It seems MS are killing off their hardware production. I guess we might be stuck with the subscriptions… I do get that you can still buy a whole game yourself instead of streaming, but not all of the catalogue is offered as an own-it cloud stream version.
I don’t see how gamepass is particularly bad, I can still buy games without it (I don’t sub to gamepass) and as long as there’s no exclusivity crap where I literally can’t play the game otherwise…
It’s nice when I want to play a game with a friend and the game happens to be on gp, thus I don’t have to buy the game for them lol.
The confusion of products and services has been awful in general. Publishers demand continuing revenue. A fixed subscription is at least an honest economic exchange, for customers - unlike any form of “microtransactions.”
We should absolutely avoid it. Subscription services are wreaking havoc in many other parts of the media landscape. The deal is good now because they’re subsidizing the hell out of it, but just like what happened with streaming services the deal will get shittier and shittier until we’re stuck with a horrible deal.
Music streaming is still pretty good. There’s competition, the catalogues are extremely similar, and the price is affordable as well.
