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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Still irritates me that modern games don’t have this. Surely it’s not that hard to implement in modern games.
And in the case of the master chief collection? They literally just… Turned it off. The code is there, it could work, but they say no.
If you buy it on Xbox, you can do splitscreen. If you buy it on PC? You cannot.
However, if you use alpharing, you can patch the game with literal kilobytes of code, and force activate splitscreen. It’s a little janky, but proves the code is in there, it’s just turned off.
Disgusting.
Yeah this pisses me off as well. And TVs now are much bigger and wider, too. Back in the day we’d split screen on whatever we had, which was more often than not an almost-square CRT with not much screen space to begin with!
I hate it, but it’s easy to justify from a dev perspective. If it’s switched off it doesn’t need to be tested.
Edit: on difficulty to implement - I’m guessing it’s down to the increased load from having to render twice on a single device, bigger higher res screens only make this more difficult. Likely needs to be optimised differently etc. I hate it too, I love couch co-op.
I mean, yeah I’d entirely prefer that too. But on a halo series play through you hit a wall with halo 5.
Back when it was under the price of 2 games a year it was a pretty good deal. Thinking of buying the next Halo and Forza? Get gamepass and save money, and have the opportunity to try a bunch of other stuff you wouldn’t have played.
There’s amazing games like Hades and Slay the Spire that I wouldn’t have been interested enough in to purchase that are now among my favorites because Gamepass let me try them.
Honestly, I think the better route would be to keep it cheap but not include new releases. Let people access the back catalog affordably with games that aren’t brining in much new revenue anyway. People will discover games and genres they otherwise would not have played, which will create new markets and boost ssales of new releases.
They make sense if you play through enough titles. If you have a pass and only ever play one game, that’s probably a bad idea.
It can probably make sense if you play a lot. You can try out a lot of different games without buyers remorse. I know steam has a good return policy but sometimes you just miss the return window.
Personally, I just wait a few years and buy everything in the steam sale for under 30% of original price.
Steam does demo fests with tons of new games to try completely free, that’s my goto when I want to try something new, true that not all games offer a demo but that’s devs loss imo, if they believe in their games they shouldn’t be afraid of releasing a demo.
I too usually wait for discounts (got Mass Effect legendary edition at 10$ xD), especially on GOG, only exception are games like BG3 or Expedition 33, for those I’m happy to pay full price the moment they release.