $4 in this example (which should be priced higher probably, at least for the premium Series X based streaming). In this example there is a base price on top of it, which would add to 12,99, not just a supply at 4. Have in mind that Game Pass has streaming builtin already, even at the the current base price of 9,99. So my suggestion is just, to make it modular. And the suggested prices are just here to give an idea what I’m talking about, not exact numbers to compare to their actual value. I was more interested in sharing the idea, rather than the exact plan. Just sayin.
Is rather have a conversation that paying for software isn’t a bad thing. It incentivises creating new software.
Not paying a cent for open source just highlights the problem - it’s not like people didn’t spent their dev time creating the software don’t deserve the compensation. They do. And this is one reason why open source is doing an uphill battle vs proprietary that can just put enormous pricetag and people pay.
Saying that, I never subbed for gamepass and hopefully never will. I like to buy things directly. Steam / GOG is perfect. I wish there was that model in films/anime/music.
I mean, I’ll oppose any Xbox Game Pass because Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy.
But I’ll bite; I don’t necessarily oppose the structure of a monthly fee for game rentals. Still, it really should be closer to the $10-$15 range, at max. Many people will claim the USA has suffered inflation, but I think a lot of that has just been price collusion on essentials. The minimum wage is the same.
The only problem with your piecemeal approach is that some features like cloud streaming sound unappealing from a distance (many people would comment “It can’t possibly technologically work! Anyone saying they’ve tried it is lying!111”) So having some way in which it becomes an extra element can get people to value it more. The base layer could even allow for about 1-2 hours of the “Streaming X” layer as a trial.
As a reminder, for anyone kinda interested in this but hating Microsoft, the lite Indie Pass exists.
Many people will claim the USA has suffered inflation, but I think a lot of that has just been price collusion on essentials. The minimum wage is the same.
We can measure inflation. You don’t need collusion on prices when all the way down the supply chain, prices increase for everyone producing the essentials. Minimum wage is the same, but it rarely gets adjusted, and that’s stupid.
Your plan structure suits me perfectly. Mostly because I wouldn’t want most of the DLCs. I’ll take the plus expansion, because it’s worth it at that price, and I might temporarily upgrade to the day 1s if something I’m really excited for comes out.
That’s what I think most people would do, I mean just adding “1 DLC”. In example the streaming guy could just add the Cloud Streaming X and stream their own purchased games only. That would be roughly 12,99, according to my model (probably too cheap).
It does seem too cheap, and I think the deciding factor on whether it could survive would be the special promos included in the Premium package. Stuff like free game currency or skins. The whales would gladly pay the extra to cover the rest of our cheap asses if they can get some exclusive cosmetics.
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Any kind of subscription is just a trap for everyone involved in it except for the ones setting it up. It might not look like that at the beginning but rest assured that is it only purpose. Avoid it at all cost!
How about just bring back online MP for $5/mo at 12mo purchase of $60. I stupidly joined in the GP tiers and watched it skyrocket from $10 to $30 and when my grandfathered price tier ended at $20, I canceled everything. Just shy of 20 years on Xbox down the drain! At one point MS had a bundle of everything that was $20/mo and that was Gold, Office, Skype minutes,1TB SkyDrive (before rebrand), it was decent.
Now they went from getting an annual $240 GP, $150 Office, and me still buying a bunch of games to now ditching the ecosystem until further notice. Greedy bastards!
I would only pay for it if my kids could play FC26 on Linux whenever they want. Cloud has queues, and other methods don’t work.
Personally, I think GamePass is a terrible idea.
The money developers get for GamePass “sales” isn’t enough to keep them in business, look at Tango Gameworks, who did Hi-Fi Rush. Great game, well received, lots of players.
Studio closed 4 months later.
If someone like Tango can’t survive on a game like Hi-Fi Rush, it doesn’t speak well for the business model.
So what you end up with are fewer games and lower quality games, it’s a race to the bottom.
Also, the push to digital only reduces the footprint in stores, so when people go to buy consoles, all they see are a bunch of old games, or (worse) no games at all, as we see in the Xbox section in Target and Walmart recently.
So GamePass encourages fewer games, lower quality games, a reduced footprint at retail, and ultimately, lower sales.
It also undermines the Stop Killing Games movement because you’re not sold a product. You’re sold a service which means any game that exists solely for game pass (which eventually will happen if game pass becomes the predominant way to access games) doesn’t need an EOL plan for game preservation.
It will also create the streaming service problem, where instead of having the games you want to play in one place you will have 3/4 gamepass-like services that each have their own exclusive library so instead of X amount a month you’ll be paying 3x amount to access different services.
It also further normalizes not owning any games so you’ll end up being dependent on the services like gamepass. Which also makes it easier to control the price of the service down the line because what are you going to do, go play your non-existent library of games?
