How much do you relate to gamepass paralysis, or emulator syndrome?

@bigsocrates: while i pretty much agree with you they never mentioned rentals let alone them not existing so i'm not sure if it was intentional or not but you came off a little aggressive how i red this :/ but yeah rentals definitely helped back then but i think its fair to say not everyone always had the option to rent too.. when i was young we had a video rental place so i did indeed get to rent some genesis games , but that was a short 2? year timeframe with the time passing the place closed down n i literally didn't rent anything for probably 10 years growing up cause we just did not have that option close by and frankly we didn't have enough money for it anyway, alot of kids got an allowance , me not so much when my mother usually didn't have it to give. that said i could definitely see how good that would have been for alot of ppl years ago.

@styx971: That comment didn't call anyone out, but people were saying that the only way you used to get games back in the day was buying them, and that's just not true. Yes some people didn't have access to rentals, but most people did, just like some people lived in areas with no movie theaters but that doesn't mean that people didn't go to the movies back then.

I never knew anybody who had videogame systems and got new games but didn't get rentals (since new games could be up to $80 but a weeknight rental was often just $1) but I'm sure it happened.

My point is that a lot of the behaviors people are saying are new because of subscriptions aren't actually new. I knew lots of people who played a ton of crappy games via rental and never finished them and just moved on. Just like people who watched half of a movie on VHS and then returned it (hopefully rewinding first) because it was a $2 investment or whatever.

Games are consumed differently now, but so is everything else.

@sometingbanuble: .. If you play games “right”?

@sometingbanuble: I never said my experience was typical, but renting games was hardly reserved for the well off. I had a friend in the small town whose mom worked in a dry goods store and whose dad worked at a lumber yard. They were far from rich but he rented a lot of games because while his parents couldn't send him skiing like mine could they could give him $2 for a Tuesday to Thursday game rental.

You seem to have a very specific and constrained view of what constitutes the "right" way to enjoy a game and while that might work for you I have no idea why you would apply it to others. I have no desire to 100% Jedi Fallen Order because it's boring and repetitive to scour the same environments over and over. If that's your thing then you do you, but other people enjoy games differently and always have.

The idea that fully enjoying Street Fighter II requires messing with the music sampling is very strange to me. There were people who loved that game but only played it in the arcade.

Not everyone has to play or enjoy games the same way.

@bigsocrates: Sounds like a gamepass tagline. Play games differently than ever before. So you recognize the difference?

yeah i admittedly misread that at first , i'd edited it at one point then unedited it again cause i misunderstood my misread at first also ( i haven't been up long so my bad) that said i think thats the issue with generalizing things at times. i still stand by my point tho that nobody else mentioned rentals doing or not doing something similar back then. i think your right in that plenty of ppl rented things back then and had a similar experience however i'm sure that plenty of ppl also just didn't rent too. but that honestly ends up being a different conversation we've seem to have spun off here which was talking about choice paralysis caused by over abundance of options . to tie both together i can flat out say that those few times i did actually rent thing i also did in fact have the same issue of not knowing what to pick when i was there to the point my mother would tell me 'hurry up and just pick one' so i almost always ended up renting sonic 2 or 3 ( i always leaned 3 till i got a copy for a holiday after renting it enough times)

Also yeah that whole idea of “we got one game a month and we made it last” is some lionized bullshit cause I picked out a bunch of stinkers as a dumb child looking at box art in the store and that shit got played 3 days and thrown who knows where afterward.

@sometingbanuble: I have always played games this way. I was never one to play the same game over and over, especially since games have gotten cheaper and more plentiful over the last 15 years. But even back in the day I liked to sample lots of different stuff. I probably finish more games now by percentage of what I play than I did back then.

Claiming that this is a 'new' way to play games is just odd. As soon as publishers were able to track how far people got in their games they saw that most people don't finish them. Almost no games have an over 50% completion rate if they have any substantial length. Look at Spider-Man: Miles Morales. It's short, it's never been on deep sale, it's easy to finish, and about 55% of gamers actually get to the end. And that's high and would have been high 10 years ago, long before Game Pass. The original Uncharted is sitting at about 35%.

The only reason we don't have those stats for games like Super Mario Bros. is that there was no way of tracking them back then.

@styx971: My earlier comment way up in the thread already focused on the main thrust of the conversation. For me, Game Pass just expands my selection at a reasonable price. I have finished a whole bunch of Game Pass games. The Medium. Call of the Sea. Echo Generation. My most played game in the last few years is Monster Train, and that was a Game Pass game (I did eventually buy a copy because I wanted to tip the developers.)

