I think that Gamepass offers the best service if you are a curious person who loves video games.
With 99 bucks per year, you will have every month a nice curated selection of games, so you can try new experiences.
But I see Gamepass as playing demos.
At some point, the games will disappear.
And it generates me anxiety to be forced to complete a game, with the urgency of knowing that I only have a limited number of months.
While it's a great service, and something that complements the other options offering something innovative in the market....
At the end, I'm more comfortable purchasing games that I will own for the rest of my life.
And giving that I'm mostly interested in indie titles and these tend to have great sales, with the same investment I can build a library that will fulfill all the time that I can spend playing video games, and which I can play for the years to come.
The last month I purchased 'Hollow Knight' in Switch for 10 bucks, and I will be able to play the game at any time, without worrying about this disappearing from the service.
This month, for 10 bucks I can get 'Crypt of the Necrodancer' and 'Dandara' in Switch, enough to play this month.
But for people with a tight budget and not too much time for following prices and discounts, specially if they are interested in big productions, I think that Gamepass makes of Xbox the most desirable ecosystem.
Other thing is that I'm worried about the long term viability of this system for small studios.
I have started to see a worrying trend of when a small game like 'Wargroove' is released, people asking if this will come to Gamepass, or saying that they will wait to see if this will eventually come to Gamepass.
When Sony introduced the Playstation Plus free games, and they started giving indie games for PS4 every month...
In the long term, this destroyed the viability of Playstation 4 as a healthy ecosystem for indie releases.
Only served to devaluate small games, creating the same problem that with the bundle culture on PC.
Like, looks at this nice title... I will wait until this is bundled on PC for a buck, I will wait to see if it appears in Playstation Plus, I will wait to see if it's released in Gamepass.
I think that Microsoft will put a lot of effort in the next generation, trying to get the leadership as the ecosystem to go for indie developers, as we can see with the recruitment of Damon Baker.
But I'm not fully convinced that this can be achieved with a model like Gamepass, that as always happens with these things, it will not have the same effect in triple A productions.
Mostly because these big productions are intended as game as services with online functions, so Gamepass will have the contrary effect, increasing the sales.
But for small titles?
Now a very few titles will benefit from this, obtaining a good paycheck.
Until in the long term, this devaluates all the indie games, and only the ones available in Gamepass have a chance of making some money.
And when this day arrives and the only way of recouping the investment in a small production is to be available in Gamepass, and with every publisher wanting their games on the system... this will also reduce the paycheck.
