7 ms·

Microsoft Launching $10/month Xbox Game Pass

87 points by executive 10y ago

minimaxir 10y ago
A move following on the success of EA Access: https://www.ea.com/eaaccess/ https://www.ea.com/eaaccess/ The Playstation 4 has PS Now (https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow/ https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow/), sorta. This press release throws a bit of shade: > One of the best things about Xbox Game Pass is that you can discover and download the full titles directly on your Xbox One. That means continuous, full-fidelity gameplay without having to worry about streaming, bandwidth or connectivity issues.
- intopieces 10y ago
  Do you know anyone who uses PS now? I have been curious about the service for a while, it doesn't seem worth it to me because the games don't interest me but I wonder if it has many happy customers
  - actsasbuffoon 10y ago
    I use it and like it. It works well. I've had occasional network hiccups that caused brief slowdowns, but they're rare. I've never had a hiccup bad enough to kick me out of a game.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Is the psnow streaming so bad? I would think it a benefit to instantly get into the action instead of waiting for a 50gb game to download and update itself and also worry about storage.
  - grigjd3 10y ago
    Doesn't work well at high traffic times in some neighborhoods.
- Splines 10y ago
  Nvidia is also rolling out GeForce NOW: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now People have also rolled their own solution: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    Bit of a difference here. TFA and Parent are discussing unilmited video game streaming packages, as a gaming parallel to Netflix or Prime Video. You're linking to articles about cloud gaming hardware services, which could be used in tandem with the above streaming services, or could be used to play games you already own. There is the possibility to create lock-in by tying the two services together, but hopefully market forces will prevent this.
    - sherincall 10y ago
      Additionally confusing since NVIDIA offers two different products with the "Geforce NOW" brand. The "Netflix for games" version is here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/ Some explanations at the FAQ: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now/faq http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now/faq
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  No, PS Now is a streaming service that allows you to play PS3 and PS4 games. What you really meant to say was PS Plus. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-plus/ https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-plus/
  - chc 10y ago
    No, the equivalent of PS Plus is Xbox Live Gold. This is not exactly the same thing as PS Now (you download the games rather than stream them), but it's intended to be another entry in the same general category that PS Now and EA Access operate in, where you pay a fee for access to a catalog of games.
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      The reason why I associated it with PlayStation Plus is because as part of the subscription, members are given six games every month for free as long as they remain members. After a while you amass quite a large library of free games. Jan 2017 Games: Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PS4, PS Vita) This War of Mine: The Little Ones (PS4) The Swindle (PS4, PS3, PS Vita) Titan Souls (PS4, PS Vita) Azkend 2 (PS4, PS Vita) Blazerush (PS3) Feb 2017 Games: LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS4) Not a Hero (PS4) Starwhal (PS4, PS3) Ninja Senki DX (PS4, PS Vita) TorqueL (PS4, PS Vita) Anna - Extended Edition (PS3)
      - chc 10y ago
        Xbox Live Gold does the same thing — for example, I just got Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime and The Force Unleashed for free on Xbox One. This program sounds more like PS Now, where you pay a subscription fee for access to a large catalog of games rather than offering a rotating selection of games you can get for free if you hit the "Get" button during the right time of the month.
muse900 10y ago
Smart idea, don't know how it will affect the quality of games moving forward as it seems that titles that would sell for lets say $40 a piece will now be included in a bundle and probably get a fee out of that $10 a month. On the other hand yes subscription/rent is the way to move forward. You lease a car, you subscribe to netflix, prime, hbo, now you subscribe to gaming libraries etc at some point will happen with food if its not there yet.
- evanextreme 10y ago
  I doubt it will, as this seems to be more of a "vault" system, similar to the already existing EA Access. How that works, is that they will release the game full price just as always, and after sales slow down they will add it to the vault. This seems to be more of a classic Netflix scenario rather than a modern one, where this is a way to make money after sales slow down.
- Retric 10y ago
  The most reasonable solution is for games to get a cut per hour someone played them. This would tend to push replay-ability on the upside, grinding on the down side. However, expect Halo 27 to be sold for full price then DLC and only after that get added to the game pass.
  - Namrog84 10y ago
    [removed my comment]
    - Retric 10y ago
