I’d love to find a $40 PVP FPS. That has split-screen and lets me host my own server. Tuned to work with small groups and large groups. This one is just tied to a server that I don’t control and will inevitably die a painful death.

You can still own your games without a physical copy if you buy them DRM-free.

They increased the price for the tier that gives you access to the likes of CoD, so I don’t think this is going to grow that offering by much, if at all. I think the numbers stalled out because this (admittedly substantial) number of customers is what the market is for people who would get more value out of a subscription than buying the games outright. And besides that, I think the numbers are pointing toward the very real possibility that they’d have been better off without Game Pass.

Consumers have always owned their media.

That’s not true. There was no way to own a television show until DVDs, and now that’s disappearing. Yes, there were compilation VHS “best of” tapes and whatnot, but you’d never have the entire season. Hollywood was so threatened by the mere existence of home video that they charged an arm and a leg for a copy and set up profit sharing deals for rentals, because they thought this threatened their stranglehold on charging for the theater viewing. Now we’re at a spot where you can buy a “digital copy” of movies and TV shows, which is the same thing as not owning anything at all, because once their store goes down, so does your “copy” of the movie you bought.

Across the entire landscape of consumer media, there is only one industry in which this business model of non-ownership and dependence on subscription services is not rapidly becoming the norm: video games.

Think of how many songs, movies, or TV episodes you can get through in a month for one cheap subscription fee. Now think about, on average, how many video games you’ll get through in a month. That’s just simple economics. It’s usually more worth it to buy the games outright.

Games will likely never be free from aggressive and unnecessary DRM software. AAA titles in particular are falling victim to faux-live service systems where games cannot be played without a good internet connection, even if they are singleplayer experiences. I am not saying that buying the newest release from EA for $80 will guarantee your long-term access to it. It won’t.

Games will only never be free from this stuff if you keep accepting it as an inevitability and pay for them. In the meantime, do what you can to support the Stop Killing Games initiative. I wrote my representative asking for consumer protections for this stuff, knowing that she’s a member of the other party and likely doesn’t care, her e-mail response indicating as much too, but it’s better than doing literally nothing.

Think about the titanic power of the music industry in the 20th century. Back when people paid to own music, music idols were at the center of pop culture.

It’s funny, because all I heard back then was that the artists made hardly any money off of record sales and made all of their money touring. Now I rarely go to concerts because Live Nation is going to tear my eyes out with ticket prices, and there’s no competition I can go to instead.

I don’t see Game Pass as a threat to gaming. Their subscription numbers have stalled out, and they’re not doing the lousy things with it that Nintendo does, at least for now. Once again, just simple economics. Even Nintendo’s online subscription will eventually fade, perhaps over the course of a decade or more, as PC becomes more and more the de facto way to play games.

I’m sure it would if I thought more highly of it.

I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.

Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.

They iterated on a stale formula in a way that those customers had wanted. Palworld is also far more competently designed than you’d expect from its premise, but that premise is the kind of satire that only people familiar with Pokemon would write in the first place.

Given how much PC has grown in the same time, statistically, they are moving to PC.

I think what we’re seeing is that people aren’t choosing to move up a generation.

I think we’re too far out to blame supply chain issues. PS5 is lagging behind PS4 at the same point in its life by about 20M consoles. #2 is both a symptom and a cause. Developers across the entire industry have bloated their development timelines. That means fewer games and less reacting to consumer tends. When do you think Concord started development, for instance? And do you think it still would have been made if it started after Overwatch 2 came out?

Plus, consumers seem to be gravitating toward the less restrictive open standard. If you’re in Sony land, you need to replace your old controllers, even though they still work; you have to pay for online play; backwards compatibility is a bit of a dice roll, and if you want features as similar as higher resolution textures and better frame rates, they’re going to sell you a remaster rather than just letting you turn up the settings. In ruling over their walled garden ecosystem and trying to extract more money from it, they’ve given players more and more reason to play on PC.

The magic is similar to Dark Souls 3. I don’t know that it’s any more overtuned or anything, but there’s a lot of fun in finding broken builds, and there are tons of them.

