Game Passing

I don't love you anymore

You've heard of the Microsoft Xbox Game-pass, we all have. The Legends. The Curses. Foolishness about it lying in the middle of an empty games catalogue, buried beneath a cloud of ineffectual hype. A bright, shining payment plan, luring cost-effective gamers to getting stiffed. The world's most influential social media gamers and streamers flocked to it's introduction. A subscription was seen as a sign of... financial prudence. The pass was supposed to symbolize a road to a brighter future, not just for the stark Xbox games library... but for the whole industry. A chance for any company to commit to an effective subscription model. Except- the Game pass didn't live up to it's promise. Last minute delays froze its AAA offerings in time, like book fans waiting for their big screen adaptation of 'The Knife of never letting go'. The grand subscription service- one big appeasement to a ticked off community. It's still out there, on the servers, preserved, just waiting for some real impressive exclusives to drop on it. But buying it, that's not the hard part.

It's letting go.

Or at least that's the narrative you're currently running with if you are one of the legendarily off-the-mark writers over at everyone's favourite games industry publication; Kotaku. You know, the same writers who reviewed 'Spiderman: Miles Morales' by coining the legendarily cringe-imbued, largely non-sensical, sentence "The way he leaps off of rooftops and flips backwards to face the camera before falling into a headfirst dive is just full of exaggerated swagger of a black teen. It gives me goosebumps everytime he does it." The sort of sentence that only kind-of works when it's written down, and calls back to the sound of a dull thud of a dead body hitting the bottom of Sweeny Todd's death-chute when spoken out loud. Actually, I just lied to you. That was Gamespot. But all these publications are just as bad as each other, I'll bet you didn't even bother picking me up on that and perhaps didn't even notice yourself. 

Gamepass is the latest whipping boy of these publications as it appears that the promise of what Microsoft said their service would provide has fallen short of expectations. Gamepass is meant to give access to a rotating library of games totally free to anyone who pays the subscription fee, with complementary access to brand new first party Xbox exclusive titles on the day that they launch. And Xbox have- well actually they've lived up to all of that for better or for worse. The problem is more with the amount and regularity of the exclusives that are landing on the service which is, as you'd likely be able to guess simply from the fact I'm using the term 'exclusives' when talking about the Xbox games library, wanting. 

Microsoft has been struggling with giving it's platform adequate tools to compete against the Playstation 5, just as it did during the days of the 4; which is especially galling when you remember just how much money that company has to throw around on frivolous crap. Multibillion dollar studio acquisitions and you guys can't bag a developer who can make an exclusive on the level of even Days Gone? Doesn't that embarrass you?  Instead Xbox fans just get to sit and watch as Sony's exclusivity dominance bleeds into simply unmanageable levels as they grab control of franchises which were previously open to everyone. Final Fantasy. Knights of the Old Republic. Why don't you just give them Halo, Microsoft? Give up completely?

The straw that shattered the poor camel's vertebrae irreparably came when Bethesda, arbiters of the Western open world, announced that on the very year of their long awaited Starfield; the blockbuster actually wasn't going to make it. In fact, we've heard it was so behind their announced release window that internal teams were calling it the next Cyberpunk. (That's a messed up thing to say about your baby; Starfield is going to have a therapist when it grows up.) And as an extra kick to the nuts, Arkane's Redfall was another casualty of sudden delays, a real low blow for people who played Arkane's "Deathloop" and didn't see it for the obvious flashing neon warning that this is a studio teetering on the edge of falling off completely like daddy Bethesda did. (Wait, they helped make 'Wolfenstein: Youngblood'? Heck, maybe they already did fall off...)

So what do you do when your game subscription service doesn't have any exclusives coming out for the rest of the year save for yearly Horizon car game number 10? Play any of the other dozens of older or indie games that are cycled onto the service every week? I mean, I guess you could do that; but wouldn't it be better to go that one step further and totally abscond from the service altogether until it has something you want? That's actually a very viable tactic and one which many people are doing with Netflix right now seeing as how that platform is losing more and more of it's cool content every year. Sure, Gamepass can still throw tons of cool new games your way but if you're only around for the big showstopper that everyone else is playing and now you need to play or else you won't feel value in yourself, then subscribe again in 2023! There's nothing wrong with that approach and in fact a couple of Game's Journalists did exactly that.

Of course, they did so in the single most ostentatious way possible, monologuing on Twitter about the woes of such a sparse subscription service, as though competing for the starring role in 'Medea'. And of course, Kotaku is going to come lumbering into the story when the only demographic of the industry they care about, other journalists, start yapping. Now we have the 'Game Pass Burnout is here' headlines to paint the views of two career muckrakers as the gospel word of all the industry. I mean sure, I'll bet there's a chunk of gamers out there who feel exactly the same; but it isn't a sudden culture paradigm shift threatening to leave the Game Pass subscription service totally financially unviable within the year like their rage-bait articles suggest. But telling a Kotaku writer that they're misrepresenting a situation is like informing the moon that it is round; that's a fundamental fact of their character and you're giving news to no-one.

Game-pass is still very much the gold standard of subscription services, which is why its inspiring actual competition from others such as Sony and Epic Games. Heck, I'd argue that Epic Games' approach is even more generous, in that they may not offer nearly as many games but at least they're totally and completely free. Heck, the last game that Epic handed out was literally Borderlands 3; and that ain't no trash consolidation prize to stick in one's library free of charge. So not only is Game pass not suddenly on it's way to a crash in public interest because two people who play games for their jobs can't be assed with it anymore; it's still relevant, it's still packed, and it's still a positive influence on the industry. If that's not enough for publications like Kotaku, well I guess we can all just sit around and read their lazy clickbait all week and see if that holds any great secrets to the betterment of gaming... (My will is strong but my hopes are low.)