I hate this kind of take. "The devs who spend hundreds of hours and trained for years to make this game want money? Well shit so do I, someone who is just consuming the product." I get "value vs price" comparisons and stuff but making the comparison of "Devs need to adapt to the race to the bottom or be left behind" is one of the worst things I've seen on a supposed game enthusiast site.
I have a lot of complaints about sub services but can see how they can be done right, despite my hesitation and fear about them. But going "devs should play ball with consumers or be left behind" really rubs me the wrong way. We've had years of people arguing that MTX and stuff exists to make profit back for games that didn't adjust for inflation, we have people who will argue that there's no point to buying day 1, we have people who will argue that they should just wait for the GOTY version down the line. All of these conflicting view points show that literally no one who consumes these products agrees on what the value of them is, and while I understand money is finite, demanding everything for pennies is why I hate the consumer centric perspective that Social Media has helped to propel even further into absurdity.
This whole thing of "well I'm a consumer so I'm owed things for less money" is why the stuff like Gears being on gamepass skews the value propositions into the arms of the people who can already afford to take the loss. I don't see how this benefits smaller devs at all, minus Gamespass which is only looking ideal currently because they NEED games on their service to appeal to people for a platform that arguably has less to offer exclusivity wise than their competitors. When the stack is in the publishers favor I highly doubt this will remain the beneficial deal it currently is. I wish people would just go "I'm cheap" and end it at that rather than trying to pass off as some psuedo intellectual perspective that benefits anything but themselves.
"Adapt or be left behind." What a sad way to look at games.
