Game pass business model needs to fail because if it succeed we'll be buried in post capitalism dystopian reality where we don't own anything.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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“This is what you will play today”
Until "This item is unavailable"
That'll be $110/month!
$110 per months or 10 gameplay hours whichever come first.
"Please drink verification can"?
No worries, enshittification and endless price increases are just a matter of time with any subscriptions service.
I have different reasons I hate MS and Game Pass specifically, but I was never convinced by this argument.
It works on the argument of “We would like to stop offering direct purchase models, and require consumers to play by subscription.” But no one has done that. No one has really come close to doing that.
People argue the price will steadily go up; and that’s one of the reasons I don’t play Game Pass anymore. I knew that I wouldn’t maintain access to the games on there, which is why I bought the ones I wanted to keep playing - not very many.
They have started doing that though. No company is going to stop selling individual games. They are going to continue raising the prices, specially of games in high demand, to price out most people.
Same result for us. But they get the ideologue whales who keep buying individual games to virtue signal, and also get to exploit gamers. It's a win win.
Capitalism needs to die if you want change.
So this is basically an observation about raising prices. But I think there’s a misconception on social media that you have to be reading the news and on your soapbox to alert people to those things.
Pricing has always very readily affected people’s spending behavior. Not just people that follow gaming news, but people browsing GameStop for whatever’s new. We’ve even seen that - stats are showing people spent much less on games this year. Some people are even spending less through the option of going for a subscription rather than buying 8 games through the year. The publisher plan is certainly to tune up that cost with time, but personally, I don’t think that plan has a high chance of success.
And there’s a very worrying reality on the publisher side that gamers have many alternatives, especially as quality falls in these AAA products. You can imagine someone starved for a Soulslike might’ve spent $70 on generic copycat “Folly of the Dodgeroll 7”, if not for seeing Hollow Knight Silksong for $20 one shelf over.
So basically, I never hated the subscription model itself as a “weapon of capitalism”; just the constant attempts to shrinkflate as has been happening to most else.
That's a different topic but ok.
I wouldn't give Microsoft any money if they were selling last molecules of oxygen on Earth, not fucking video games
And Microsoft is compiling lists of all Palestinians on behalf of israel
I really hope the subscription model for games falls flat.
Shit live services, don't give them money for it or say goodbye to owning games.
Some really nice games on that list too!
I mean, a lot of the games on that spreadsheet (I would even guess more than 50%) contain licensed material, music, or other intellectual property that is not owned by Microsoft, ActiBlizz, or any of the subsidiary studios.
If someone was going to actually make a really list, those games should not be on the list that anyone would reasonably expect to come back, probably ever. It would require renegotiation of the licensed content with the license holder, if they are still easy to find, who would absolutely demand more money than originally agreed upon at the original game's release (thereby making the effort immensely expensive), or it would require developers to alter the artistic vision and integrity of some of those games that they can, while others like "Bee Movie: The Game" would require so much reworking it would be better to make it an original game instead.
I mean, imagine if Square Enix decided to remaster Omikron: The Nomad Soul. They would have to either renegotiate the soundtrack license with David Bowie's estate and the record label company that publisher the album, or they would have to destroy the legacy of the game by replacing the music with some other artist that would be guaranteed to be genuinely worse than David Bowie. Honestly, I am surprised but also overjoyed that Square Enix is still selling the game on Steam.
The oligopolies rarely buy out smaller companies and keep to promises, or let those companies do what they did best.
They buy them to control competition.
Not putting these titles on their service isn’t a tactic to control competition, but it is indicative of their lack of giving a shit about what they have hoarded.
Man, I wish they'd make marvel ultimate alliance 1&2 available for download again. I swore I had 2 purchased digitally, I have all the dlc available on my account but not the game
Oh I thought it was gonna be a list of games that they announced and never released yet.
*cries in PS Plus Game Catalog*