4 ms·

As a GamePass subscriber, I mildly disagree. Saw an indie game last night and felt like buying it. Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft

As a GamePass subscriber, I mildly disagree. Saw an indie game last night and felt like buying it. Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft land. Although I will admit I'm tempted to cancel my pre order since I'm worried it won't run well.

izacus 5y ago
I don't quite understand what you're trying to say here? If Microsoft starts subsidizing Game Pass games from their other businesses (like Amazon, Google and Apple do for their other services), it'll make the business model of actually selling games unviable by pure race to the bottom. As a result, you'll lose independent development and market diversity because everyone will need to beg Microsoft (and maybe Sony and Apple as other megacorps) for money scraps. This is very similar what actually happened in mobile games market - a race to the bottom that only left a few winners filled with exploitative anti-patterns that feed on peoples addiction to recoup their costs instead of selling the product. It'll of course be amazing for users - games will be cheap! And free! Just like views on YouTube are, where creators are getting more and more burned out fighting against the algorithm which decides how much they deserve to be paid.
- cloogshicer 5y ago
  I don't think it'll be amazing for users. The mobile market is just awful. It's almost impossible to find any good games that don't use these exploitative methods.
  - izacus 5y ago
    Yeah, I should really add "At least in the beginning" part - those systems are very great at the start as they try to siphon as much use as possible and trap them into the walled garden.
    - cloogshicer 5y ago
      Agreed. It's a very deceptive business practice.
- smileybarry 5y ago
  There's a large crowd of people who'd rather buy to own games even if they're on Game Pass, even after the entire Bethesda catalog was added. I'm personally one of them, if I like/want a game a lot, I prefer buying it on Steam so I'll always be able to replay it. (I've even bought some games I discovered on Game Pass) Also -- EA (EA Play), Ubisoft (Uplay Plus), and Sony (PS Now) already went the way of subscription gaming. EA Play is included in Xbox/PC Game Pass, and PS Now isn't just Sony's catalog, either.
  - bakugo 5y ago
    >There's a large crowd of people who'd rather buy to own games even if they're on Game Pass Judging by the reactions I've seen to this acquisition around the internet, this crowd is really not that large. The average consumer of today does not care in the slightest about owning things, they only care about being able to enjoy whatever the current flavor of the week AAA tripe is for now before the next flavor of the week comes along to replace it. When they're done with a game, they don't care about having it anymore.
    - fullstop 5y ago
      You get a discount (20%, I think) if you want to buy a game which is available on Gamepass and you have a subscription. This way you can fully play the game and if you really want to "permanently" add it to your library, you can do so for less.
      - verst 5y ago
        Most DLCs are not part of Game Pass, so if you really enjoy a particular game you can still purchase the DLC (at a discount), even without owning the base game. Of course this only makes sense for as long you are a Game Pass Subscriber. You would unfortunately need to purchase the base game from the Xbox / Microsoft Store before you can play your previously purchased DLC.
        fullstop 5y ago
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  It's already a race to the bottom. It has been for a while. Don't blame mobile games - they got those exploitative ideas from PC market. The upside of a PC market, is the lack of a centralized authority to tell you what games are good - a.k.a the app stores. (App stores are horrible for games or any creative content discovery, as they use purely utilitarian categorization) That doesn't mean that PC, or web, games are any less exploitative than mobile counterparts. (remember mafia wars or farmville?)
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > It's already a race to the bottom. It has been for a while. Is it? Undoubtedly there's exploitative crap on PC, but there are countless great titles -- indie and otherwise -- released every year that you can pay money to own. On my iPhone I can hardly even find games to pay a fair price once to own anymore; it's almost entirely exploitative crap. I used to buy games all the time on my iPhone; were it not for Apple Arcade I'd've hardly played anything in years.
    - JAlexoid 5y ago
      Yes, commercial games have been a race to the bottom for a long time. In spaces where casual gaming dominates - exploitative games are top of the "charts". I'm not an enthusiast gamer - I don't have time to search for indie games. What I see is primarily exploitative games, which turned me off gaming. If you even read about gaming industry or new games - you're not the majority , that drives casual games to the top of the charts in primary app stores.
      - mrtranscendence 5y ago