Different people react to having a lot of options differently. Game Pass is not for everyone. My point with my comment was just that the past was more complicated than people were saying and the concept of renting games, or even subscriptions (Sega Channel) is not new.

@bigsocrates: A year after launch 55% is pretty impressive. If playstation had a gamepass of their own the rate would probably be 15%. By math more people would experience the game but more people are summarily dismissing the game because they don't give the game a chance. It's NOT the developers responsibility to dangle carrots to incentivize you to stick around. The Louvre doesn't put the Mona Lisa near the entrance. My kid mind didn't get that. Through ownership there is more investment/commitment. Limitation helped foster a respect for games that gives older gamers their perspective. I don't even know what this thread looks like in a comparable span into the future. I'd say it's a lot less healthy. Maybe there's a limited volume of games that one can consume and they just move on sooner. If it wasn't for the pandemic i think i was going to retire from gaming. The supply constraints has really made me only check out sites for the ability to buy a new console for sheer curiosity about the absurdity of it.

yeah most really bad things i would think got abandoned pretty easily in favor of old favorites that ppl hung onto. that said i think ppl also might have had a larger tolerance of mediocre bad games vs now with more easily accessible alternatives to get games on the cheap. i'm wording that poorly i think but i think the thought comes across? its honestly something i've thought about here and there over the years myself. i know i definitely drop more games these days vs when i was a kid but time also feels totally different when you get older at least i felt like after school i had alot of 'time' for how long a chunk it was vs now when the same amount of it goes by in a blink. honestly i think that plays a big part in all of this really. i think the choosing when you spend your limited time with now is alot harder with passage of time being quicker feeling and possibly with having less free time overall if your a working adult with priorities outside of hobbies. i know because of how time works as a working adult my taste in games has definitely shifted i used to love open world games and long Jrpgs and the few RTS games i'd sinks hours into as a kid , and with those i didn't feel like i was missing as much when i didn't have too many options to pick from. now i oddly lean easily into the give me shorter stuff cause i want to finish things side or weird run-based things that i can feel ok putting down cause a chunk of time is so small to play things in when i'm employed.. currentaly not working since a bit after the pandemic started i've only had time on my hands tho and too many things to play and more than not i spend more time trying to pick what vs actually playing what i pick. hell this past week alone i've started 7? games and only beat a single 3 hour game (unpacking its honestly a great little game and i'm happy it was on gamepass cause i wouldn't have wanted to pay 20 for something that short.. #5 on my goty list atm somehow .. i've played 6 new releases this yr tho ). ...... anyway i've clearly lost the point i was intended to make but ... idk .. i really do wonder how much alot of the factors into age/time

Or hell if you graduated from rentals then maybe you got into trading.

Things are easier now, but yeah we found ways before.

ahh i gotcha , like i said i mostly agree i guess it was just how i was reading things . i definitely see gamepass as a good thing for a number of reasons personally but everyone is different n all i could understand why ppl might not too.

@sometingbanuble: Eh that last bit is very subjective. I’m no more likely to finish something I own than something I’ve gotten on a service. I’m gonna be more annoyed if the thing I spent money on turns into a dud but that’s it.

If I’m being honest if there’s anything unhealthy here it’s this tendency you’re having of just looking down on the ways that people interact with games is evolving past your personal experience.

thats definitely subjective . i personally hate when things i buy turn into duds it makes me rather grumpy , but i'm also more likely to give it a longer chance or try to power through something that i borderline enjoy if i paid for it specially if its outside of a steam refund window. by that same token tho i'm more likely to prioritize playing games i own vs something on gamepass or from ps+ unless its something i was intending to buy and really want to play. despite what my obscene number of steam games i somehow own might lead ppl to believe i really hate buying something n not getting my moneys worth from it. ...but time ..time thats just sometimes more expensive too honestly so definitely subjective.

I have had similar issues in the past, but not really with Game Pass. I’ve definitely started a lot of games from the selection that I haven’t gone back to for various reasons, but I’ve also started and finished six games this year. In general, I’ve just started to not really care about my gigantic backlog.

I've had issues with this before. I just had it yesterday, actually. I signed up for Game Pass again because there's 5 or 6 games I'd like to play. I set them all to install then couldn't decide which to go with so I just ended up playing State of Decay 2 for a bit instead.

I've been doing this bouncing around all my life and tbh gamepass is a blessing to me because now I don't have to pay a ton of money each month to satisfy my erm... Curiosity?

I'm not entirely sure this kind of service is all good for the industry as a whole, but for me personally it's been a massive help in what can only be described as a problem.