      I think this is somewhat balanced by the full price on new games. Getting instant access to a large catalog of old games is mostly about replaying them. In other words, people will not be download that gem to replay it because they already got their three hours from it. Honestly though I can't think of a game that world be worth 60$ for 3 hours, but I can think of lot's of games that cost 60$ but did not hold my interest for 3 hours.
rdudek 10y ago
It seems a bit pricey. If they would throw the Xbox Gold sub with this, it might be worth it. EA Access has a great library and you can find an annual key for that for less than $30. Though this is definitely better than PS Now since you actually download the full game rather than streaming it.
- charlieegan3 10y ago
  > If they would throw the Xbox Gold sub with this, it might be worth it. I think this would be an great deal for $10 a month.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  It looks like this doesn't require Gold to run. If not, it doesn't seem too bad to me. But if I need to shell out $10 for this plus $10 for Gold, then that's probably too rich for me.
- tschlossmacher 10y ago
  I support this. Gold sub, should come with a game pass. Chances are the best multiplayer games won't be on the game pass anyways and you'll have to pay that standard $60 regardless
OmarIsmail 10y ago
Key thing for people like me will be the difference between this library and the Games with Gold library. If you're new to Xbox though then this is an incredible value. Imagine a kid getting an Xbone for X-Mas and the parents spending another $120 and the kid gets effectively unlimited games for a year.
Splendor 10y ago
Do we have any information about how game developers are compensated for including their games in this new subscription option?
bruno207 10y ago
I wonder if we are going to get to the point where people no longer "own" any traditional media, such as movies, music and games, and rather pay monthly subscriptions to have access to a giant library of all these things. It's certainly in both the consumer's interest (massive library of content) and the company's (revenue generated for dated content). I worry about the implications of this, ie. exclusive content released only on certain platforms or just the lack of control over the media you're paying for (titles removed, modified, etc.) Interesting to think about.
- mikeyouse 10y ago
  This feels more broad than digital media.. Car sharing of expensive autonomous cars means nobody will own a vehicle, the 'capital class' has purchased most of the housing as investment so far fewer people will own homes, all of the fiber and most of the WISPs use expensive proprietary equipment so to access the internet you need to rent their devices, etc. etc. is there any area where ownership is actually increasing?
  - pm90 10y ago
    This might be a kind of a tangent but the reduction of brokerage fees and index funds has actually increased "ownership" (as in investment in) almost all sectors of the economy. Perhaps this analogy is incorrect; would love to hear the refutations :).
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I guess the other way of looking at this is that people are freed from owning non-investments. Where previously you had to own if you wanted to use, now there's an alternative. But (and big but) that does rental-trap those who can only afford to rent, with no surplus income to invest. And makes monopolies even more dangerous (PS: #&@+ Comcast).
- Avenger42 10y ago
  I actually thought about this in the context of magazine subscriptions last year. I wondered whether anyone would open things up so you could subscribe in either of two ways: 1) The "digital" way - you've got access to every issue of the magazine, from the very beginning of their publication - but only for the duration of your subscription. If you quit, you're locked out. 2) The "print" way - you've got access only to those issues that were published during your subscription. If you cut off your subscription, you don't get any new issues but you can still log in with your account and see those issues that you were "subscribed" to. (Granted, it adds complexity to people who are likely just thinking "I just want to read this month's [X] magazine, why are you making it so hard?".) It sounds like Microsoft is doing a decent best-of-both-worlds option here - if you play it and like it, you get a discount to purchase it.
Eridrus 10y ago
I wonder if this will kill the second hand games market the same way Netflix murdered Blockbuster. I don't really know how quickly you can buy a second hand game for a reasonable discount, but if games people currently buy second hand appear in a subscription instead I think that means GameStop is dead since that's their main driver of profit AFAIK.
jasonkostempski 10y ago
"Over 100" sounds like an incredibly small number. I'm guessing most people could just buy the ones they like used for less than a few months of the subscription. Although, the concept of "used" is a bit insane when the disc is little more than a key to get to the current version of the game that just gets downloaded.
- freehunter 10y ago
