this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.

It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.

I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn't as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn't killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the "wait for a sale" people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that's a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yet another example of:

C Suite / Upper Management doesn't listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they're being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.

How many times have we already seen this?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (4 children)

It's the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Honestly who cares. Stop buying AAA slop and support indies.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Only open-sourced, homebrewed, and single-person is what we need!

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago

Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

This has been so obvious from the beginning, and now that it’s too late is when they starting to complain.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

MS is making money from Gamepass

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Have they paid off the 70 billion? If they are making money, why are they firing people and cancelling projects?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

MS may not have invented it (although I'd argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

We call it the Walmart model

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.

I wouldn't be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there's a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that's at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that's revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they've built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.

[–] [email protected] 89 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (5 children)

Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I'm not falling for it twice.

Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don't even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.

I'll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (5 children)

you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch

justwatch is pretty reliable and can save you tens of hours on your search apparently

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Justwatch reliably tells me "this isn't available for streaming in your region". Sonarr tells me it's an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™

Edit: But like, no shade on Justwatch, it works as intended. It's the streaming services who get worldwide licensing rights and then don't bother targeting my little region.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That may be true, but that wasn't the point he tried to make. The problem is that netflix used to have everything at a good monthly price and once they dominated the market, enshittification and price hike started, plus all the other companies wanted in on the action, starting their own service.

Now MS is trying to do the same to the PC gaming market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

It's also worth noting it came out in 2017. In the years leading up to that namely around 2014 everyone was questioning if Sony was going to have to declare bankruptcy. Throwing a large amount of money into a product that can draw users to your console/platforms for a cheap price that your main competitor couldn't afford to do probably sounded like a good strategy at the time, knowing they could drive costs up if they got the user base built.

Sony may have recovered though

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

May as well enjoy it while it lasts. Like Moviepass.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

Can confirm, I never stopped pirating for 20+ years.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we're comparing "the industry with Game Pass" to "games at face value". That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was "the industry with game rentals". Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.

But game rentals were often seen as a "try before you buy" case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don't lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, it used to be quite common for PC gaming magazines to include a demo disk, basically, here's the game and the first level or two, often you could fit a couple game's demo versions on one cd.

GamesPass could easily do something like uh... hey, this game here, you can play for 2 or 5 or 10 hours, and then if you want more, you can buy it with... I dunno, a 1/4 to 1/3 discount if you're subbed to GamesPass, and you've got the playtime.

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