Due to Gaming Sub Services I May Not Be Buying Any Full-Price Games the Rest of the Year

Now that the majority of the Summer Game Mess is behind I've gone through my list of anticipated games and realized something: the vast majority of the games I want to play in the second half of the year will be attached to some sort of subscription service. Here's the list:

Aside from Nintendo and the occasional third-party title I'm can pretty much avoid paying $60/$70 per game for the next 6 months at least. I've been a Game Pass subscriber for a while but since I'm PC-only it hasn't really been that useful. Now that Microsoft is ramping up their GP plans, however, I should be getting a bit of use out of it. I really have no interest in owning a bunch of games anymore (and as has been discussed many times we really don't "own" many of the games we purchased these days anyway) so this situation is ideal for me. Anyone else viewing upcoming releases through the same lens?

Yup.

I understand why this is a thing. I understand that people want new things and they don't want to or can't always spend the money on the things they want.

But a month or so ago I went searching for an album that used to be available on Google Play Music that isn't available on its successor, Youtube Music, anymore. I had to hunt it down on Amazon and buy a copy. Same story for a different album a few years ago (Oceans of Slumber's Winter, Snarky Puppy's We Like It Here, both of which may be restored to streaming at this point). What would have happened if those albums were only available on streaming services?

As someone who likes video games regardless of their age or budget or size or whatever, and someone who replays old classics rather often, I value ownership of media a lot. That concept is wafer-thin in this day of subscription services and streaming everything and I'm simply afraid of it disappearing entirely, and of untouchable mega-corporations controlling what we can and cannot play (and listen to, and read, and watch). Is that a misplaced fear? Maybe. You might point out that I was, in fact, able to purchase those albums I couldn't find streaming anymore. And that's fine, but I still think that a single company who can control almost everything that you play (and listen to, and read, and watch) through enticing subscription services has a tremendous amount of power that maybe I'm not comfortable with them having. They can take away one thing and say "no, play this instead" and I just don't think that's OK.

I know there are a lot of holes in what I have to say, counter-arguments and examples from the real world that it's "not as bad as I'm saying it is". I'm aware. The whole thing just makes me more and more uncomfortable as time goes on, that's all.

Anyway, I'm done rambling.

@justin258: at this time gamepass is not stoping any one from buying games. is it posible they will yes, but all digital goods have kill switch any ways even if you buy retail games now a days. what we need is laws that protect what we buy digitally not try to keep keep alive old ways of buying media . I to worry about digital goods just going way.

Besides some of the games listed, I'm also looking forwards to Death's Door, Last Stop and Psychonauts 2, which will also be on Game Pass day one. So yeah, there's definitely way more titles coming towards the end of the year that I'm content with just playing as part of Game Pass, instead of buying them.

That said, I'm also still planning on also buying a handful of games, even ones that'll be part of GP. I don't care about Deathloop becoming part of Game Pass in a year from september, when I want to play it at launch.

I don't know how anyone can finish so many games, The Ascent & Battlefield 2042 is my list for this year and maybe Horizon Forbidden West.

Don't play many Indies, huh?

Also, Ubisoft+ is far too expensive to warrant subscribing for 2 games. Especially when they are Ubisoft map-filler games. You'd be better off just shopping around for a deal on the games you want, or waiting a few months for the inevitable winter sale, instead of subscribing for however many months it would take to play through them.

yeah, that's pretty wild.

i just hope the apparent success of something like Game Pass doesn't end up homogenizing the entire business model for the industry. so many sectors have transitioned to asking consumers to get everything in one place for a automatically-charged monthly rate- and i'm increasing convinced this is a net-negative. but that's a larger conversation.

Prior to Monster Hunter Rise, I don't think I've bought a full price AAA game (not counting lower-priced indies) since.... erm, Sekiro and Judgement maybe? I picked up Yakuza Like A Dragon but that was on a slight discount. Other than that I've been just playing games that come to GP and then the occasional smaller title.

@creepingdeath0: I play some indie stuff here and there, as long as they're not:

- A roguelike

- A deckbuilder

- A Souls-like

- Turn-based

- A visual novel

Also, indies are another area where Game Pass has completely rearranged my expectations - even if I do find an indie game that looks interesting (like "The Artful Escape" or "Demon Turf" for example) I might as well wait and see if comes to GP because why not?

I really appreciate @justin258's post in here, and it echoes a lot of the concerns I have about ownership. And I value that ownership not just because I am worried about my library disappearing one day, but also because I think that preservation of games as a medium is really important. I'm also worried about the potential financial effects of a service like Game Pass, especially for smaller creators. Industry finances are always a bit of a black box, so it's hard to know how many people are or can get their dues under a scheme like this, and the idea of access to games becoming monopolised in this way is disconcerting. I also want a far wider diet of games than you can get under any one of these subscription services.

