7 ms·

Microsoft same-day reversal on Xbox Live Gold price doubling

47 points by Terretta 6y ago

chovybizzass 6y ago
doubling? wow. they really got greedy there for a second.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  No they really want to kill XLG and make Game Pass the only source of games, first on XBOX and then the world. That way players have zero input in what games get made but well-connected companies (like one from Montreal famous for bad games and bad behavior) will get your money no matter what you do.
  - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    The Game Pass model really worries me. It's a definite chilling effect to game studios and traditional publishing, not to mention indies.
    - Jhsto 6y ago
      Feels like the subscription model is an answer for popular games being free, which itself make a bank on the 1% who spend an enormous amount of money on in-game items. Seems like everyone wants to be Valve in a way or another, owning a platform while making a bank on transaction cuts rather than the content itself. I wonder how much of a conscious decision this was on Valve's part when they made DotA 2 free. At the time it seemed more like a user-grab from LoL and Garena private-servers, and the in-game items were more like an afterthought that came from modding tools.
    - ccmonnett 6y ago
      Why do you say that? I am a Game Pass subscriber and find myself playing _many_ more indie games with it than before. It's easier for me to pay for the service and effectively amortize the cost of paying for indie games which is, at least how I would put it, inherently risky. Before I would pay $5, $10, or $20 for games with a chance I'll like them - some are worth way more, some worth way less. With Game Pass I have a 'sunk cost' so I download and try out games much more eagerly and find myself enjoying many more indie games than before. I have seen an interview where an indie dev said that Microsoft covered their entire development cost for a game to get it on Game Pass, leaving their sales on other platforms to be 'pure profit' in a sense. I am not having a great time with the 'traditional publishing' model of the industry right now. If it gets shaken up, that seems like a benefit to me, not a drawback.
      - dkersten 6y ago
        Before, the indie dev got that entire $5, $10, $20 (minus the stores percentage), while now they get whatever percentage you played out of whatever percentage of the game pass fees are paid to the gAsk me what working on Manhunt 2 was like some time.ame developers. Maybe that ends up more than before, especially if you play a game a lot and more than just during one month, but its not clear to me that this is the case, especially if you split your time between many games. It seems like this model is better for the consumer (pay one fee, play whatever and however much you like), but whether or not its better for the game developers, I don't know.
        dawnerd 6y ago
        I think the point is the OP and people like myself wouldn’t be buying the Indy games at all.
        vulcan01 6y ago
        But those same indies get more people playing their game with a subscription like game pass. This is all just speculation, though. We need an indie dev to tell us how game pass has affected their company—positively or negatively.
        dkersten 6y ago
        Indeed. I’d love to see some real statistics from a variety of indie devs.
        dkersten 6y ago
        Bah too late to edit the accidentally pasted text in my message :(
      - leetcrew 6y ago
        how is this better than the steam model? pay for games you want, get a refund if you don't like them.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      I'm not so sure it's chilling. Many indie folks actually feel like they get more reliable income from gamepass or epic exclusivity than they do on steam for example.
    - kyriakos 6y ago
      Game pass is like Netflix for games. Netflix doesn't just steam their own productions.
  - smileybarry 6y ago
    Not necessarily, most games on Game Pass are on a Spotify-like business model: your subscription is split between the games you played that month. Some releases (mostly day-one additions) just get one lump of cash but so far a lot of those were based on demand and which games people were waiting for.
    - snovv_crash 6y ago
      If that was the Spotify model the people would be a lot happier with Spotify. The Spotify model is that people who listen to Beyonce on repeat are subsidized by the person who listens to 1h of indie bands a month.
      - smileybarry 6y ago
        Fair, I guess I used the wrong example but that's how Game Pass is (was?) done, at least. Given the size of the catalog I'm sure most are still this way: > Others want [agreements] more based on usage and monetization in whether it’s a store monetization that gets created through transactions, or usage. We’re open [to] experimenting with many different partners, because we don’t think we have it figured out. When we started, we had a model that was all based on usage. Most of the partners said, “Yeah, yeah, we understand that, but we don’t believe it, so just give us the money upfront.” https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-interview-xbox-series-x-launch-decoder-podcast#:~:text=How%20do%20you%20pay%20out%20developers https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-int...
  - simlevesque 6y ago
    Ubisoft is actually from Montreuil, in France.
    - noarchy 6y ago
      >Ubisoft is actually from Montreuil, in France. This is unnecessary pedantry. https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/ https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/
      - simlevesque 6y ago
        Well, they have an office in Montreal, no more no less.
whalesalad 6y ago
Glad to see this. I’ve always felt so dirty paying an annual fee just to play Halo online once or twice a year - particularly when the online experience isn’t exactly worth paying for.
int_19h 6y ago
I like how the way this was officially communicated is by editing the original blog post to strike out (but not remove) the bits that are no longer applicable - makes it clear what exactly was backtracked. This should be standard practice. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/01/22/update-on-xbox-live-gold-pricing/ https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/01/22/update-on-xbox-live-g...
- KwanEsq 6y ago
  Shame they used <s> instead of <del> though, but I'm guessing they are probably just using a CMS with a WYSIWYG editor, so not that surprising.
  - mkr-hn 6y ago
    It's WordPress.
  - btown 6y ago
