But... Xbox gold used to cost me £40 to play online, which I gladly paid... And would still gladly pay and it still costs £40. Then they started giving me free games!
From my point of view those games ARE completely free.
Of course someone else may have bought gold more recently because they want the games (not multiplayer) , and so the games are NOT free for them.
They're not free no matter how you look at it, stop paying and you don't get them
When you see a chocolate bar that says buy 1 get 1 free, the 2nd bar isn't free, even if you only wanted 1. It's still behind a paywall
I appreciate that it may feel like they're a bonus if you mainly pay to play online, but they're generally only offered at all to make paying for online less of a bitter pill to swallow
There is nothing wrong with not caring about paying for online or being happy to do or or seeing it as an insignificant cost, but it's still on the whole, shitty, and unnecessary, and only done because it's basically free profit without requiring any effort from the company, because a decade ago MS tried their luck and got away with it, and now it's the norm
If only 25% of Switch owners pay for this, that's £90 million a year from this service, and you won't be seeing £90 million pounds of "free games" or improvements to the services. They'll do the bare minimum and add a few more NES roms next year and a few SNES roms the year after, probably along with a price hike, and call it a day
