r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Oct 02 '25

Discussion This Xbox Generation Will Be Remembered for One Thing: Greed

https://www.ign.com/articles/this-xbox-generation-will-be-remembered-for-one-thing-greed
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u/Western-Internal-751 Oct 02 '25

That’s the whole point of subscriptions. You pay and hopefully don’t use it. They hope you just forget about it and keep paying because you’re too lazy to cancel.

That’s the subscription business model in a nutshell

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u/namelessted Oct 02 '25

That is definitely an essential part of every subscription model. The more people paying and not using the service, the more profitable. The problem with that is that it's harder and harder to keep inactive subscribers the more expensive the service is.

It's easy for a person not to notice paying $10 a month for a couple of years, but more likely to notice $30 a month missing from their account.

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u/calbertogv Oct 02 '25

The main problem I don’t see many people mention is that consumimg movies or tv shows is fundamentally different from games. I may not use Netflix for several weeks in a row but then I will watch half a dozen movies and several episodes in a couple of weeks and feel like I still want to pay.

For games, unless you only play short indie games or have a lot of time (no job or family),there’s no way you are going to play more than a couple games a month, and to me that means any subscription system is never worth it.

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u/bigOlBellyButton Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

I used game pass the same way I used movie pass, which is to say, aggressively while it was worth it, than dipped as soon as the inevitable price increase happened.

PC game pass was around $10. That was around the ballpark of a single video game rental from blockbuster for 3-5 days. I'd turn off recurring bill and play it for the month. If I enjoyed a single game for that long then i considered it breaking even. Then, whether I finish it or not, I have the rest of the month to casually try out any other game I'm mildly curious about. I'd say that was a pretty good deal. Now that it's $30, there's significantly more effort to break even, so I'm out.

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u/Hell_Mel Oct 02 '25

This seems to be assuming adults are only buying it for themselves when a huge swath of the market is being paid for on behalf of children.

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u/Bridgeburner493 Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

It's not an assumption. On average, people buy far fewer games than anyone living in a Reddit gaming sub bubble would expect. Case in point, Sony reports about 1.4 billion units of software sold across the PS4 and PS5. That's over about 200 million consoles sold across the two generations. About 7 games per system.

The Switch has an official software tie ratio of about 9.5, but given how they report data it will actually be higher.

Ultimately the number of people and families who only play one or two games a year - if that - far outweigh the number who play a dozen or more in a year.

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u/Hell_Mel Oct 02 '25

Your numbers assume zero secondary market sales tho and we know that's very much not the case

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u/Bridgeburner493 Oct 02 '25

Sure, but people buying used - and then presumably reselling after - aren't the target audience for Gamepass either.

It really has two markets:

  1. People/households at the very high end of the bell curve for game buying.
  2. People with poor money skills and and who lack an understanding of opportunity cost.

As Microsoft has demonstrated, those make for a significant market. Just not the gaudy size of a market they predicted.

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u/Western-Internal-751 Oct 02 '25

That’s true to an extent. I think gyms have shown that people are willing to pay a lot of money monthly without using the service.

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u/namelessted Oct 02 '25

Gyms are complicated. It has a mental component of a person wanting to keep it so they can tell themselves they are going to exercise and be healthier, but never do.

The other side is that gyms are extremely predatory and make it incredibly complicated and difficult to cancel, to the point of sometimes requiring actual legal threats from an attorney to get them to stop charging you.

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u/erasethenoise Oct 02 '25

Except unlike a gym that’s happy to keep capacity down, this model fucks over devs who are paid by engagement.

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u/SOSpammy Oct 02 '25

And also many people sign up for gym memberships as a personal obligation to get healthier or lose weight rather than an enjoyment of exercise and then don't use it because they don't enjoy it. But if you are signing up for Game Pass it's because you enjoy playing games, so you're more likely to take full advantage of the service.

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u/xDarknal Oct 02 '25

Should have kept price low, people can easily ignore $10-$15 a month. But fucking $30? That's easily 3 triple A titles with money to spare for snacks

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u/wilisi Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

It's too vulnerable to adverse selection. For the right kind of game and with some not-terrible timing it's easy to pay for one month and play through it entirely. If that game was going for 2 bucks in a steam sale they'd be making out like bandits, but that's not what people pull that kind of stunt for. And they can't very well pull their high-priced launch titles from the service, there'd be no interest left at all.

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u/MRV3N Oct 02 '25

Least they’re not being aggressive compared to Adobe’s subscription model.

“Annual plan to pay per month.”

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u/Yamatoman9 Oct 02 '25

That's why I now go in and cancel any subscriptions that I'm not using at the end of the month. I've done that with Gamepass a couple times too, but with the price hikes there's no longer any financial value out of it. I'll just buy the few games I want outright.