    The commentary here has some context on when to use each type of element: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16743581/what-is-the-difference-between-s-and-del-in-html-and-do-they-affect-website https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16743581/what-is-the-dif... Honestly it's such a small nitpick, but worth sharing documentation as we all improve our craft!
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I had unsubscribed from Live/GamePass last year, I understand how it's perceived as good value for those who are really into multiplayer games and wanting to have large game library. But what I don't understand is how 'overchoice'[1] hasn't affected Xbox GamePass adversely yet; even though hundreds, thousands of games are available for download we're limited by the time we can put into gaming and storage to download those games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
- CryptoGhost 6y ago
  I believe that claims of video game over choice and video game saturation are largely a myth. The reality of the situation is that players are faced with a large library of just okay games and few titles that actually check off all the boxes and are really tailor made for the individual player. AVGN is a good example of how players slog through mediocre to bad games because of the large chasm between what you have and what you actually want.
  - elondaits 6y ago
    Also, most commercial games are "high maintenance" now. They take a long time to start, a long time to go through menus and options, and in many cases the "significant" gameplay is interleaved with dialogue, cut-scenes, tutorial, grind, fedex quests, etc... which is opposed to the old-school or indie experience of jumping into play and being challenged pretty fast. ... So going through all those motions is OK for great games... but unbearable for those not up to par. I could spend some time playing a not-so-great indie plataformer, but open world action rpgs and the like must be top notch or they're painful to play.
vultour 6y ago
I still find it unbelievable how console manufacturers managed to convince people its normal to pay more money just to use their internet connection.
- simias 6y ago
  Indeed. I think gamers are an easy target because they've collectively very little impulse control. Every single time there were talks of boycotts nothing really happened as far as I recall. For instance the justification for "paid online" is usually server costs, but that's forgetting that not so long ago most (non-persistent) online games let you host your own servers if you wanted to. So they moved away from that in order to gain more control and give themselves more opportunities for monetization (loot boxes etc...) and then they use that as an excuse to ask money for online. And it worked. Meanwhile, gamers: https://pcinvasion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/modernwarfare2-boycott.png https://pcinvasion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/modernwarf...
  - atomicnumber3 6y ago
    I say this as a somewhat reluctantly self-identified "gamer". Big agree on the impulse control. It's worsened by the fact that, for lots of gamers, gaming is their strongest form of escapism. But I think it also compounds with this tendenct for gaming to suffer from a lot of the same polarization that's happening in politics. It's like it gets at the same core part of your lizard brain. Instead of Red vs Blue, it's Green vs Blue (and Nintendo stands off to the side, having fun with its family in Wii Fit, and PC is in a basement garbed in dark blue worshiping GabeN and trying to summon HL3). And people will look the other way to an excessive degree while "their" team does bad stuff. I will say that one thing gaming has that politics doesn't is "the only thing we hate as much as the other side is our side". Obviously even microsoft fanboys will be quick to turn on Microsoft if they do something obviously anti-gamer, since gamers also love to be victims.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    It's not some nefarious plot, it's just regular economics, the same kind that is motivating a trend away from on-premise software and toward SaaS. The justification was never 'server costs' but rather the costs of the services that xbox provides (text and voice chat, moderation, player profiles, friends lists, matchmaking, video capture and sharing, software update channels, etc).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
habosa 6y ago
Since we’re talking about Xbox and cost here I have a question for the HN crowd. I’m always amazed that a $500 console can run games better than a $1500 PC. I know these consoles are sold at a loss, but how much? What are the components worth? Also would a console be any good as a PC if you could get a common OS running on it?
- tw04 6y ago
  They generally can't, as cyberpunk showed. More often than not the console version has lower quality graphics than their PC counterpart is capable of.
  - staticman2 6y ago
    There is no PS5/ Xbox One X version of cyberpunk. One will launch end of 2021. Cyberpunk is a bad example.
- clubsoda 6y ago
  > I’m always amazed that a $500 console can run games better than a $1500 PC. I cannot think of an instance where that statement is true. Perhaps you meant $500 console can perform moderately well compared to a $1500 PC? If a game runs better on a console then its PC counterpart, then it usually the developer not optimizing the game properly. > Also would a console be any good as a PC if you could get a common OS running on it? PS2 OS was based on Linux. It was not impossible to get a Linux disto running. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2?wprov= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2?wprov=...
- boardwaalk 6y ago
  > I’m always amazed that a $500 console can run games better than a $1500 PC. It'd be amazing if true (because it doesn't make sense), but it's not. "[The PS5] is about equivalent to a mid to high end gaming PC from five years ago" [1] [1] https://youtu.be/HCvE4JGJujk?t=1953 https://youtu.be/HCvE4JGJujk?t=1953
  - staticman2 6y ago
StavrosK 6y ago
This is rather off topic, but I hate how these sites have all links be internal. There's text saying "Microsoft announced X last week" and it's a link, but when I click it I don't go to the announcement, I go to their article about the announcement. It frustrates me to no end that I can't easily reach the original material because the site wants to keep me engaged.
StavrosK 6y ago
I dislike how "reversal" has a negative connotation (to me as well). Reversals of bad decisions should be applauded, not ridiculed as if doubling down on a bad decision is somehow more noble. Bravo to Microsoft for rolling this back.