  >the disc is little more than a key to get to the current version of the game that just gets downloaded. Hoo boy this burned me bad when I bought Half Life 2. It was 2004 and I had a dial-up connection, so I bought the DVD from the store instead of purchasing it from Steam. No way I could download that big of a game in any reasonable time. Well, it turns out the DVD I bought from the store was just an installer for Steam and a CD key, the game didn't actually come on the disc. So Christmas day, I'm attempting to download 5GB on 56k along with everyone else who just got the game that day.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    What I remember about the original release of the game was that the DVD had the game, but it was encrypted. You could pre-load it onto your machine, and when it released, they'd provide the key over Steam, and the game would decrypt. Or maybe I'm confusing that with a pre-release encrypted file that you could download ahead of time, to save the download later. I'll have to look at my disks when I get home; I was pretty sure that they had the full data for the game on them.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  MS tried to embrace that fact and let CDs just be one time use keys for games and got torn to shreds for it. I lament the decision because it means you need to manually switch out disks to play different games even though all the game data is on the hard drive.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
makecheck 10y ago
I hope subscriptions kill “paid DLC”. Enough of this trend of shipping crippled-by-default games that require you to pay extra in order to have what should frankly be called “the finished game”. Once you’re paying a monthly fee, the games had better be complete, offering all available content as the games were meant to be played. Otherwise, it would be just another scam to seem “cheap” until you add up all the extra charges to download more.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  Define "complete". The vast majority of day-1 and post-release DLC is content that was created by the development team after the gold master (the thing burned to retail discs) was complete, so that the studio doesn't have to lay them off. There is the question of how this interacts with digital-only releases, but you don't see it as much there. Also: Why is it your business to say whether somebody can sell expansion content for a game or not? Are premium services somehow immoral?
  - makecheck 10y ago
    The problem is that what passes for a finished game these days has diminished compared to years ago, for the same base price. It is easy to see for instance that an older RPG easily had 100-150 hours or more of play, while modern ones top out at 40-50 “unless” you pay more for extra “chapters” (read: stuff that should have been there when you bought the game). They release HALF a game for the same $60-$80 or whatever they would have charged years ago, except now they know full well that they will demand another $5-$20 or more to obtain the rest of the game. It is a racket that rewards crippleware over quality.
    - kevingadd 10y ago
      I can empathize with your displeasure here but this argument represents a complete misunderstanding of games and how they're constructed. '100-150 hours or more of play' is completely meaningless. A game can be 150 hours because it's completely padded out with awful grind (i.e. WoW's widely reviled kill 10 rats formula, widely disliked formulaic Ubisoft Open World Games with repetitive side-quests), or a 5-hour experience with adjustable difficulty, optional objectives and high replayability (multiplayer!) You simply can't judge the value of a game based on play time, no more than you can judge the quality of a piece of software by the length of its features list or the quality of a film by its running time. I would make arguments that the quality of the experience you get out of retail games is much higher than a decade ago, due to increased budgets, better technology and general design refinement: * Almost universally better tutorials * More widespread access to options like control remapping and sensitivity adjustments * Access to patches that fix obscure bugs and performance issues found after launch * More consistent UI and narrative feedback telling you where to go in a game (so you don't get lost if you take a break) * More consistent availability of adjustable difficulty levels and 'gimme' help in response to multiple retries * More games that offer alternative paths and solutions * Cloud saves * Automated checkpointing You can view some of these things as steps back from what you liked in (picking random examples here) Final Fantasy 7 or even Final Fantasy 12, but for the vast majority of game players (now a HUGE audience compared to a decade ago) these changes make games more accessible and are generally steps forward, despite some weak points. I'm the sort of person who happily dumps 100+ hours into a JRPG, but I still find that things have generally moved forward. Most of the high-profile 'short' games I purchase are stellar experiences, some of them are genuinely on par with movies. Others are cheap enough that the short duration is not a weakness - I didn't spend much on Life is Strange or Firewatch but they were very memorable and delivered exactly what I paid for. If you want a big sprawling RPG those are still out there, and they're great - Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy 15 and Xenoblade X are 3 recent titles that I thought stacked up well here for a lower cost (considering inflation) than you would have paid in the past (especially if you use Amazon prime to buy games below retail!)
chrisper 10y ago
I was upset when I found out that changing my nickname costs $10. I don't even own an XBox and this was the game community thing on Windows. I think it's called XBox App or so. They should have just limited the amount you can change your username in a given time. But I guess free money this way.

