Sooo… Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They’ve got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
Games are a lot more expensive to make now. While the tooling has improved, the cost of labor has risen-sadly not enough to keep pace with the cost of living. The cost of a game to the consumer is also a lot cheaper than it was in even the 90’s. So you have a lead gen strategy in gamepass that forces them to recoup in other areas but they still aren’t able to recoup enough. Because of political monetary policies which gamers don’t really want to think about, currencies are worth less (USD lost 7% this year already-$100 bill is now worth $93) and the game prices haven’t adjusted to compensate. In short, games are hitting a similar wall to movies where in a world with Netflix, everything is going to end up looking like mediocre trash if it has to be basically free.
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but distribution is way cheaper and the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
Except now it’s just spyware
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
How many times have we already seen this?
I canceled it when I canceled every other subscription except real debrid
One of the shit thing is that all the games that I’ve bought in the last 5 years all has come into game pass.
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google.
lol, feel free to let me know when any actual consequences come from that
We haven’t seen antitrust with teeths for a while now.
Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple should have been broken up in a million little pieces a long time ago, but it won’t happen.
The only part of the gamepass that is monopolistic is the friends network it creates.
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I thought that was during Covid.
I’m honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
And as an industry they return less than the sp500 so not only is movie viewing horrible, movie making is a terrible investment .
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…
Yet another example of:
C Suite / Upper Management doesn’t listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they’re being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
The goal is to lose money to capture the market and once it is done, to recoup their loss and bleed the market dry.
Yes, but if they can’t actually pull off the last part… uh… that doesn’t end well.
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
“But if you offer all these old games to play, why would anyone bother buying the new stuff?” - some corpo director
Honestly who cares. Stop buying AAA slop and support indies.
Only open-sourced, homebrewed, and single-person is what we need!
10 people or less.
Captain of Industry is a gem with a 4 person team Risk of Rain was 2, expanded to 3
That’s still at a human scale.
Hedon, Cultic, Zortch I think were all solo devs.
is there anyone making any money from video games at this point?
Mobile gacha shit
- Publishers. They always get their buck.
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
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Game engines. Nobody is going to even try to reinvent that wheel. Unreal and Unity make a fuckton of cash whether a game does or not. Yeah I hear you, but but but they have income limits, studios release one good ish title, they’re expected to pay like it’ll always happen.
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Stores. At least until recently there was not even a slight challenge against the stores control. Now with Apple versus Epic, everybody’s dying to funnel people into their own payment system, But honestly, stores are still making all the money, there’s still the primary method of advertising that works and they still hold all the cards for making sure you show up in their “searches”.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven’t already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it’s more than two guys in a garage, they’ve already all sold their sole adventure capital)
On 2) Godot has entered the chat.
Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.
Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
MS is making money from Gamepass
Have they paid off the 70 billion? If they are making money, why are they firing people and cancelling projects?
Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.
MS may not have invented it (although I’d argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
We call it the Walmart model
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I’m not falling for it twice.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don’t even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.
I’ll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.
you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch
justwatch is pretty reliable and can save you tens of hours on your search apparently
So does sailing the high seas
Sadly justwatch doesn’t work for me. It gives the choice between a part of the country that doesn’t offer services where I live, or another country - which doesn’t offer services where I live.
Justwatch reliably tells me “this isn’t available for streaming in your region”. Sonarr tells me it’s an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™
Edit: But like, no shade on Justwatch, it works as intended. It’s the streaming services who get worldwide licensing rights and then don’t bother targeting my little region.
That may be true, but that wasn’t the point he tried to make. The problem is that netflix used to have everything at a good monthly price and once they dominated the market, enshittification and price hike started, plus all the other companies wanted in on the action, starting their own service.
Now MS is trying to do the same to the PC gaming market.
Not to defend Netflix, but it did seem to me like the degradation and price hikes were a result of the other companies cutting in. I have no particular love for Netflix, but I didn’t perceive it to be like that until after external threat. Maybe I’m wrong.
