Microsoft's £1/$1 Xbox Game Pass offer cut from a month to 14 days
Microsoft's £1/$1 Xbox Game Pass offer cut from a month to 14 days
www.eurogamer.net
Microsoft's £1/$1 Xbox Game Pass offer cut from a month to 14 days
Earlier in the year they removed the trial offer. Now it's returned, but worse than before.
I mean, common issues surrounding subscription-based services and the lack of ownership of digital content aside, the full price of $10 a month (for the base rate, at least, I know they have some "Ultimate" package which combines the Xbox and PC programs) is actually a pretty good value on its own, given the size of the selection.
Even if you only play a few games per month on it, you're still getting pretty good value compared to buying those games individually. For example, once Starfield releases, you could play it for six months on Gamepass before buying it up-front would've been a better deal, and that's if you never play a single other game on the platform.
It's also nice to be able to try out games without having to commit to purchasing them. I've found a number of games through Gamepass that I've enjoyed which I never would have tried otherwise.
However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point... Gamepass doesn't really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.
I think it's inevitable that other publishers are going to try and get in on the action, balkanizing the available content into too many services for consumers to care about, and diminishing the value of each service individually.
I also fully expect that MS will start driving up the base price of Gamepass at some point, once they feel like they have enough market penetration. The reduction of the $1 trial might already be a sign of that, but I'm hoping we'll still have some time before that happens. I might stay around at $15/month, but if it reaches $20 I'm probably out.
When it reaches $15/20 a month it'll already be too late.
It's the exact same model that ruined all the other entertainment industries.
Paying into subscription services now is a good deal for you, but it's gonna ruin everything just like it did everywhere else.
Netflix pricing has always had a lot of pressure on it because the company has no product diversity. All Netflix offers is Netflix, so all of its revenue comes from there. Meanwhile, MS has Office as the world's default productivity suite, and it rakes in billions from corporate Windows licensing and cloud services. As of about a year ago, gaming was actually less than 10% of their annual revenue. So they can support narrow margins on Game Pass pretty much indefinitely. And they are motivated to do so as the heavy underdog to Sony, whose consoles consistently outsell theirs by a ratio of about 2:1.
Yes horrible Microsoft. Giving access to all these games and then stealing that away from the poor helpless consumers, instead charging money for them.
If you were paying $0-$1 for game pass, you were not a game pass customer, and it’s not worth their time to provide you dedicated phone customer support.
This is similar to my experience. A few games came and went that I was interested in but not a single must have and I don’t think I ever did more than install a game and try it for 20min and then lose interest. I would just keep signing up over and over for $1 and sometimes when I’d cancel they would even refund me my $1. It was a bizarre system. I don’t even honestly think I was abusing it either be because I got about a dollars worth out of it every month.