Activision has prevented Game Pass from being seen as “not worth it” by many. It is helping Microsoft retain value.
Because the kinda of people that sub to GamePass aren’t the kinda of people that play CoD every year.
Add a free sub to wow with game pass and I might consider renewing
Not sure if this is a joke or not… WoW was always a subscription game-as-a-service.
Not a joke. Never played it. Didn’t realize there were subscription games outside of iracing.
Game Pass’ revenue grew by 5.7% in the year to June, which is below the internal target of 11%. Following the service’s declining growth rate, it was dropped as a metric contributing to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s pay in 2023.
Rules for thee, not for me.
…and neither have gamepass and other game streaming services helped grow the industry gaming and propel it into the future.
This is an encircling manuever by massive corporations attempting to en-spotify the gaming industry and blow the bottom out of independent game developers being able to do anything of note without paying a toll to microsoft or google or some other corporation trying to induce centralization, collapse and catastrophic loss of revenue for the rest of the industry.
No shade at people who use and love gaming streaming services, the idea isn’t bad, its just the strategic role these services are being used for is to carpet bomb the gaming industry until it is forced to play by whatever terms these massive corporations demand.
For game streaming itself, there’s always going to be the latency issue that will keep a bunch of gamers away from ever using it. I never bothered even looking at the streaming options when I had game pass because of that.
GPU drivers have low latency modes for when the timing of a frame update means your current input will come a frame or two later, and a difference of 10ms in frame delivery time can be enough to call something a stuttery mess.
Now add network latency that is an order of magnitude higher. Streaming video and/or audio is fine because it can buffer enough to absorb typical latency jumps, but games can’t buffer more than the upper bound of input latency, so that brief 1 second network hiccup is a horrible stutter where you can’t even move.
Though at least game pass works more like Netflix in that you can just pick a game available and try it out if you have a sub. I don’t get the appeal of the ones where you not only subscribe to the service but also need to buy the games you play at full price.