87 points by executive 10y ago

A move following on the success of EA Access: https://www.ea.com/eaaccess/ https://www.ea.com/eaaccess/ The Playstation 4 has PS Now (https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow/ https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow/), sorta. This press release throws a bit of shade: > One of the best things about Xbox Game Pass is that you can discover and download the full titles directly on your Xbox One. That means continuous, full-fidelity gameplay without having to worry about streaming, bandwidth or connectivity issues.

intopieces 10y ago
Do you know anyone who uses PS now? I have been curious about the service for a while, it doesn't seem worth it to me because the games don't interest me but I wonder if it has many happy customers
- actsasbuffoon 10y ago
  I use it and like it. It works well. I've had occasional network hiccups that caused brief slowdowns, but they're rare. I've never had a hiccup bad enough to kick me out of a game.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Is the psnow streaming so bad? I would think it a benefit to instantly get into the action instead of waiting for a 50gb game to download and update itself and also worry about storage.
- grigjd3 10y ago
  Doesn't work well at high traffic times in some neighborhoods.
Splines 10y ago
Nvidia is also rolling out GeForce NOW: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now People have also rolled their own solution: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Bit of a difference here. TFA and Parent are discussing unilmited video game streaming packages, as a gaming parallel to Netflix or Prime Video. You're linking to articles about cloud gaming hardware services, which could be used in tandem with the above streaming services, or could be used to play games you already own. There is the possibility to create lock-in by tying the two services together, but hopefully market forces will prevent this.
  - sherincall 10y ago
    Additionally confusing since NVIDIA offers two different products with the "Geforce NOW" brand. The "Netflix for games" version is here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/ Some explanations at the FAQ: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now/faq http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now/faq
bitmapbrother 10y ago
No, PS Now is a streaming service that allows you to play PS3 and PS4 games. What you really meant to say was PS Plus. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-plus/ https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-plus/
- chc 10y ago
  No, the equivalent of PS Plus is Xbox Live Gold. This is not exactly the same thing as PS Now (you download the games rather than stream them), but it's intended to be another entry in the same general category that PS Now and EA Access operate in, where you pay a fee for access to a catalog of games.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    The reason why I associated it with PlayStation Plus is because as part of the subscription, members are given six games every month for free as long as they remain members. After a while you amass quite a large library of free games. Jan 2017 Games: Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PS4, PS Vita) This War of Mine: The Little Ones (PS4) The Swindle (PS4, PS3, PS Vita) Titan Souls (PS4, PS Vita) Azkend 2 (PS4, PS Vita) Blazerush (PS3) Feb 2017 Games: LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS4) Not a Hero (PS4) Starwhal (PS4, PS3) Ninja Senki DX (PS4, PS Vita) TorqueL (PS4, PS Vita) Anna - Extended Edition (PS3)
    - chc 10y ago
      Xbox Live Gold does the same thing — for example, I just got Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime and The Force Unleashed for free on Xbox One. This program sounds more like PS Now, where you pay a subscription fee for access to a large catalog of games rather than offering a rotating selection of games you can get for free if you hit the "Get" button during the right time of the month.

muse900 10y ago

Smart idea, don't know how it will affect the quality of games moving forward as it seems that titles that would sell for lets say $40 a piece will now be included in a bundle and probably get a fee out of that $10 a month. On the other hand yes subscription/rent is the way to move forward. You lease a car, you subscribe to netflix, prime, hbo, now you subscribe to gaming libraries etc at some point will happen with food if its not there yet.

evanextreme 10y ago
I doubt it will, as this seems to be more of a "vault" system, similar to the already existing EA Access. How that works, is that they will release the game full price just as always, and after sales slow down they will add it to the vault. This seems to be more of a classic Netflix scenario rather than a modern one, where this is a way to make money after sales slow down.
Retric 10y ago
The most reasonable solution is for games to get a cut per hour someone played them. This would tend to push replay-ability on the upside, grinding on the down side. However, expect Halo 27 to be sold for full price then DLC and only after that get added to the game pass.
- Namrog84 10y ago
  [removed my comment]
  - Retric 10y ago
    I think this is somewhat balanced by the full price on new games. Getting instant access to a large catalog of old games is mostly about replaying them. In other words, people will not be download that gem to replay it because they already got their three hours from it. Honestly though I can't think of a game that world be worth 60$ for 3 hours, but I can think of lot's of games that cost 60$ but did not hold my interest for 3 hours.