47 points by Terretta 6y ago

chovybizzass 6y ago

doubling? wow. they really got greedy there for a second.

PaulHoule 6y ago
No they really want to kill XLG and make Game Pass the only source of games, first on XBOX and then the world. That way players have zero input in what games get made but well-connected companies (like one from Montreal famous for bad games and bad behavior) will get your money no matter what you do.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  The Game Pass model really worries me. It's a definite chilling effect to game studios and traditional publishing, not to mention indies.
  - Jhsto 6y ago
    Feels like the subscription model is an answer for popular games being free, which itself make a bank on the 1% who spend an enormous amount of money on in-game items. Seems like everyone wants to be Valve in a way or another, owning a platform while making a bank on transaction cuts rather than the content itself. I wonder how much of a conscious decision this was on Valve's part when they made DotA 2 free. At the time it seemed more like a user-grab from LoL and Garena private-servers, and the in-game items were more like an afterthought that came from modding tools.
  - ccmonnett 6y ago
    Why do you say that? I am a Game Pass subscriber and find myself playing _many_ more indie games with it than before. It's easier for me to pay for the service and effectively amortize the cost of paying for indie games which is, at least how I would put it, inherently risky. Before I would pay $5, $10, or $20 for games with a chance I'll like them - some are worth way more, some worth way less. With Game Pass I have a 'sunk cost' so I download and try out games much more eagerly and find myself enjoying many more indie games than before. I have seen an interview where an indie dev said that Microsoft covered their entire development cost for a game to get it on Game Pass, leaving their sales on other platforms to be 'pure profit' in a sense. I am not having a great time with the 'traditional publishing' model of the industry right now. If it gets shaken up, that seems like a benefit to me, not a drawback.
    - dkersten 6y ago
      Before, the indie dev got that entire $5, $10, $20 (minus the stores percentage), while now they get whatever percentage you played out of whatever percentage of the game pass fees are paid to the gAsk me what working on Manhunt 2 was like some time.ame developers. Maybe that ends up more than before, especially if you play a game a lot and more than just during one month, but its not clear to me that this is the case, especially if you split your time between many games. It seems like this model is better for the consumer (pay one fee, play whatever and however much you like), but whether or not its better for the game developers, I don't know.
      - dawnerd 6y ago
        I think the point is the OP and people like myself wouldn’t be buying the Indy games at all.
      - vulcan01 6y ago
        But those same indies get more people playing their game with a subscription like game pass. This is all just speculation, though. We need an indie dev to tell us how game pass has affected their company—positively or negatively.
        dkersten 6y ago
        Indeed. I’d love to see some real statistics from a variety of indie devs.
      - dkersten 6y ago
        Bah too late to edit the accidentally pasted text in my message :(
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      how is this better than the steam model? pay for games you want, get a refund if you don't like them.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    I'm not so sure it's chilling. Many indie folks actually feel like they get more reliable income from gamepass or epic exclusivity than they do on steam for example.
  - kyriakos 6y ago
    Game pass is like Netflix for games. Netflix doesn't just steam their own productions.
- smileybarry 6y ago
  Not necessarily, most games on Game Pass are on a Spotify-like business model: your subscription is split between the games you played that month. Some releases (mostly day-one additions) just get one lump of cash but so far a lot of those were based on demand and which games people were waiting for.
  - snovv_crash 6y ago
