Microsoft just raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99/month, and fans aren’t happy. Many are canceling, some are calling for a boycott, and even Microsoft’s website is struggling to keep up.
Right. Microsoft’s website is struggling. The same Microsoft whose core business model is selling server/cloud infrastructure? Yeah, I definitely believe that.
Counterpoint:
Do you remember Xbox Live?
The thing I hate the most about XBox live is it convinced Sony that they should make the PlayStation network paid for as well.
Sure I know someone has to host all the shit, but man it sure would be nice to play games without having to pay for other services after paying for the game.
The number of games you can play offline seemed to plumit after Microsoft/Sony made paid for network access.
So, I actually used to work for MSFT a decade ago.
The uh… Xbox people and the corpo business people were, once upon a time, wildly different kinds of people, literally problematic 90s pc gamer dude bros vs ex IBM stodgy walrus people.
Basically, the walrus people won, made all the big boy business decisions, and things rather rapidly went to shit in terms of the business decisions being just insanely corpo.
Like uh, at the time Xbox Live came out… well there was this whole other paradigm for online video gaming set by Valve, but uh… lets just say you shouldn’t talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus.
I didn’t really have that important of a role, but lets just say I knew that half of Xbox 360s were coding 3RR or faulty in some way that necessitated a complete replacement (they’d just swap your hardrive into a new model and claim they refurbed it LOL) … yeah I knew that about a decade before that became wider public knowledge.
But anyway, here we are about 20 years later, Valve is having MSFT’s cake, eating it too, and the remaining husks on the gaming side of MSFT absolutely know they are fucking cooked, and are fully in the ‘suck all the money outta this shit while we still can’ phase, before the entire concept of MSFT gaming basically transitions to more or less a legacy system.
They’re rapidly headed toward just being a B2B oriented company, maybe they’ll use their hoard of IPs to effectively liscense out game dev, but when ‘everything is an Xbox’, fucking nothing is and they know that.
Game server uptime isn’t as profit able as business server uptime, either pump those numbers up or your branch of MSFT goes the way of the Windows Phone and Zune.
You know they are like, massively downsizing, right?
Yeah, Seattle (and environs) is looking fairly fucked these days with Boeing imploding and all the major tech companies doing mass layoffs, BelRed property values are probably gonna tank lol.
lets just say you shouldn’t talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus
Ugh, that evil G-man with his S-word!
Didnt do Playstation any good, their online service was still just as shit, they just pocketed the money. I think consoles reached their peak anyway, PC is a much more accessible and appealing option now, the market is shifting.
This post tells me you’re not required to use Power Automate for work. It must be nice.
It was always going to end like this. If you’re surprised, I hope you learned a valuable lesson.
Just cancelled my subscription and 365 subscription. $360 back in my pocket every year.
Hah oh man I hope this is indicative of a Great Cancelation Event coming to punish all the capitalists, where we take the relatively minor power we have a individuals and combine it to smash the fuck out of them.
The Kimmel Disney thing showed people that we have the power at the end of the day, I hope these XBox games can hang tough and kick Microsoft right in the dick.
(Also maybe give these conglomerates some second thoughts about buying another company…)
The inevitable, it was always going to rise, it was loss-leader to get market share.
I tried telling so many people that and their answer was always either so what, or no it wont. Well, here we are. If you own a thing the price doesn’t go up
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WHAT? I didn’t fucking know that. Shouldn’t they notify you of shit like that? Me and my wife are both cancelling ours for sure.
Maybe I’m too old, but I never understood the appeal of game passes, you can’t play hundreds of games at the same time unless you have nothing else to do in your life, and most of them are garbage anyway.
Only reasonable subscription model to me is MMOs, because those require a complex infrastructure to run, but non-MMO games? No thank you, I’ll just turn to indies that still sell games without any live-service bullshit.
Here in Brazil (and problably most of the developing world as well), piracy used to be the standard way to get console games. People would buy unblocked consoles from street merchants and then buy pirated media from them, or download the games from pirate sites.
But with the newer xbox xs series, they made it so that piracy is impossible, and people got forced to buy games from microsoft. Since most people around here don’t have much money to spend, game pass became an option to have a selection of games always at disposal for a reasonable price, so it became popular. Sadly, that’s how microsoft expanded their business to the developing countries.
Cloud play allows local couch co-op without a second console/version of the game.
Back in my day we had split screen multiplayer
I mean, yeah I’d entirely prefer that too. But on a halo series play through you hit a wall with halo 5.
When a new game costs 60 bucks, just paying for a game pass and have access to a random library seems appealing. It’s also a nice way to try and discover games I guess. I never used it.
Today I purchased 4 games on Steam sale in one go: Elite Dangerous: Deluxe Edition, DOOM Eternal Standard Edition, Hades and Slay the Spire for 18,34€. I don’t need to repay to play them and “own them forever”*****(big asterisk, i know!).
The part of Game Pass that gets me the wrong way the most is, if I stop paying monthly, then I loose access to all games I played so far too. Yes, that’s the point of a subscription and I dislike it. To be honest, the price of Game Pass was really good in the past. But I usually focus at max a few games in a month anyway, including free to play, so having such a big library to choose from is not that big of a deal.
Some games on steam are actually DRM free and you do ‘own’ them once downloaded. I think slay the spire is one but I could be remembering wrong.
Right, there are lists for: https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games and https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
I can find Slay the Spire in the second list.
Eternal was fun, I only got to it a few months ago. Great deals! Slay the Spire is a favorite
I stopped subscribing when they first went up from $1/month.
For about a year I could cancel my 1€ subscription and renew it every other month 6€ for half a year was worth it. But the app lacks so much no way I’m paying more
That’s basically what I mean. I gamed the system until they closed the loophole. I found ONE game through it I would not have normally known or played. And that was Void Bastards.
Yeah, they used to constantly offer $1/month, I’d take that for a month and try a game I was interested in. I got value there, but I’d never pay more than that and certainly not on a recurring basis.
Never had or wanted gamepass