rdudek 10y ago

It seems a bit pricey. If they would throw the Xbox Gold sub with this, it might be worth it. EA Access has a great library and you can find an annual key for that for less than $30. Though this is definitely better than PS Now since you actually download the full game rather than streaming it.

charlieegan3 10y ago
> If they would throw the Xbox Gold sub with this, it might be worth it. I think this would be an great deal for $10 a month.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
It looks like this doesn't require Gold to run. If not, it doesn't seem too bad to me. But if I need to shell out $10 for this plus $10 for Gold, then that's probably too rich for me.
tschlossmacher 10y ago
I support this. Gold sub, should come with a game pass. Chances are the best multiplayer games won't be on the game pass anyways and you'll have to pay that standard $60 regardless

OmarIsmail 10y ago

Key thing for people like me will be the difference between this library and the Games with Gold library. If you're new to Xbox though then this is an incredible value. Imagine a kid getting an Xbone for X-Mas and the parents spending another $120 and the kid gets effectively unlimited games for a year.

Splendor 10y ago

Do we have any information about how game developers are compensated for including their games in this new subscription option?

bruno207 10y ago

I wonder if we are going to get to the point where people no longer "own" any traditional media, such as movies, music and games, and rather pay monthly subscriptions to have access to a giant library of all these things. It's certainly in both the consumer's interest (massive library of content) and the company's (revenue generated for dated content). I worry about the implications of this, ie. exclusive content released only on certain platforms or just the lack of control over the media you're paying for (titles removed, modified, etc.) Interesting to think about.

mikeyouse 10y ago
This feels more broad than digital media.. Car sharing of expensive autonomous cars means nobody will own a vehicle, the 'capital class' has purchased most of the housing as investment so far fewer people will own homes, all of the fiber and most of the WISPs use expensive proprietary equipment so to access the internet you need to rent their devices, etc. etc. is there any area where ownership is actually increasing?
- pm90 10y ago
  This might be a kind of a tangent but the reduction of brokerage fees and index funds has actually increased "ownership" (as in investment in) almost all sectors of the economy. Perhaps this analogy is incorrect; would love to hear the refutations :).
- ethbro 10y ago
  I guess the other way of looking at this is that people are freed from owning non-investments. Where previously you had to own if you wanted to use, now there's an alternative. But (and big but) that does rental-trap those who can only afford to rent, with no surplus income to invest. And makes monopolies even more dangerous (PS: #&@+ Comcast).
Avenger42 10y ago
I actually thought about this in the context of magazine subscriptions last year. I wondered whether anyone would open things up so you could subscribe in either of two ways: 1) The "digital" way - you've got access to every issue of the magazine, from the very beginning of their publication - but only for the duration of your subscription. If you quit, you're locked out. 2) The "print" way - you've got access only to those issues that were published during your subscription. If you cut off your subscription, you don't get any new issues but you can still log in with your account and see those issues that you were "subscribed" to. (Granted, it adds complexity to people who are likely just thinking "I just want to read this month's [X] magazine, why are you making it so hard?".) It sounds like Microsoft is doing a decent best-of-both-worlds option here - if you play it and like it, you get a discount to purchase it.

Eridrus 10y ago

I wonder if this will kill the second hand games market the same way Netflix murdered Blockbuster. I don't really know how quickly you can buy a second hand game for a reasonable discount, but if games people currently buy second hand appear in a subscription instead I think that means GameStop is dead since that's their main driver of profit AFAIK.

jasonkostempski 10y ago

"Over 100" sounds like an incredibly small number. I'm guessing most people could just buy the ones they like used for less than a few months of the subscription. Although, the concept of "used" is a bit insane when the disc is little more than a key to get to the current version of the game that just gets downloaded.