    If that was the Spotify model the people would be a lot happier with Spotify. The Spotify model is that people who listen to Beyonce on repeat are subsidized by the person who listens to 1h of indie bands a month.
    - smileybarry 6y ago
      Fair, I guess I used the wrong example but that's how Game Pass is (was?) done, at least. Given the size of the catalog I'm sure most are still this way: > Others want [agreements] more based on usage and monetization in whether it’s a store monetization that gets created through transactions, or usage. We’re open [to] experimenting with many different partners, because we don’t think we have it figured out. When we started, we had a model that was all based on usage. Most of the partners said, “Yeah, yeah, we understand that, but we don’t believe it, so just give us the money upfront.” https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-interview-xbox-series-x-launch-decoder-podcast#:~:text=How%20do%20you%20pay%20out%20developers https://www.theverge.com/21611412/microsoft-phil-spencer-int...
- simlevesque 6y ago
  Ubisoft is actually from Montreuil, in France.
  - noarchy 6y ago
    >Ubisoft is actually from Montreuil, in France. This is unnecessary pedantry. https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/ https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/
    - simlevesque 6y ago
      Well, they have an office in Montreal, no more no less.

whalesalad 6y ago

Glad to see this. I’ve always felt so dirty paying an annual fee just to play Halo online once or twice a year - particularly when the online experience isn’t exactly worth paying for.

int_19h 6y ago

I like how the way this was officially communicated is by editing the original blog post to strike out (but not remove) the bits that are no longer applicable - makes it clear what exactly was backtracked. This should be standard practice. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/01/22/update-on-xbox-live-gold-pricing/ https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/01/22/update-on-xbox-live-g...

KwanEsq 6y ago
Shame they used <s> instead of <del> though, but I'm guessing they are probably just using a CMS with a WYSIWYG editor, so not that surprising.
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  It's WordPress.
- btown 6y ago
  The commentary here has some context on when to use each type of element: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16743581/what-is-the-difference-between-s-and-del-in-html-and-do-they-affect-website https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16743581/what-is-the-dif... Honestly it's such a small nitpick, but worth sharing documentation as we all improve our craft!

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I had unsubscribed from Live/GamePass last year, I understand how it's perceived as good value for those who are really into multiplayer games and wanting to have large game library. But what I don't understand is how 'overchoice'[1] hasn't affected Xbox GamePass adversely yet; even though hundreds, thousands of games are available for download we're limited by the time we can put into gaming and storage to download those games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice

CryptoGhost 6y ago
I believe that claims of video game over choice and video game saturation are largely a myth. The reality of the situation is that players are faced with a large library of just okay games and few titles that actually check off all the boxes and are really tailor made for the individual player. AVGN is a good example of how players slog through mediocre to bad games because of the large chasm between what you have and what you actually want.
- elondaits 6y ago
  Also, most commercial games are "high maintenance" now. They take a long time to start, a long time to go through menus and options, and in many cases the "significant" gameplay is interleaved with dialogue, cut-scenes, tutorial, grind, fedex quests, etc... which is opposed to the old-school or indie experience of jumping into play and being challenged pretty fast. ... So going through all those motions is OK for great games... but unbearable for those not up to par. I could spend some time playing a not-so-great indie plataformer, but open world action rpgs and the like must be top notch or they're painful to play.

