The Game Pass Thread

To be fair to Phil he's more a symbolic figurehead and blame monkey these days, Satya and the bean counters are the ones calling the shots now.

The concessions they had to make to get the deal over the line - no exclusivity, licensing deals with just about everybody, Ubi getting the streaming rights to all Activision games (and any released in the next 15 years) in perpetuity - meant that the deal was great for just about everybody except Microsoft. The post pandemic shrinking of the industry and the collapse of the embracer group has put the willies up them and they want their money back sooner rather than later.

Looks like Core codes are still stackable, and thus the conversion to Ultimate should still be doable. Guess we just wait to see if the conversion or the ratio gets an overhaul.

I resubbed a few weeks back, managed to stack some India Core codes and then convert to 2 years of Ultimate for £70 all in. Ridiculous really, great for me, not so great for Microsoft one has to assume, although the percentage of subscribers savvy enough to seek out such deals remains a mystery really, I'd imagine it's relatively low but who knows.

It's been a gravy train (for us at least) for years now, never going to last really, especially with the likes of Sony getting away with some frankly absurd subscription price increases last year.

Agreed! They could release their campaigns on a monthly schedule.

TBF I think that message was for investors not for the plebs.

What the fuck have you guys got against my toaster? And I love Mountain Dew as well. You’re mean!

That's massively missing the elephant in the room that Game Pass on pc does little to no numbers especially as the Gamepass PC version always seems to be gimped in some way. Making games on that platform day one is their attempt to get people on it.

But there is still the issue that due to the way MS platform is you do sometimes get a version missing features that the Steam version will have. I think Still Wakes the Deep is one example.

Interesting wrinkle... But if I don't fancy paying £20/m to keep my Ultimate, and I decide to drop down to the lower tier then I wonder if I thus get classed as a "new customer" to that product and therefore lose day one access.

I guess MS relied on the idea that, if enough people subscribed, even just $10 per month would have been enough.

Now they are facing the prospect that GP isn't really expanding anymore, and stuck at a point where it's still not sustainable. Maybe if it had been available on PlayStation and Nintendo as well, it might grow again, but I'm sure that will never happen.

They also have their existing subscribers. They are not enough to keep the service profitable, but you still gotta give them what they signed up for, and because of that, new games will almost never see high revenue.

So, on one side you have low revenue for new games, on the other side you have a service that doesn't grow... I wonder if at some point they will just give up and say "alright, that didn't work out, back to $70 games".

How much faffing with a VPN does this entail? Can I buy the codes, turn on VPN and redeem on the Microsoft website, then turn VPN off and carry on as normal? Found some 6 month India Core codes on Gamivo for £9.97, tempted to go for it.

Some hilariously poor takes on this, especially all the usual fanboys that have waded in over on EG, as per.

Who didn't see this coming? There's no "told you so" aspect to this. We've seen price rises across all subscription services, in all industries. That's the business model. If people feel it's poor value for money (it is) then they'll stop subscribing... and?

As far as I'm concerned, over the last few years I've had access to a large library of games for less than £3/mth, as well as all the day 1 games.

When my sub runs out next year, I'll still be able to buy any games I deem worthy of purchase, and likely at a substantial discount. That's the long and short of it.

Yeah the price has gone up, and the value has gone down. No argument there. I thought the more egregious thing Microsoft did of late was selling Game Pass as having "day 1 access" to games, then selling "early access" ie. They changed the definition of "day 1". Nobody seemed to care though.

I've been massively disillusioned with the entire industry for years now anyway, so it's water off a duck's back at this point. Games just seem to be stagnating in their design and scope, and gamers seem okay with that, so gaming's probably just not for me anymore.