Overall I think Gamepass becoming successful would be a net negative for gaming and as such I’m completely against gamepass and all similar subscription services that might pop up.
Tango might have been fine if they were an independent developer, not owned by Microsoft who shut the studio down. Their shutdown likely had nothing to do with their sales, and everything to do with messing with margins for stockholders to see a line going up more.
I think Game Pass is a model where more games is beneficial for Microsoft, and diversity and short games that can be created easier. That’s because Game Pass wants to have a flood of games coming to keep subscription. I wouldn’t say that necessarily equates to lower quality. The risk is lower for each game, so they can experiment.
In the end I think Game Pass harms more than its useful, but I do not see this black and white, as it has its pros and cons. Overall I do not like subscription services where you pay for years and if you stop playing, you stop getting access. If you had purchased games, then after years you would have a library you can visit and play over and over again, without paying for access. But it has its pros too, as one can play ton of games in short period of time, especially if you like shorter small games.
It’s extremely easy to price something for customers when you’re not the one paying for its capital and operating expenses, so I’m not sure how much value there is in this exercise. Cloud gaming is one that I’m just about convinced will never be able to price itself in a way that people will actually want to pay for it, given those who have tried and failed already.
Well, there is Nvidia Now cloud streaming and it seems to be working.
$10/month for just the cloud streaming of games you already paid for elsewhere (and if I’m not mistaken, there are still limits on which ones you’re allowed to play), which isn’t attractive for many people given the latency and image quality compromises that come along with cloud streaming. You put your fantasy price at $4/month. Maybe that’s what you’re willing to pay, but given that Google put their premium sub at about the same $10/month price, I’d wager the math doesn’t work out to supply it at $4.
Google, notably, also had a hard time delivering the high-end hardware that they promised in their pitch, where you’d never need to fork up hundreds of dollars for a powerful console or graphics card as the end user, because you’d always be sent a stream of the game running on highest settings. In reality, they were often running on much lower settings, because it’s expensive to cyclically upgrade your fleet of gaming PCs to keep up with the latest games.
But its not just $4 in this example (which should be priced higher probably, at least for the premium Series X based streaming). In this example there is a base price on top of it, which would add to 12,99, not just a supply at 4. Have in mind that Game Pass has streaming builtin already, even at the the current base price of 9,99. So my suggestion is just, to make it modular. And the suggested prices are just here to give an idea what I’m talking about, not exact numbers to compare to their actual value. I was more interested in sharing the idea, rather than the exact plan. Just sayin.
I’d rather have a conversation about how I haven’t paid for software in over 25 years, but you do you
Edit: I find the concept of subscription software profane, and so should you
Is rather have a conversation that paying for software isn’t a bad thing. It incentivises creating new software.
Not paying a cent for open source just highlights the problem - it’s not like people didn’t spent their dev time creating the software don’t deserve the compensation. They do. And this is one reason why open source is doing an uphill battle vs proprietary that can just put enormous pricetag and people pay.
Saying that, I never subbed for gamepass and hopefully never will. I like to buy things directly. Steam / GOG is perfect. I wish there was that model in films/anime/music.
I mean, I’ll oppose any Xbox Game Pass because Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy.
But I’ll bite; I don’t necessarily oppose the structure of a monthly fee for game rentals. Still, it really should be closer to the $10-$15 range, at max. Many people will claim the USA has suffered inflation, but I think a lot of that has just been price collusion on essentials. The minimum wage is the same.
The only problem with your piecemeal approach is that some features like cloud streaming sound unappealing from a distance (many people would comment “It can’t possibly technologically work! Anyone saying they’ve tried it is lying!111”) So having some way in which it becomes an extra element can get people to value it more. The base layer could even allow for about 1-2 hours of the “Streaming X” layer as a trial.
As a reminder, for anyone kinda interested in this but hating Microsoft, the lite Indie Pass exists.
We can measure inflation. You don’t need collusion on prices when all the way down the supply chain, prices increase for everyone producing the essentials. Minimum wage is the same, but it rarely gets adjusted, and that’s stupid.
Your plan structure suits me perfectly. Mostly because I wouldn’t want most of the DLCs. I’ll take the plus expansion, because it’s worth it at that price, and I might temporarily upgrade to the day 1s if something I’m really excited for comes out.
Other than that, I can do without.
That’s what I think most people would do, I mean just adding “1 DLC”. In example the streaming guy could just add the Cloud Streaming X and stream their own purchased games only. That would be roughly 12,99, according to my model (probably too cheap).
It does seem too cheap, and I think the deciding factor on whether it could survive would be the special promos included in the Premium package. Stuff like free game currency or skins. The whales would gladly pay the extra to cover the rest of our cheap asses if they can get some exclusive cosmetics.