You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.

As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few 'smaller', though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, 'satellite' campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.

...

I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I'd say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.

Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?

Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.

MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a 'console maker', and moving toward 'we are an uber publisher'.

...

But anyway... I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass...

The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.

It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don't know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don't sell as well.

...

Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:

If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service...

... eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart... and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren't any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.