Of the ones I’ve played, Elden Ring. The biggest aid for new players being that if something’s too tough, you just go somewhere easier and come back later. The opening area has a boss roaming a field designed to teach you exactly that lesson.

But not that the multiplayer will. It’s often times impossible to discern from what’s on the store page.

I’m not in the UK, but it’s incredibly hard for me to make an informed purchase as someone who cares about this stuff. My latest strategy is to use the PC Gaming Wiki, because I can’t even rely on store pages on GOG or Steam to paint a full or accurate picture of what I’m buying. Often times I need to hope the developer responds to particular Steam forum posts.

Is their removal of these licenses a measure to somehow prevent people from taking action?

The problem is this game can’t even be pirated due to how it’s architected.

Yup, just made more sense to group it with the other high profile releases. I’m looking forward to that expansion, for sure.

No. As others have said, there’s just a lack of information about what’s coming out. Basically starting last year, companies got fed up with announcing release dates that they can’t meet, which has a tangible marketing expense on their side, among other problems. So now we basically only hear about games’ release dates when they’re imminent. This year, we’ve gotten:

• Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
• Balatro
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
• Penny’s Big Breakaway
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
• Tekken 8
• The Thaumaturge
• Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes

…and while it’s divisive, I quite liked Alone in the Dark.

We’ve got the likes of Palworld and Enshrouded in early access, with No Rest for the Wicked to join them shortly.

There are a couple of games from smaller developers and publishers I’ve got my eye on with likely or confirmed 2024 release dates. They may have a wide spread in quality when reviews hit, but some of them could be winners, especially since they’re in genres currently underrepresented by the wider market:

• Aero GPX
• Agent 64: Spies Never Die
• Big Boy Boxing
• Broken Roads
• Conscript
• Commandos: Origins
• Core Decay
• Fallen Aces
• Kingmakers
• Phantom Fury
• The Plucky Squire
• Streets of Rogue 2
• Tempest Rising
• Titan Quest II
• V Rising (1.0 release)
• Warside

Then some other noteworthy games that are likely going to be very good and have a real shot at releasing this year:

• Avowed
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Dragon Age: Dreadwolf
• Gears 6
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Judas
• Mina the Hollower
• The Rise of the Golden Idol

What this year doesn’t have, at least so far, is a clear front runner like Baldur’s Gate 3 or God of War, but there’s more than half of the year left.

In fact lots are claiming the opposite since this leak came out and they started looking at the numbers and taking directly to devs involved.

Then please link that instead of their estimates, because if they were lying, publishers calling out bad math is exactly what I’d expect to happen. What I see on this list though are a bunch of costs that can be spread out over several years, not paid out all at the same time. Jedi Survivor, Suicide Squad, and Mortal Kombat account for $800M of this list, and none of them came to Game Pass, meaning Microsoft did not opt to spend that money.

Games leave gamepass since when it comes to renewal they don’t want to since streaming cannablizes sales and leads to lower revenue (already said this) so it’s not Microsoft deciding it’s not profitable, it’s the game wanting control back.

You are misplacing cause and effect. It’s more expensive for Microsoft to get someone else’s game on Game Pass right at launch than it is after launch, because if it’s a game people are already excited for, it will eat sales, as opposed to something like Descenders where most people never even heard of it, so it would serve as a form of marketing. In that case, Microsoft and the other company are essentially making a bet with regards to how much the game would make if it’s not on Game Pass, and Microsoft pays them a guaranteed sum up front, which reduces risk but also reduces reward. When a game leaves Game Pass, it’s not because they saw their sales tanking and wanted to “take back control”. It’s that Microsoft isn’t offering them enough to make up for the sales they’d expect to otherwise make for the next leasing period. Microsoft doesn’t offer them as much for the next period, because they don’t expect that keeping that game on the service keeps more people subscribed.

If you can produce that link that demonstrates what you’re claiming, I’ll read it, but otherwise, this sure looks like you’d rather believe in some boogeyman conspiracy theory than a simple truth.