That’s the neat part about it not being the only way to access a game, people can choose, if they want to buy other things, they can buy other things, but if they still like certain titles available from MS, they can still get those even outside the service. Or they can just get the subscription if it costs them less for stuff they’d support anyway. If they don’t want to support MS for decisions they’ve made with studios, they can choose to not buy anything too, but I’m not sure how that’s going to help other studios they care about within MS. And let’s not pretend the studio issue is exclusively a problem with MS or game pass, it’s a capitalism symptom across the industry.

As for third party contracts for making things available on game pass, those developers get to choose if the deal is good enough for them or not, they have a stake and more information than outsiders trying to play armchair executives.

Nobody’s calling it a default here, the options aren’t “have only game pass forever” and “game pass doesn’t exist”, there’s plenty of room for nuance in-between. So long as game pass continues to be a value proposition for enough consumers, it’ll be around, if they raise the price too much or lower the quality or offerings so that it isn’t seen as a good deal, people will stop paying. Adding it to the deck would increase the value proposition.

I find it odd that an argument about giving people the power of choice is used to advocate against a choice existing.