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This is a glimpse at our future under Techno-Feudalism, by the way. Five companies own all the entertainment and charge you extortionate rates to rent it. Please enjoy these last few years of Steam allowing indie games to be published with $20.00 or lower prices - once Gabe Newell goes away, inide devs are going to get "Spotified" out of existence by whatever venture capitalist buys up Steam.
While I don't support the merger obviously I don't think this particular price hike has anything to do with the acquisition. Game Pass was in my view operating at a loss to corner a market (the Uber method) and the pricing structure was inherently unsustainable because of that. This hike was gonna happen one way or another regardless of the merger. Microsoft is a such a preposterous company that they have tried everything to make money from gaming except making good games. It wasn't ever gonna pay off.
This is also more directly a result of Microsoft squeezing every department for more cash to keep the AI bubble inflated. There's no doubt that the overarching success model for GamePass was based on the potential for market monopolisation, but it's the demand for every more cash to go all in on AI that has called time early on that plan.
AI crazy preponed this particular price increase but it was inevitable one way or another. Their Xbox Series consoles turned out to be massive flops. On PC people still prefer using Steam over any other platform. They were just stacking Ls.
Fuck Microsoft.
About this but also in general.
Game Pass was reportedly "profitable even when factoring in lost sales for first-party studios" as of 3 months ago. I agree with your overall point regarding the merger though
I am having difficulty believing that. Without accounting tricks I don't see that happening. The guy cites anonymous sources from Microsoft so I can't take that at face value. Later down in the replies he says this:
I don't know enough to tease out the implications of this but for me it's a sign that they are being disingenuous with their accounting.
Jez Corden, who's considered generally reliable in the gaming leaks and rumors community, is pretty confident that game pass is profitable.
And I think separating dev costs from game pass P&L is the more reasonable way to look at it, as Corden explains:
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