VOID BASTARDS GAME PASS FULL
You could get Sea of Thieves, Crackdown, and the new Just Cause game the day they came out on Game Pass, but the lukewarm response to all of these made the bold decision seem more like an admission that no one was going to pay full price for any of these games at retail than a bold stroke to increase Game Pass subscriptions. Unfortunately, the company only has two first-party franchises that anyone cares about, and there won’t be new Halo or Gears games out until the next console generation. Microsoft probably hoped that deciding to make all of its first-party titles available on Game Pass immediately would get people to take it more seriously. Gaming podcast weirdos are talking about Game Pass, and not just to make fun of the people who are unhip enough not to have already completed every game on it! Changes in the industry, and a big push from Microsoft, have brought about a reassessment. For a while I noticed that even admitting I was getting most of my new games from Game Pass identified me right away as a small-timer, in gaming circles. It was a good deal for people outside of the hardcore realm, and a good tie-in for the new version of the Xbox you can get that doesn’t have a disc drive. But if you were the sort of gamer who goes to the store and comes out with three or four brand new games in shrink wrap several times a year, the service probably wasn’t worth the additional cost. If somehow you never paid money for Braid, or Spelunky, or the Rocksteady Batman games, or Shadow of Mordor, or the numerous (pretty good) Gears of War sequels, they were all on there. It used to be a good place to catch up on titles you read a lot about in games magazines three or four years ago. Game Pass has changed its profile in the last year. Nintendo isn’t marking down any of its Switch titles any time soon, and Ubisoft clearly sees its Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed catalog as still worthy of a premium. It seems kind of obvious what sort of games you still have to buy on their own. I’ve also yet to have the experience of paying for a game only to have it show up on the service just a few weeks later. What has definitely happened is that I try a lot more games than I did before, since there’s never been a point where there wasn’t anything on offer from Game Pass I wanted to play. Perhaps a little bit more, since the option to trade in physical copies of old games rarely presents itself anymore. Is ten bucks a month for a Game Pass subscription a little bit more than I was spending before on used games and a la carte downloads? It’s about the same, I’d say.
So by packaging together a bunch of last-generation titles with a few indies and an inconsistent number of two- and three-year-old studio games, Microsoft did a good job getting slightly more of my money. When my budget can bear it, that is to say. Since it’s become easy and ubiquitous to buy games for download, I just keep an eye out for deals. In the last console era, I was happy to wait for most games to drop below the $20 mark on the used market. There are some “comfort” games I have played and will play for years, like FIFA, Civilization, old Final Fantasy titles, and NBA 2K, but it’s very rare indeed that I step up and pay the $60 it costs to bring a brand new full-featured console title home. I play video games almost every day, but I’m not someone who feels compelled to always keep up with the latest thing. When it first became available a few short years ago, Xbox Game Pass felt like targeted at “medium” gamers like myself.
0 kommentar(er)
