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Microsoft's £1/$1 Xbox Game Pass offer cut from a month to 14 days
(www.eurogamer.net)
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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I subscribed for a year or so, other than the horrible client it was good. But there are just too many games to play and not enough time, a good problem to have but still. I also felt like I didn't appreciate the games as much when I got them for "free."
I started getting it for $1 per month by canceling and then resubscribing, now you can't do that and I just don't bother to subscribe at all.
Now with just 14 days for a $1 trial it's an even worse deal. This is why I don't think MS should be allowed to buy up all these game companies. Try contacting MS for support. If you can't get through to someone in less than 10 minutes then they shouldn't be buying any more companies. That should be the test for any company acquiring other companies. If they can't serve the customers they have, how are more customers going to help?
I mean, common issues surrounding subscription-based services and the lack of ownership of digital content aside, the full price of $10 a month (for the base rate, at least, I know they have some "Ultimate" package which combines the Xbox and PC programs) is actually a pretty good value on its own, given the size of the selection.
Even if you only play a few games per month on it, you're still getting pretty good value compared to buying those games individually. For example, once Starfield releases, you could play it for six months on Gamepass before buying it up-front would've been a better deal, and that's if you never play a single other game on the platform.
It's also nice to be able to try out games without having to commit to purchasing them. I've found a number of games through Gamepass that I've enjoyed which I never would have tried otherwise.
However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point... Gamepass doesn't really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.
I think it's inevitable that other publishers are going to try and get in on the action, balkanizing the available content into too many services for consumers to care about, and diminishing the value of each service individually.
I also fully expect that MS will start driving up the base price of Gamepass at some point, once they feel like they have enough market penetration. The reduction of the $1 trial might already be a sign of that, but I'm hoping we'll still have some time before that happens. I might stay around at $15/month, but if it reaches $20 I'm probably out.
Netflix pricing has always had a lot of pressure on it because the company has no product diversity. All Netflix offers is Netflix, so all of its revenue comes from there. Meanwhile, MS has Office as the world's default productivity suite, and it rakes in billions from corporate Windows licensing and cloud services. As of about a year ago, gaming was actually less than 10% of their annual revenue. So they can support narrow margins on Game Pass pretty much indefinitely. And they are motivated to do so as the heavy underdog to Sony, whose consoles consistently outsell theirs by a ratio of about 2:1.