The big difference with Game Pass is that the $10 gets me all those games just for that month, whereas my Steam library is full of games I've bought over the years, usually for <$10/each. If I were to have paid $10/mo over the same period of time, I would have paid significantly more -- and I'd have to keep paying it in order to play those games.

I subscribe to Game Pass occasionally and it sucks every time to lose access to all the games I'm playing. It becomes a balancing act of "I can buy this game for $30 or I can play it (and others) for 3 months at the same price... but what if I want to play it again in the future?" Like most rental models, most times it's easier and cheaper to just buy the game upfront if you can afford it, especially when it's on sale, which is easy to predict (and be notified of) on stores like Steam.

There's a very long tail of interesting games, 150 games at a time just doesn't cut it. When the urge to replay an old favorite comes along, I'm incredibly uninterested in doing the equivalent of checking Netflix to see if it's still in the library. They'd have to have coverage at Spotify levels to make that start to seem interesting.

But maybe they'll get there.

I'd still rather own my games than rent it out, especially since I know that there's also a constant stream of games leaving Game Pass.

This month, Game Pass subscribers will lose access to Cyber Shadow (launched January 2021), Nowhere Prophet (launched July 2020), Prison Architect (launched January 2021) and Xeno Crisis (launched August 2020).

I'm also having trouble believing that Game Pass will remain $10 for long. At some point Microsoft will want to start recouping its investments and it's gonna start hiking prices. I personally got pretty tired of the constant Netflix price updates and I'd rather not do the same to my video game collection. I didn't actually have a gaming PC between January 2014 and March 2021, and it was actually pretty nice to install Steam and see all of the games that I bought between 2006 and 2014 still waiting for me in my library.

I paid $20 for Valheim and played that for about 6 months.

Got Conan Exiles for $12 and played it for 3 months.

If you really like playing a wide variety of games, and like to rent them, then a $10/mo deal is excellent. I like to buy inexpensive games and play them for a long time. Should I even mention the 15 years I got out of StarCraft?

I'll go in waves, playing one game like crazy for a couple months, and then maybe not playing anything for a few. I like going back to the games I already know I enjoy and playing them some more, so I don't want to rent them.