It’s also worth noting it came out in 2017. In the years leading up to that namely around 2014 everyone was questioning if Sony was going to have to declare bankruptcy. Throwing a large amount of money into a product that can draw users to your console/platforms for a cheap price that your main competitor couldn’t afford to do probably sounded like a good strategy at the time, knowing they could drive costs up if they got the user base built.
Sony may have recovered though
I love JustWatch. Gets you the exact info you’re looking for pronto.
May as well enjoy it while it lasts. Like Moviepass.
Can confirm, I never stopped pirating for 20+ years.
Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don’t care.
Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it’s so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won’t or can’t think ahead
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though? I’ve been a Game Pass subscriber for something like 8 years and it’s still crushing it as far as services go - probably moreso now than any year prior.
Will it last / remain a good deal forever? Nope. But nothing does/is. Might as well enjoy the great variety of games I’d never purchase (like Blue Prince, Arcade Paradise, Shipbreaker, South of Midnight, Expedition 33, etc.) along with the convenience of access to games I totally would pay for (like THPS 1+2, Gears, Diablo, etc.). Plus the built-in rewards subsidize like 1/4 of the cost.
When (not “if”, when) they jack up the price to a point that’s not worth the games or I don’t have enough time to play to justify the spend, I’ll just cancel.
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though?
Gamepass attacks the developers, not the consumers.
If you had been buying games you’d have a library 🤷
i get the feeling gamepass gives you access to the library of games that my library has. fantastic if your library doesn’t have video games or you have difficulty getting out of the house, but i love my local library
Absolutely. Every indicator available suggests Enshittification will hit the subscription models within the next few years.
I thought subscriptions were enshittification, you mean it gets even worse?
Enshittification is the process of squeezing money out of both sides of the transaction after you have built a sufficient customer and supplier base with initially attractive offerings that were possibly made at a loss.
First the service is great for consumers (and likely bleeding money). People flock to it.
Then they use that consumer base to lure more suppliers to the platform. Phase two. The service is great for suppliers because it means easy access to a big customer base.
When both a lot of customers and a lot of suppliers are using the platform they start making changes that redirect revenue from both sides to the platform itself. Prices increase, fees for suppliers increase or their cut decreases, maybe they have to sign that they won’t sell under a certain price elsewhere, customers can’t use all things on the platform anymore without paying extra, they introduce ads, maybe exclusives, that stuff. Customers won’t leave because they are used to the platform, there are network effects (all my friends use it), sunk cost fallacies (I have paid them x dollars over the years and if I leave I keep nothing for it) in the case of gamepass they have maybe stopped buying games elsewhere and wouldn’t have a library at all if they lost access. Suppliers won’t leave because the customer base is huge and they have no other simple way to reach those customers. Both are the literal frog in slowly boiling water. “What’s a few more bucks a month, what’s a little additional ad before my game loads, what’s a few more % to MS when the alternative is losing all those customers”. That’s the enshittification part.
Riding the subsidized waves until the point of enshittification and then dumping it faster than a hot turd is what makes the shareholder cry
Microsoft is literally killing off game studios and dev jobs to fund AI. There’s absolutely no way that customers don’t get fucked when the end goal of game pass is met. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Plus, since SKG is a trending topic, you think they’ll think twice about killing games exclusively under GP or just dropping them? You’re not even paying for the games, just access. I got it a couple times when it was $1. After it went up I realised “oh cool so my entire library would be hostage for future price hikes”. Fuck that.
What is SKG?
Stop Killing Games, in short it’s a campaign that’s pushing petitions to force developers to keep games playable when currently if a developer is done with it they will just shut servers and there can be o way to play the games any more, or provide code for someone else to be able to set up a way for them to still be played.
Thanks. I wasn’t familiar with the abbreviation and of course Google offered no insights.
Stop Killing Games
Gamepass is going to continue betting worse until we end up with the mess that are streaming services right now.
I sincerely hope it fails.
Exactly. Right now developers get good deals when adding their games to game pass and the game pass is pretty cheap, but after game passes become “the thing” and developers have to be in a game pass, it will get worse for developers and consumers.
It has plateaued some time ago now. That’s not failure, but it’s not about to become Netflix either.
This has been so obvious from the beginning, and now that it’s too late is when they starting to complain.