vultour 6y ago

I still find it unbelievable how console manufacturers managed to convince people its normal to pay more money just to use their internet connection.

simias 6y ago
Indeed. I think gamers are an easy target because they've collectively very little impulse control. Every single time there were talks of boycotts nothing really happened as far as I recall. For instance the justification for "paid online" is usually server costs, but that's forgetting that not so long ago most (non-persistent) online games let you host your own servers if you wanted to. So they moved away from that in order to gain more control and give themselves more opportunities for monetization (loot boxes etc...) and then they use that as an excuse to ask money for online. And it worked. Meanwhile, gamers: https://pcinvasion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/modernwarfare2-boycott.png https://pcinvasion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/modernwarf...
- atomicnumber3 6y ago
  I say this as a somewhat reluctantly self-identified "gamer". Big agree on the impulse control. It's worsened by the fact that, for lots of gamers, gaming is their strongest form of escapism. But I think it also compounds with this tendenct for gaming to suffer from a lot of the same polarization that's happening in politics. It's like it gets at the same core part of your lizard brain. Instead of Red vs Blue, it's Green vs Blue (and Nintendo stands off to the side, having fun with its family in Wii Fit, and PC is in a basement garbed in dark blue worshiping GabeN and trying to summon HL3). And people will look the other way to an excessive degree while "their" team does bad stuff. I will say that one thing gaming has that politics doesn't is "the only thing we hate as much as the other side is our side". Obviously even microsoft fanboys will be quick to turn on Microsoft if they do something obviously anti-gamer, since gamers also love to be victims.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  It's not some nefarious plot, it's just regular economics, the same kind that is motivating a trend away from on-premise software and toward SaaS. The justification was never 'server costs' but rather the costs of the services that xbox provides (text and voice chat, moderation, player profiles, friends lists, matchmaking, video capture and sharing, software update channels, etc).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

habosa 6y ago

Since we’re talking about Xbox and cost here I have a question for the HN crowd. I’m always amazed that a $500 console can run games better than a $1500 PC. I know these consoles are sold at a loss, but how much? What are the components worth? Also would a console be any good as a PC if you could get a common OS running on it?

tw04 6y ago
They generally can't, as cyberpunk showed. More often than not the console version has lower quality graphics than their PC counterpart is capable of.
- staticman2 6y ago
  There is no PS5/ Xbox One X version of cyberpunk. One will launch end of 2021. Cyberpunk is a bad example.
clubsoda 6y ago
> I’m always amazed that a $500 console can run games better than a $1500 PC. I cannot think of an instance where that statement is true. Perhaps you meant $500 console can perform moderately well compared to a $1500 PC? If a game runs better on a console then its PC counterpart, then it usually the developer not optimizing the game properly. > Also would a console be any good as a PC if you could get a common OS running on it? PS2 OS was based on Linux. It was not impossible to get a Linux disto running. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2?wprov= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2?wprov=...
boardwaalk 6y ago
> I’m always amazed that a $500 console can run games better than a $1500 PC. It'd be amazing if true (because it doesn't make sense), but it's not. "[The PS5] is about equivalent to a mid to high end gaming PC from five years ago" [1] [1] https://youtu.be/HCvE4JGJujk?t=1953 https://youtu.be/HCvE4JGJujk?t=1953
- staticman2 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago

This is rather off topic, but I hate how these sites have all links be internal. There's text saying "Microsoft announced X last week" and it's a link, but when I click it I don't go to the announcement, I go to their article about the announcement. It frustrates me to no end that I can't easily reach the original material because the site wants to keep me engaged.

StavrosK 6y ago

I dislike how "reversal" has a negative connotation (to me as well). Reversals of bad decisions should be applauded, not ridiculed as if doubling down on a bad decision is somehow more noble. Bravo to Microsoft for rolling this back.