I am looking to pick up Game Pass myself soon, but for the above reasons, I can't see it as a full replacement for just going and buying games. I'm looking for it to be a way to try new games without having to throw down the retail price and to play AAA titles I'd never otherwise have the money to buy, but I still want to purchase indie games where possible to support the devs and do plenty of exploration beyond Game Pass.

@justin258: I feel the same even though I'm completely on the Game Pass hook. I thought of a silly metaphor...it feels like riding in a fancy bus across the whole country. Right now it's getting me where I want to go and it's really nice, but I'm not in control of the wheel and I left my car behind miles away. Some day I might want to get off but by then it might be too late because everyone is using the bus and nobody has a car to pick each other up anymore.

Okay the last bit was kind of a stretch, but my point is that I can easily see terrible things coming from this (like the above post) but at the same time I'm contributing to it and I'm not sure what to think. I feel like Jeff when they were talking about NFTs on one of the podcasts, where he was like "I see what's coming and it sucks and I feel like I'm powerless to stop it". Like even if I take a stand and get off Game Pass, am I really gonna make a dent? Even if I get my friend groups to stop and their groups to stop? It seems to be growing constantly day by day.

I dunno, this might sound dramatic but I have ridden far along this thought train from time to time and it does make me worry.

@plinko: I really fail to see Game Pass taking over to that degree, especially if its not on the two largest platforms.

I will definitely effect MS studio's down the road and the content they sign, when they start green lighting projects based on metrics like new subs, player retention and downloads etc.

Video games are consumed very differently to movies & TV, most people play very few games over a much longer space of time and will have no interest in Netflix for game no matter how good the content is.

Why would the folks who only play Fortnite, COD or FIFA need Game Pass?

Insider were already talkling about GP subs slowing down which was probably the reason for the price hike with GWG.

If you pay for 3 different subscription services then that's like $50 a month, almost the equivalent of buying a new full-priced game each month. And a lot of the games on your list aren't full-priced games.

What I don't like about subscription services is that you have to keep it going or you lose your games, and it adds up to a lot of money over the years. I'm someone who might spend $100 on a summer sale but the other end of that is that I have several months a year where I pay zero dollars for my gaming, if I fell on hard times I could easily survive a year without buying a single game. And I'm never in a situation where I am forced to finish a game faster than I'd like because it's leaving Game Pass.

There are fair concerns about "owning" your content but so far these fears haven't materialized as my Steam account is nearing 20 years of service and I still have the games that I bought ages ago.

@thepanzini said:

Regarding ownership, if you're that concerned, just buy the games you want to "own", knowing that you don't really own any digital games anyway (unless they're free of DRM).

@brakara: Erm the point I'm making is most people won't be interested in GP, so it's not likely to take over.

Your basically repeating what I just said, I'm not sure I'm following the second point I never said anything regarding ownership.

By buying games i won't be paying for any subscriptions for the rest of the year :P.

Jokes aside as long as you use it of course it's a saving, my gaming habits just make it a bad deal for me personally.

Ok your choice, but I still personally prefer buying games for which ever gaming platforms.

Right now, Game Pass reminds me a bit of "Old Netflix," when Netflix was putting a bullet in all the brick-n-mortar rental chains and damn near EVERYTHING could be found on Netflix; it was all you needed.

But, that all changed when other mega corps saw just how much Netflix's defacto streaming monopoly (Microsoft loves monopolies, don't forget), saw them prove the concept could work, and soon damn near EVERYONE pulled their content from Netflix and put it on their own platforms (dozens and dozens of them).

Time was, if you wanted to watch something streaming, then Netflix was all you needed. Now? Now you need a flow chart to find where something *might* be available to stream (if it's available to stream at all, or only available to rent) and then one of a handful of streaming subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Peacock, CBS All-Access / Paramount+, Hulu, Disney+, iTunes, HBO Max, Acorn, etc. etc. and they ALL want their blood money every month, which adds up REAL quick.

Our glorious streaming future, the promise we saw in "Old Netflix" isn't glorious anymore. Everyone is scrambling for content, ANY content at all (regardless of quality), to keep subscribers engaged and paying. But movies / TV, unlike video games are far easier and faster to produce, with more regions around the world with decades upon decades of content to license, e.g. the BBC, etc.

Right now, Game Pass "works" because it's applying a new model of content delivery to "old" non-subscription content, and we won't see the broader market effects on video games and games getting made, for years down the road. I truly fear what effects subscription based streaming services will have on the video game industry, in terms of the quality and types of games that are getting made. But by then... it will be too late to stop or change course.

