Founder of Arkane Studios: "I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade"; impacts sales
We should absolutely avoid it. Subscription services are wreaking havoc in many other parts of the media landscape. The deal is good now because they're subsidizing the hell out of it, but just like what happened with streaming services the deal will get shittier and shittier until we're stuck with a horrible deal.
Hemorrhage money to kill or buy smaller studios, then jack the price and tank the quality. Shove some AI in it for good measure.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy about it
Music streaming is still pretty good. There’s competition, the catalogues are extremely similar, and the price is affordable as well.
Piracy always exists and will always be there once you get an awful deal as a customer. That's what's already happening to streaming services. If they don't learn from that, they'll just suffer later on.
I hear what you're saying and would normally agree with you. But it's the smaller developers that will suffer, not Microsoft or other giant corporations. And they will not always be there...
The confusion of products and services has been awful in general. Publishers demand continuing revenue. A fixed subscription is at least an honest economic exchange, for customers - unlike any form of "microtransactions."
I don't see how gamepass is particularly bad, I can still buy games without it (I don't sub to gamepass) and as long as there's no exclusivity crap where I literally can't play the game otherwise...
It's nice when I want to play a game with a friend and the game happens to be on gp, thus I don't have to buy the game for them lol.
But why would you buy a game if game pass exists?
They will run it at a loss until they can kill off game ownership, then they will force devs to run at a loss a la Spotify and fatten up their margins.
It seems MS are killing off their hardware production. I guess we might be stuck with the subscriptions... I do get that you can still buy a whole game yourself instead of streaming, but not all of the catalogue is offered as an own-it cloud stream version.
the only subscription I tolerate is taxation and internet and phone, but only because the alternative sucks.