        Still not sure I buy it. Where are these spaces where exploitative games are top of the charts? It's not in the major PC game storefronts, for example (at least not in my experience). Steam is very good at recommending decent non-exploitative games to me right on its landing page. Same with Epic; even its prominent free games are generally non-exploitative. Game Pass is popular and also recommends a mix of very good games without having to search. Regardless, my point isn't that there aren't spaces where exploitative games predominate. My point is that so many actual good games exist that aren't the slightest bit difficult to find, whereas my experience on the iPhone has been almost uniformly negative the past few years. On average, people just aren't willing to lay out ten, fifteen bucks for a game on mobile, so the race to the bottom is real. Do you have to be an enthusiast gamer to find good PC games? Just google "best PC games", the first hit is a decent list from PC gamer. Takes all of 60 seconds to search and skim the list. If you don't have time for that, then you don't have time to be gaming at all. If I google "best iOS games" I see a mix of exploitative crap and games that are years and years old by now. (A list of "best iOS games 2021" that includes Bastion -- a game I was playing on my phone ten years ago -- is criminal.)
- dleslie 5y ago
  I used to hold the same opinion as you, and for the most part I still do. But I think the subscription model is a solution to the race to the bottom, because it creates an artificial level of quality assurance. Take PlayPass, for instance: the play store is a landfill of endless trash, but PlayPass adds both a level of curation and it unlocks all the microtransactions. So for a low yearly fee you get access to the best Play Store games, never pay for microtransactions, and don't need to go digging to find gems in the garbage heap.
  - VRay 5y ago
    I dunno, I tried Apple Arcade, and the games on there are decent, but I really didn't feel like I was getting my $5/month's worth Any random $20 Switch title from the Shovelware Shelf at your local retailer is so much more polished and fun than even the best phone games, it's insane
    - dleslie 5y ago
      I have no idea what's on Apple Arcade, but on Play Pass I've been playing the Kingdom Rush games, the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, and a tonne of critically-acclaimed indie titles.
JeremyNT 5y ago
> Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft land. This seems to put the writing on the wall for the Steam Deck though, right? How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog? I preordered the Steam Deck and plan to follow through with the purchase, but things look pretty dismal for Valve at this juncture. It seems like they're five years too late to the party with the Deck, and they now have no leverage to push MS to interoperate.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    Better yet. You can run Game Pass directly in a browser. So you could use GamePass on really any modern web connected device. I would be shocked if Microsoft supported the actual GamePass app on Linux
    - smileybarry 5y ago
      That's just cloud streaming, though. "Normal" Game Pass means downloading full games to run locally.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      Can is a bit abstract. I've found it works really poorly in the browser ( just getting to the correct page that actually shows you the list of games available is a pain and requires multiple hops).
      - mrtranscendence 5y ago
        For what it's worth, I used xcloud for the first time on iOS this morning, where it runs entirely in the browser. It actually wasn't bad! I had to close out the browser entirely and reopen it to fix issues with the streaming, but once I did that it was much smoother than I anticipated, and jumping into a game was quick. It was absolutely unplayable without a controller, mind you, but it worked.
f6v 5y ago
Right, but big developers have also been getting away with producing crappy AAA titles. They always have tried to push unfinished games to the market, but it has become more widespread in the last years. Now, with less competition, things might actually get worse.
habeebtc 5y ago
Indeed the Steam Deck is very exciting because what we've seen is that the mobile space is where Linux has been able to defeat Microsoft in end user adoption. As some other folks have pointed out, the existence of WINE and other compat layers is actually hindering gaming on Linux, by disincentivizing game devs to make games directly for linux. A huge hit with the Steam Deck could actually start bringing more games directly to Linux.
- oblio 5y ago
  > Indeed the Steam Deck is very exciting because what we've seen is that the mobile space is where Linux has been able to defeat Microsoft in end user adoption. That's a very generous definition of "Linux". Android won, not Linux. What's the GUI toolkit? Android's one. Audio? Same. Notifications? Android. Etc, etc. There's a reason many people are scared of Fuchsia, it's not inconceivable that Google at some point just pulls the plug on Linux and replaces it wholesale with Fuchsia as the base for Android. Linux on mobile failed utterly, from Maemo to Meego to Ubuntu Mobile to all other attempts.

