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Are people dumb? How else will microsoft fund their AI features for another additional 2 weeks?
Hah oh man I hope this is indicative of a Great Cancelation Event coming to punish all the capitalists, where we take the relatively minor power we have a individuals and combine it to smash the fuck out of them.
The Kimmel Disney thing showed people that we have the power at the end of the day, I hope these XBox games can hang tough and kick Microsoft right in the dick.
(Also maybe give these conglomerates some second thoughts about buying another company...)
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My wife and I have been slowly over the last few years finding ways to cancel our subscriptions and just own things. If I want to play a vintage game, I buy a physical copy and boot up an emulator. We also set up navidrome and started collecting discs to rip. My wife backed up her spotify playlists before cancelling and we're trying to find a way to link them to music tracks that we own and make a list of what we're missing.
Not a terribly challenging task, but I looked around online to see if anyone else was doing it. What I found was dozens of projects going the other way. People saying "I'm looking to ditch my MP3s and move to Spotify."
It's certainly less work, but I wonder how all of these people will feel when they're locked in and their monthly costs for these services increases and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
Being able to do whatever you want with your physical media is so incredibly freeing. Seems like many born after the 90s don't seem to quite have a grasp on what that's like.
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Definitely not alone. For the music I've rediscovered record stores. They're great ways to fill in the gaps of your music library while also discovering new music. I buy CDs and take them home now, happy to keep them on my shelf.
I switched to music streaming (Qobuz) because hi res is too expensive for the amount of music I listen to.
Movies are Garbage quality in streaming though, buying a Blu Ray is so much better and I don't watch many movies anyways.
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I was planning to cancel it a while ago but this actually made me do it.
Why?
- because of life obligations I consider myself lucky if I can play something once per week.
- with the money that I spend on the subscription I can buy a (more) older game(s) and keep myself entertained for half a year.
- having the latest releases is nice, but I can wait one year and buy it on some sale and if not... mneh... Whatever...
- sure you get hundreds of games with Game Pass, but most of them are either noise or not my type of genre.
- fuck Microsoft.
Yeah, I'm in a similar situation. Don't get a lot of game time and I've got a pretty large backlog of stuff I want to play. If I like the look of something I wishlist it and buy it on sale for less than £10.
I think the gamepass model is going to be struggling with economic factors - many of us are working more and have less playtime, and money is tighter.
Right. Microsoft’s website is struggling. The same Microsoft whose core business model is selling server/cloud infrastructure? Yeah, I definitely believe that.
Counterpoint:
Do you remember Xbox Live?
The thing I hate the most about XBox live is it convinced Sony that they should make the PlayStation network paid for as well.
Sure I know someone has to host all the shit, but man it sure would be nice to play games without having to pay for other services after paying for the game.
The number of games you can play offline seemed to plumit after Microsoft/Sony made paid for network access.
So, I actually used to work for MSFT a decade ago.
The uh... Xbox people and the corpo business people were, once upon a time, wildly different kinds of people, literally problematic 90s pc gamer dude bros vs ex IBM stodgy walrus people.
Basically, the walrus people won, made all the big boy business decisions, and things rather rapidly went to shit in terms of the business decisions being just insanely corpo.
Like uh, at the time Xbox Live came out... well there was this whole other paradigm for online video gaming set by Valve, but uh... lets just say you shouldn't talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus.
I didn't really have that important of a role, but lets just say I knew that half of Xbox 360s were coding 3RR or faulty in some way that necessitated a complete replacement (they'd just swap your hardrive into a new model and claim they refurbed it LOL) ... yeah I knew that about a decade before that became wider public knowledge.
But anyway, here we are about 20 years later, Valve is having MSFT's cake, eating it too, and the remaining husks on the gaming side of MSFT absolutely know they are fucking cooked, and are fully in the 'suck all the money outta this shit while we still can' phase, before the entire concept of MSFT gaming basically transitions to more or less a legacy system.
