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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Game Pass was never a sustainable business model. People liked it because when a new game came out, they could buy a month of game pass for like $15, play through the game in a couple weeks, and cancel. It was a really good deal because Microsoft has spent the past decade+ trying to recover from their terrible fumble of the Xbox One launch, so they were subsidizing gamers to come back to their platform.

With the money being spent on AAA titles these days, they are not going to make any money without increasing the price of Game Pass majorly. The big price bump they quickly backtracked on was an attempt to make Game Pass somewhere closer to being profitable.

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Traditionally if you're going to play through a game in a couple weeks and then not own it anymore, that means you sell it and someone else buys it for their own couple weeks, and the company should be happy if they make $15 per person in the chain.

Also this is part of why I'm really worried about how weak the concept of game ownership is getting.

See also how anyone buying GTA6 near launch will be unable to resell it.

The vast majority of people buy a game, play it a few weeks, and then it sits forever - even if they could trade it in for a few bucks.

Lamepass should have been much closer to "buy a new release, get a month of gamepass games for free" or something.

The kind of person that actually cancels gamepass within a month is the kind of person to actually trade in the game. And with an efficient trading market they'd get more than a few bucks so early on.

Not necessarily. I was never the type to trade in physical games, but recently for Forza 6 I could either pay $99AUD to "own" the game, or buy one month of the PC game pass for $15AUD. An obvious choice.

The friend I played the game with did the same. Honestly, if they didn't include Forza 6 in Game Pass we both would've purchased it full price.

True, they set themselves up for "the only people who subscribe are those who use/abuse the subscription" - which is a recipe for failure.

by that logic then every subscription is a dud since they could just use heavily in few months and cancel for the rest of the year

but that's not happen in reality, people forgot to cancel

I see what you mean, but I think gamers on a budget will cancel. Other gamers would've paid full price for 12 games and instead paid $15 each for 12 games.

Not budget constrained gamers, which there are a lot of.

The writing's been on the wall about physical games going away for quite some time now.

You can tell the PS5 was designed to be a digital-first system by the disc drive slapped on the side like a tumour hanging off the otherwise symmetrical body.

I don't mind physical copies dropping in importance, and all else equal I even like the move to digital, but we desperately need to fix ownership of digital copies and stop having loopholes around "it's just a license".

> near launch

How can you say that? No credible reporting has proven that there ever will be a version of GTA 6 on a disc. The physical versions that are announced will all consist of a one-time code.

This model is going away expect piracy to increase accordingly

I very much doubt a typical AAA game is bought new then resold 3 times on average. Very much doubt. And even if the used game market does cannibalise new games, they also generate a demand. Some gamers will pay full price knowing they can recoup some of it on the used market. Some of those gamers may not have made the purchase otherwise. Game Pass does not perform the same function.

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