izacus 5y ago

I don't quite understand what you're trying to say here? If Microsoft starts subsidizing Game Pass games from their other businesses (like Amazon, Google and Apple do for their other services), it'll make the business model of actually selling games unviable by pure race to the bottom. As a result, you'll lose independent development and market diversity because everyone will need to beg Microsoft (and maybe Sony and Apple as other megacorps) for money scraps. This is very similar what actually happened in mobile games market - a race to the bottom that only left a few winners filled with exploitative anti-patterns that feed on peoples addiction to recoup their costs instead of selling the product. It'll of course be amazing for users - games will be cheap! And free! Just like views on YouTube are, where creators are getting more and more burned out fighting against the algorithm which decides how much they deserve to be paid.

cloogshicer 5y ago
I don't think it'll be amazing for users. The mobile market is just awful. It's almost impossible to find any good games that don't use these exploitative methods.
- izacus 5y ago
  Yeah, I should really add "At least in the beginning" part - those systems are very great at the start as they try to siphon as much use as possible and trap them into the walled garden.
  - cloogshicer 5y ago
    Agreed. It's a very deceptive business practice.
smileybarry 5y ago
There's a large crowd of people who'd rather buy to own games even if they're on Game Pass, even after the entire Bethesda catalog was added. I'm personally one of them, if I like/want a game a lot, I prefer buying it on Steam so I'll always be able to replay it. (I've even bought some games I discovered on Game Pass) Also -- EA (EA Play), Ubisoft (Uplay Plus), and Sony (PS Now) already went the way of subscription gaming. EA Play is included in Xbox/PC Game Pass, and PS Now isn't just Sony's catalog, either.
- bakugo 5y ago
  >There's a large crowd of people who'd rather buy to own games even if they're on Game Pass Judging by the reactions I've seen to this acquisition around the internet, this crowd is really not that large. The average consumer of today does not care in the slightest about owning things, they only care about being able to enjoy whatever the current flavor of the week AAA tripe is for now before the next flavor of the week comes along to replace it. When they're done with a game, they don't care about having it anymore.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    You get a discount (20%, I think) if you want to buy a game which is available on Gamepass and you have a subscription. This way you can fully play the game and if you really want to "permanently" add it to your library, you can do so for less.
    - verst 5y ago
      Most DLCs are not part of Game Pass, so if you really enjoy a particular game you can still purchase the DLC (at a discount), even without owning the base game. Of course this only makes sense for as long you are a Game Pass Subscriber. You would unfortunately need to purchase the base game from the Xbox / Microsoft Store before you can play your previously purchased DLC.
      - fullstop 5y ago
JAlexoid 5y ago
It's already a race to the bottom. It has been for a while. Don't blame mobile games - they got those exploitative ideas from PC market. The upside of a PC market, is the lack of a centralized authority to tell you what games are good - a.k.a the app stores. (App stores are horrible for games or any creative content discovery, as they use purely utilitarian categorization) That doesn't mean that PC, or web, games are any less exploitative than mobile counterparts. (remember mafia wars or farmville?)
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > It's already a race to the bottom. It has been for a while. Is it? Undoubtedly there's exploitative crap on PC, but there are countless great titles -- indie and otherwise -- released every year that you can pay money to own. On my iPhone I can hardly even find games to pay a fair price once to own anymore; it's almost entirely exploitative crap. I used to buy games all the time on my iPhone; were it not for Apple Arcade I'd've hardly played anything in years.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    Yes, commercial games have been a race to the bottom for a long time. In spaces where casual gaming dominates - exploitative games are top of the "charts". I'm not an enthusiast gamer - I don't have time to search for indie games. What I see is primarily exploitative games, which turned me off gaming. If you even read about gaming industry or new games - you're not the majority , that drives casual games to the top of the charts in primary app stores.
    - mrtranscendence 5y ago
      Still not sure I buy it. Where are these spaces where exploitative games are top of the charts? It's not in the major PC game storefronts, for example (at least not in my experience). Steam is very good at recommending decent non-exploitative games to me right on its landing page. Same with Epic; even its prominent free games are generally non-exploitative. Game Pass is popular and also recommends a mix of very good games without having to search. Regardless, my point isn't that there aren't spaces where exploitative games predominate. My point is that so many actual good games exist that aren't the slightest bit difficult to find, whereas my experience on the iPhone has been almost uniformly negative the past few years. On average, people just aren't willing to lay out ten, fifteen bucks for a game on mobile, so the race to the bottom is real. Do you have to be an enthusiast gamer to find good PC games? Just google "best PC games", the first hit is a decent list from PC gamer. Takes all of 60 seconds to search and skim the list. If you don't have time for that, then you don't have time to be gaming at all. If I google "best iOS games" I see a mix of exploitative crap and games that are years and years old by now. (A list of "best iOS games 2021" that includes Bastion -- a game I was playing on my phone ten years ago -- is criminal.)
dleslie 5y ago
I used to hold the same opinion as you, and for the most part I still do. But I think the subscription model is a solution to the race to the bottom, because it creates an artificial level of quality assurance. Take PlayPass, for instance: the play store is a landfill of endless trash, but PlayPass adds both a level of curation and it unlocks all the microtransactions. So for a low yearly fee you get access to the best Play Store games, never pay for microtransactions, and don't need to go digging to find gems in the garbage heap.
- VRay 5y ago
  I dunno, I tried Apple Arcade, and the games on there are decent, but I really didn't feel like I was getting my $5/month's worth Any random $20 Switch title from the Shovelware Shelf at your local retailer is so much more polished and fun than even the best phone games, it's insane
  - dleslie 5y ago
    I have no idea what's on Apple Arcade, but on Play Pass I've been playing the Kingdom Rush games, the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, and a tonne of critically-acclaimed indie titles.