They're rapidly headed toward just being a B2B oriented company, maybe they'll use their hoard of IPs to effectively liscense out game dev, but when 'everything is an Xbox', fucking nothing is and they know that.
Game server uptime isn't as profit able as business server uptime, either pump those numbers up or your branch of MSFT goes the way of the Windows Phone and Zune.
You know they are like, massively downsizing, right?
Yeah, Seattle (and environs) is looking fairly fucked these days with Boeing imploding and all the major tech companies doing mass layoffs, BelRed property values are probably gonna tank lol.
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They most likely, and purposefully, relegate few assets to a cancellation page.
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This post tells me you're not required to use Power Automate for work. It must be nice.
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This is the endgame of all subscriptions. I have not one. Purchase where they will let you purchase without DRM, for the rest: 🏴☠️
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Even if 1/3 of their subscribers cancel they still come out ahead because of lower infrastructure costs. i doubt they are going to see a 1/3 reduction in subscribers, so capitalist exploitation and enshittification will win again.
It's still better for people overall if the parasites take larger sums from fewer willing idiots compared to them taking less each from more people, even if their bottom line is unaffected.
It was always going to end like this. If you're surprised, I hope you learned a valuable lesson.
Yeah. I lay for YouTube Premium. And it has already gone up. If it goes up any further though I may have to cancel. The whole family uses it though so cancelling it will affect more than just me. They aren’t tech savvy enough to avoid ads.
Now if YouTube blocks sharing a family account across houses (in my country) then they will make the decision really simple.
Jesus Fucking Christ, it was $4.99/month a few years ago; what did Microsoft expect? Even at that price it was hardly worth paying for...
I haven't paid a subscription for entertainment for a handful of years now, but now I'm starting to understand why people are canceling streaming services en masse. Disney+ was $6.99/mo back when I had it but I heard it's also $20-something a month now too. People just needed a good excuse to cancel, and now they have one.
Theoretically, now that Microsoft owns half the AAA studios, you could expect Gamepass to have a lot of day 1 AAA games.
Unfortunately, they just bought all the studios and... ordered them to stop making games or something.
I'd cancel if I hadn't done it several years ago. Oh well.
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There's been a glitch on my Xbox where I haven't paid for one pass in 10 years but still have access to all the game. I never intentionally subverted the rules but it somehow happened
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 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.
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This was just the reminder I needed to cancel as I moved over to Linux and they don't support Linux or have an app. Didn't realize that it was going to go up again.
I was thinking about giving it a try for a while, the PC version, anyway. Won't be doing that now.
Literally had the convo with someone to get it Saturday, glad I didn't jump on it
Oh yea, I knew I forgot to cancel something after switching my gaming pc to Linux.
The inevitable, it was always going to rise, it was loss-leader to get market share.
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Just cancelled my subscription and 365 subscription. $360 back in my pocket every year.
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Microsoft on BDS list: 
Microsoft make treat bigger price: 
No more mr nice guy
I was considering canceling anyway since I found myself using it less and less, so this was a good deciding factor.
how about not having to pay for playing online on the console? i know this is about ultimate but i am still pissed that i have to pay everytime i want to play something else online then fortnite
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I used to think Game Pass was a good idea but more and more I rather owning my games.
(yeah, yeah, I know, you're only buying a license)
Unless its from GOG of course, because then you really do own your game
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GOG. It’s not all games, but you can own some of them. Steam, in spite of the CEO that keeps it decent, started this lease under the guise of buying model.
That said, subs are much worse. If the Disney/Kimmel situation taught us anything, it’s that boycotts work.
Subs are costing most Americans, on average, $300/mo. (More Perfect Union covered it.). That’s a monthly grocery bill for 1-2, if you buy right and cook. Subs are part of the “squeeze” that siphons money to the top 1%.
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WHAT? I didn’t fucking know that. Shouldn’t they notify you of shit like that? Me and my wife are both cancelling ours for sure.
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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