freehunter 10y ago
>the disc is little more than a key to get to the current version of the game that just gets downloaded. Hoo boy this burned me bad when I bought Half Life 2. It was 2004 and I had a dial-up connection, so I bought the DVD from the store instead of purchasing it from Steam. No way I could download that big of a game in any reasonable time. Well, it turns out the DVD I bought from the store was just an installer for Steam and a CD key, the game didn't actually come on the disc. So Christmas day, I'm attempting to download 5GB on 56k along with everyone else who just got the game that day.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  What I remember about the original release of the game was that the DVD had the game, but it was encrypted. You could pre-load it onto your machine, and when it released, they'd provide the key over Steam, and the game would decrypt. Or maybe I'm confusing that with a pre-release encrypted file that you could download ahead of time, to save the download later. I'll have to look at my disks when I get home; I was pretty sure that they had the full data for the game on them.
BoorishBears 10y ago
MS tried to embrace that fact and let CDs just be one time use keys for games and got torn to shreds for it. I lament the decision because it means you need to manually switch out disks to play different games even though all the game data is on the hard drive.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

makecheck 10y ago

I hope subscriptions kill “paid DLC”. Enough of this trend of shipping crippled-by-default games that require you to pay extra in order to have what should frankly be called “the finished game”. Once you’re paying a monthly fee, the games had better be complete, offering all available content as the games were meant to be played. Otherwise, it would be just another scam to seem “cheap” until you add up all the extra charges to download more.

kevingadd 10y ago
Define "complete". The vast majority of day-1 and post-release DLC is content that was created by the development team after the gold master (the thing burned to retail discs) was complete, so that the studio doesn't have to lay them off. There is the question of how this interacts with digital-only releases, but you don't see it as much there. Also: Why is it your business to say whether somebody can sell expansion content for a game or not? Are premium services somehow immoral?
- makecheck 10y ago
  The problem is that what passes for a finished game these days has diminished compared to years ago, for the same base price. It is easy to see for instance that an older RPG easily had 100-150 hours or more of play, while modern ones top out at 40-50 “unless” you pay more for extra “chapters” (read: stuff that should have been there when you bought the game). They release HALF a game for the same $60-$80 or whatever they would have charged years ago, except now they know full well that they will demand another $5-$20 or more to obtain the rest of the game. It is a racket that rewards crippleware over quality.
  - kevingadd 10y ago
    I can empathize with your displeasure here but this argument represents a complete misunderstanding of games and how they're constructed. '100-150 hours or more of play' is completely meaningless. A game can be 150 hours because it's completely padded out with awful grind (i.e. WoW's widely reviled kill 10 rats formula, widely disliked formulaic Ubisoft Open World Games with repetitive side-quests), or a 5-hour experience with adjustable difficulty, optional objectives and high replayability (multiplayer!) You simply can't judge the value of a game based on play time, no more than you can judge the quality of a piece of software by the length of its features list or the quality of a film by its running time. I would make arguments that the quality of the experience you get out of retail games is much higher than a decade ago, due to increased budgets, better technology and general design refinement: * Almost universally better tutorials * More widespread access to options like control remapping and sensitivity adjustments * Access to patches that fix obscure bugs and performance issues found after launch * More consistent UI and narrative feedback telling you where to go in a game (so you don't get lost if you take a break) * More consistent availability of adjustable difficulty levels and 'gimme' help in response to multiple retries * More games that offer alternative paths and solutions * Cloud saves * Automated checkpointing You can view some of these things as steps back from what you liked in (picking random examples here) Final Fantasy 7 or even Final Fantasy 12, but for the vast majority of game players (now a HUGE audience compared to a decade ago) these changes make games more accessible and are generally steps forward, despite some weak points. I'm the sort of person who happily dumps 100+ hours into a JRPG, but I still find that things have generally moved forward. Most of the high-profile 'short' games I purchase are stellar experiences, some of them are genuinely on par with movies. Others are cheap enough that the short duration is not a weakness - I didn't spend much on Life is Strange or Firewatch but they were very memorable and delivered exactly what I paid for. If you want a big sprawling RPG those are still out there, and they're great - Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy 15 and Xenoblade X are 3 recent titles that I thought stacked up well here for a lower cost (considering inflation) than you would have paid in the past (especially if you use Amazon prime to buy games below retail!)

chrisper 10y ago

I was upset when I found out that changing my nickname costs $10. I don't even own an XBox and this was the game community thing on Windows. I think it's called XBox App or so. They should have just limited the amount you can change your username in a given time. But I guess free money this way.