JeremyNT 5y ago

> Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft land. This seems to put the writing on the wall for the Steam Deck though, right? How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog? I preordered the Steam Deck and plan to follow through with the purchase, but things look pretty dismal for Valve at this juncture. It seems like they're five years too late to the party with the Deck, and they now have no leverage to push MS to interoperate.

sofixa 5y ago
Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  Better yet. You can run Game Pass directly in a browser. So you could use GamePass on really any modern web connected device. I would be shocked if Microsoft supported the actual GamePass app on Linux
  - smileybarry 5y ago
    That's just cloud streaming, though. "Normal" Game Pass means downloading full games to run locally.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Can is a bit abstract. I've found it works really poorly in the browser ( just getting to the correct page that actually shows you the list of games available is a pain and requires multiple hops).
    - mrtranscendence 5y ago
      For what it's worth, I used xcloud for the first time on iOS this morning, where it runs entirely in the browser. It actually wasn't bad! I had to close out the browser entirely and reopen it to fix issues with the streaming, but once I did that it was much smoother than I anticipated, and jumping into a game was quick. It was absolutely unplayable without a controller, mind you, but it worked.

f6v 5y ago

Right, but big developers have also been getting away with producing crappy AAA titles. They always have tried to push unfinished games to the market, but it has become more widespread in the last years. Now, with less competition, things might actually get worse.

habeebtc 5y ago

Indeed the Steam Deck is very exciting because what we've seen is that the mobile space is where Linux has been able to defeat Microsoft in end user adoption. As some other folks have pointed out, the existence of WINE and other compat layers is actually hindering gaming on Linux, by disincentivizing game devs to make games directly for linux. A huge hit with the Steam Deck could actually start bringing more games directly to Linux.

oblio 5y ago
> Indeed the Steam Deck is very exciting because what we've seen is that the mobile space is where Linux has been able to defeat Microsoft in end user adoption. That's a very generous definition of "Linux". Android won, not Linux. What's the GUI toolkit? Android's one. Audio? Same. Notifications? Android. Etc, etc. There's a reason many people are scared of Fuchsia, it's not inconceivable that Google at some point just pulls the plug on Linux and replaces it wholesale with Fuchsia as the base for Android. Linux on mobile failed utterly, from Maemo to Meego to Ubuntu Mobile to all other attempts.