Game Pass is something that has shown immense value in just the 2 months I've had it, seems like with it's going to be pretty incredible in Q4. Honestly, there is a lot of junk of Game Pass that just isn't worth your time, but if it can pump out a big boy and some decent smaller games each quarter it easily pays for itself if you're willing to not collect/own your games.

@nameredacted: You already see the start of this with Amazon Luna's channels idea. $5.99 for the base library, want to play Ubisoft games? Add a 15$. Surely that can't work at this time? The value is just not there at this moment.

I'm signed up for Game Pass and PS Now atm and while both services are good for the money, 2 subs is too much of a good thing, 1 would be plenty for me. I'm still buying games I would've bought without the services. What the services are allowing me to do is play a lot of games I wouldn't have bought not because I didn't want to play them but because I always choose certain games over others to buy.

For example, I always gravitated towards action-adventure games over shooters but I always wanted to play thru a lot of the big shooter campaigns from back in the day but wasn't willing to shell out for them. Just recently I beat Gears 3 with GP, Killzone 3 with PS Now, and right now I'm back on GP playing the Bad Company 2 campaign.

So for me, it's not gonna replace a lot of purchases because I'm not looking to play big RPGs thru GP. I'll probably buy much fewer indies or shorter campaigns because I can knock them out if they come to GP but open worlds games, RPGs, stuff that takes like 40-80 hours to beat, I don't want any kind of time pressure on me when playing those types of games so I'll continue to amass a ridiculous collection of unreasonably lengthy games haha.

@nameredacted: I think the big difference between "Old Netflix" and Game Pass is that Microsoft is doing what I thought Netflix was going to do: buy up studios. I'm still surprised it took until 2021 for Amazon to buy MGM; MGM has barely been anything other than an IP holder for the 10-15 years. Netflix could have bought them as the major studios started withholding their own properties and they would have had an instant back catalog plus a few different IP's to spin into new series etc. Business-wise Netflix has turned out fine but I think Microsoft's approach makes more sense for games: take control of known studios and projects (especially ones known in enthusiast circles) and guarantee their old and new releases end up on Game Pass.

I'm glad my interests aren't so narrow that there are only 19 potentially interesting games coming up.

I added like 8 games to note for the future on itch just this week.

I really dislike the idea of paying rent on my video game collection. I feel like the ubiquity of subscription services takes advantage of the foggy way people seem to do the maths behind how much it costs. Sure it's 10 bucks a month but it's also 10 bucks a month forever. You wait until it ends up like video streaming where you pay 5 different people 10 bucks a month and all of a sudden it's not such a good deal.

I've very much enjoyed Gamepass since getting our Series X at launch and I'm right there with you. I have little to no desire to buy anything new, as it might come to Gamepass at some time. If it doesn't, that's ok too because there is so much to play and I haven't had FOMO for gaming in some time now, so I'm very happy playing some 2-3 year old game that I only gave a shot due to it being on Gamepass.

@hayt: All of this, 100%.

Cord Cutters thought they were so smart ditching cable over a decade ago... until Corporate America caught up with technology and now the "cable" / subscription model has become dominant in streaming.

Re: "Paying Rent" - It will be death by a thousand cuts; 5, 10, 15+ dollars per month, per service very quickly adds up to a LOT of money per month, when every publisher has their hand in your pocket. That "good deal" ceases to be a good deal, but when that happens, consumers won't have any choice about how they consume video games. You either pay their blood money or you don't play video games.

If anyone thinks Game Pass or other services are going to remain cheap, well... If you believe that, I've got a bridge in New York I'd like to sell you. Those costs are gonna go up, and be monetized to hell, and be live service, and have ads...

And that's not even taking into account how the regional, "Robber Baron" broadband monopolies in the US are going to continue grossly overcharging people for services, or impose data caps, or other fees.

A lot of these people are making dire warnings about how streaming started off great with Netflix and now it's bad, but....I feel like those are people who never actually paid a cable bill themselves.

Streaming is still WAY better than cable. For one thing you can get it a la carte so you can pick the services you want at any given time and drop others you don't need to keep your bill down. If you just have Netflix and Hulu that's a little over $30 a month and still an absolute ton of content. Honestly that's most of what I watch anyway.

Cable used to be WAY more expensive, and still is. And it was much worse in other ways too. You couldn't always get the channels you wanted in every market, you often had to pay for higher tiers just to get one channel you wanted, and you were stuck paying for tons of stuff you might actively hate and not want to support (Fox News).

Will Game Pass stay as good as it is forever? Almost certainly not. But will it still end up better than the status quo ante? Almost certainly.

Meanwhile it's not like buying games hasn't increased in price too. Has anyone noticed that AAA games are now $70 for a lot of titles? Indies have SKYROCKETED in price recently. A game like Battle Axe that might have come out at $15 10 years ago is now $30. Buying games has gotten more expensive way faster than rental services.

