Sure, that $10 gets you only 1 month, but will you buy a different $10 game next month? Will you play this game for more than a month?
Pretty soon the GamePass ROI becomes difficult to ignore. (This coming from someone that doesn't have GamePass but is very impressed by the business model and value proposition around it).
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.
But how long do you play these games for, and how often do you replay them? There are definitely games I replay a lot (Resident Evil games, for one) but there are many where I'm done after one playthrough. I'm totally okay "renting" it and moving on with Game Pass for a lot of titles.
Some of my most-played on Game Pass are Crusader Kings 3, ARK, Dragon Age, My Time at Portia, and No Man's Sky, which are basically what I go back to every time I resubscribe. But after getting up near a dozen months subscribed at $10/mo, I'm now really wishing I would have just dished out the cash earlier to buy the games instead, especially if I want to keep playing them over time. I'm very much in a sunk cost mindset though: "I've already paid to play the game so much, surely this month is the month I'll 'finish' it and get to stop paying, right? Therefore, I shouldn't pay full price to own it when I can just pay the $10..."
It's very much a digital Blockbuster all over again. There, too, I spent many more hundreds of dollars on repeatedly renting games that I should have just bought. But, like Blockbuster, Game Pass is really good for discovering new games because it's such a low cost to try anything in the library once.
But maybe they'll get there.
It's really is literally just Netflix of games. Not great at all when you want to watch Movie X, better if you want to just watch some movie, and the only way when you want their in house productions which in theory are striving to be high quality. GamePass isn't to that final level of exclusivity yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some game goes "Only on GamePass" in the nearish future.
It's also similar to Netflix in that if your usecase was the old "Just streaming The Office only" you could probably just purchase it. A mono game player would definitely be better served just buying the title they want for $60 rather than a monthly fee, but it starts to get more attractive at just a few games per year.
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.
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.
So you get access to these games to try them, and if you really, really like them, you can buy them when they go on sale for cheap on Steam.
I don't use Gamepass because it somehow has eluded me, but it seems like a good deal even if I tend to buy games for cheap on Steam.
