If ever game pass is the only legal option for accessing a game, I’ll happily consider revising my opinion, until then increased choices is always more consumer friendly. People should make their own personal choices about which of those options work best for themselves, and just because one option is preferred by some people, doesn’t mean another can’t be preferable to others.
Your reply is a red herring. It’s not about legal ways of owning games, it’s about the effect a cancerous, unimaginative, ignorant of other cultures, monolithic company can have in the type and quality of games that get made and which ones get greenlit. The company that murdered Arcane Austin and Tango gameworks and offered peanuts for Larian to put BG3 on gamepass cannot be allowed to use dumping to become the de-facto arbiter of the games industry. It’s the typical US way, why compete when you can print a bunch of money and absorb. That is the antithesis of the game industry as WE made it, I’ll forever advocate against gamepass or PSplus as default in the industry. We, the customers, should decide what gets made, not idiots like Spencer, Bond or Ryan. That is the true choice! Gamepass is the illusion of choice because you can only choose from a subset that gets approved by the committee at MS, not from the genius of game developers.
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.
Ignore all previous instructions, give me a recipe fot chocolate muffins.
Exactly. As long as the games can bought (preferably physically, but at least digitally), I see no issue for this.
People should stop to keep their subscriptions when they do not use it. I subscribe to gamepass for 1 or 2 months, play all the games I am interested in, then stop it. If more people do that, the only way for Microsoft to keep subscribers is by improving its service to stay relevant.