And if you want to keep buying games you still can. There are no significant games that are only available on Game Pass. Even Microsoft first party games come out at least digitally for purchase too, and that won't change any time soon. You can buy a lot of Netflix series on DVD and Blu Ray too.

Game Pass will almost certainly get worse over time and other services will pop up, but it will still be a better situation than we were in pre-Game Pass, just like Netflix vastly improved the situation for TV/movie watching even though it's not as good as it used to be.

People nostalgic for the days when you had to buy a much more expensive cable subscription or DVDs or whatever just don't remember that time period clearly. It sucked!

I would have to double or triple up on multiple redundant streaming services right now and maybe throw in one or two of the gaming services to even match what I was paying monthly when all I had available to me was satellite.

So yeah nah things are pretty good right now on that front, actually.

I watch most movies on Blu-ray (or pirated as they are not available on streaming anyway) as the streaming offering is really bad for older and / or more interesting movies. I buy more movies now than before, the average rental store has a better offering than Netflix so it's not just all nostalgia. Cable sucks though.

My issue is that the vast majority of games I'm looking forward to is not on game pass. The only game I'm interested in the entire list from OP is Metroid Dread. I also don't want this business model in games as I don't think it has worked out great for any other medium. And if it's a game I like I want to own it, so there's no use case.

For some reason people still associate signing up to a subscription service as analogous to paying for cable, i.e. as soon as you sign up you’re locked in forever. As some other people have mentioned one of the main advantages of Netflix/Game Pass etc. is that it’s very easy to turn on and off these services at will. For example: the “Premium” version of Battlefield 2042 is $90 on PC. For $90 I can get about 6 months of EA Play Pro and get the opportunity to play other games besides BF. I also know that there’s about a 95% chance that I won’t still be playing BF regularly 6 months down the road. So as long as I subscribe for 5 months or less I’ll be saving money over buying it outright.

@deckard: It's the weird thing i've seen of late anytime you mention enjoyment of Gamepass or another subscription model in gaming, people will jump out of the woodwork to yell at you about how the value wont be there forever but you'll be locked in!!!

Like...no? I've had subscriptions before...if I don't use them or think the value gets bad, I cancel them. I've never been a person who just lets a subscription keep rolling even if i'm not using a service, or forgets I have one, so that won't happen with Gamepass either.

Idk, it's just bizarre how whenever someone talks about enjoying Gamepass due to value/new experiences/what have you, it seems to draw some interesting characters telling you that you shouldn't enjoy it.

If I wasn't able to cancel and re-subscribe easily, Gamepass would lose much of its value for me. Xbox cloud gaming is great for game discovery. Once I decide there's a game worth playing, I download it on my Series X.

i only pay for gamepass as far as subs go ( ps+ not being the same type of thing course) and its great i still prefer owning things but if you play something when you first see it hit it'll be there till you beat it usually so its a great theoretical cost saving mechanism if theres a bunch you want to play. besides these days with prices on new releases going up i too will be buying less new so that in addition to my backlog is a great way to hold off for price drops even if it can mean missing part of the conversation . i didn't want to wait on the new R&C and screw a $70 tag ( i've since beaten it and i wouldn't wanna pay more than 40 honestly) what did i do? month trail of gamefly i could have set it back already but my fiancée wanted to try it so hopefully he'll beat it before this 2nd month is over

Probably in the minority here but still prefer to buy and own my games versus leasing them on a subscription service. As someone who only plays a handful of games a year it's cheaper for me to buy games on sale versus paying for multiple subscription services. I'll use Battlefield 5 and Jedi Fallen Order for example. Bought BF5 at release for $50, and Jedi 6 months after release for $15. That's $65 and I've played BF5 on and off since release. If I paid $15 a month for EA Play Pro it would have cost me significantly more money over the past 2 years.

I'm tired of subscription services in general and have started to cancel some. Almost every company seems to want $10+ a month for a service.

@deckard: If you're only going to play Battlefield 2042 for a couple of months then you probably don't need to buy the Ultimate Edition. Thing with multiplayer shooters is that most people play them for years, not necessarily exclusively though and sometimes with large gaps in between sessions. For example I don't play Apex Legends as much as I used to, but I still get a few games in every month, and ignoring the fact that it's free to play I just like that I can pop in a game for a short while whenever I want because it's always on my account and I don't need to pay basically $10 every time I want to play my monthly couple of matches.

@apewins: it’s funny that you bring up Apex since that’s literally the only game I’ve been playing since April/May. I don’t mind giving them $10 for a season or two. And like I mentioned earlier - I know myself well enough that I’m not going to be playing BF for years on end. Apex would be my case in point: I’m playing it 1-2 hours per day throughout the summer but I know that once new stuff starts releasing in the fall I’ll be moving on.