Microsoft Launching $10/month Xbox Game Pass | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Launching $10/month Xbox Game Pass

news.xbox.com

87 pointsexecutive45 comments

A move following on the success of EA Access: https://www.ea.com/eaaccess/

The Playstation 4 has PS Now (https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow/), sorta. This press release throws a bit of shade:

> One of the best things about Xbox Game Pass is that you can discover and download the full titles directly on your Xbox One. That means continuous, full-fidelity gameplay without having to worry about streaming, bandwidth or connectivity issues.

Do you know anyone who uses PS now? I have been curious about the service for a while, it doesn't seem worth it to me because the games don't interest me but I wonder if it has many happy customers

I use it and like it. It works well. I've had occasional network hiccups that caused brief slowdowns, but they're rare. I've never had a hiccup bad enough to kick me out of a game.

Is the psnow streaming so bad? I would think it a benefit to instantly get into the action instead of waiting for a 50gb game to download and update itself and also worry about storage.

Doesn't work well at high traffic times in some neighborhoods.

Nvidia is also rolling out GeForce NOW: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now

People have also rolled their own solution: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...

Bit of a difference here. TFA and Parent are discussing unilmited video game streaming packages, as a gaming parallel to Netflix or Prime Video.

You're linking to articles about cloud gaming hardware services, which could be used in tandem with the above streaming services, or could be used to play games you already own.

There is the possibility to create lock-in by tying the two services together, but hopefully market forces will prevent this.

Additionally confusing since NVIDIA offers two different products with the "Geforce NOW" brand.

The "Netflix for games" version is here:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/

Some explanations at the FAQ: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now/faq

No, PS Now is a streaming service that allows you to play PS3 and PS4 games. What you really meant to say was PS Plus.

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-plus/

No, the equivalent of PS Plus is Xbox Live Gold. This is not exactly the same thing as PS Now (you download the games rather than stream them), but it's intended to be another entry in the same general category that PS Now and EA Access operate in, where you pay a fee for access to a catalog of games.

The reason why I associated it with PlayStation Plus is because as part of the subscription, members are given six games every month for free as long as they remain members. After a while you amass quite a large library of free games.

    Jan 2017 Games:

    Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PS4, PS Vita)
    This War of Mine: The Little Ones (PS4)
    The Swindle (PS4, PS3, PS Vita)
    Titan Souls (PS4, PS Vita)
    Azkend 2 (PS4, PS Vita)
    Blazerush (PS3)


    Feb 2017 Games:

    LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS4)
    Not a Hero (PS4)
    Starwhal (PS4, PS3)
    Ninja Senki DX (PS4, PS Vita)
    TorqueL (PS4, PS Vita)
    Anna - Extended Edition (PS3)

Xbox Live Gold does the same thing — for example, I just got Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime and The Force Unleashed for free on Xbox One. This program sounds more like PS Now, where you pay a subscription fee for access to a large catalog of games rather than offering a rotating selection of games you can get for free if you hit the "Get" button during the right time of the month.

I wonder if we are going to get to the point where people no longer "own" any traditional media, such as movies, music and games, and rather pay monthly subscriptions to have access to a giant library of all these things.

It's certainly in both the consumer's interest (massive library of content) and the company's (revenue generated for dated content).

I worry about the implications of this, ie. exclusive content released only on certain platforms or just the lack of control over the media you're paying for (titles removed, modified, etc.)

Interesting to think about.

This feels more broad than digital media.. Car sharing of expensive autonomous cars means nobody will own a vehicle, the 'capital class' has purchased most of the housing as investment so far fewer people will own homes, all of the fiber and most of the WISPs use expensive proprietary equipment so to access the internet you need to rent their devices, etc. etc. is there any area where ownership is actually increasing?

This might be a kind of a tangent but the reduction of brokerage fees and index funds has actually increased "ownership" (as in investment in) almost all sectors of the economy. Perhaps this analogy is incorrect; would love to hear the refutations :).

I guess the other way of looking at this is that people are freed from owning non-investments. Where previously you had to own if you wanted to use, now there's an alternative.

But (and big but) that does rental-trap those who can only afford to rent, with no surplus income to invest. And makes monopolies even more dangerous (PS: #&@+ Comcast).

I actually thought about this in the context of magazine subscriptions last year. I wondered whether anyone would open things up so you could subscribe in either of two ways:

1) The "digital" way - you've got access to every issue of the magazine, from the very beginning of their publication - but only for the duration of your subscription. If you quit, you're locked out.

2) The "print" way - you've got access only to those issues that were published during your subscription. If you cut off your subscription, you don't get any new issues but you can still log in with your account and see those issues that you were "subscribed" to.

(Granted, it adds complexity to people who are likely just thinking "I just want to read this month's [X] magazine, why are you making it so hard?".)

It sounds like Microsoft is doing a decent best-of-both-worlds option here - if you play it and like it, you get a discount to purchase it.

It's already the case for just about all main stream media. I try to avoid it like the plague. As long as there's nothing stopping people from releasing bits and code the way they want, there will always be DRM free and open source options, those are the ones I'll try to embrace.

I wonder if we are going to get to the point...

Going to?

> It's certainly in both the consumer's interest (massive library of content)

Until the company drops things from the library, pushes an "upgrade" that changes the nature of some items, the consumer wants to modify the product in some way that the service won't allow, or the consumer wants to use it on a platform that the company doesn't want to support (but which would've been possible with the "owned" version of the product).

> It's certainly in both the consumer's interest

I have to disagree. I dislike subscriptions for several reasons, especially in an area like video games where there is replay value. (I, at least, don't re-watch tv/movies the way I re-play video games.)

A) Subscriptions give me anxiety, a feeling that I have to maximize the value I'm getting from the fixed cost. B) As a direct follow-on, it makes me feel rushed. My game play style is slow, I like adventure games. But if playing longer/slower costs more then I have pressure to hurry, rather than to enjoy. C) For casual play, I can buy a game once and enjoy it in small bursts over a long window of time. With subscriptions, I have to pay $X/mo even if I only spend an hour in a given month consuming the subscription. D) I have subscription overload. I still have cable, for a variety of reasons (including its attachment to the internet service I'd buy anyway), and Amazon Prime (mostly for the shipping). But I don't subscribe to anything else. If I did I'd feel like I need to subscribe to Netflix, and Hulu, and Spotify, and Google Music, and PS Now, and Xbox Game Pass, and .. and .. and ...

I hope subscriptions kill “paid DLC”. Enough of this trend of shipping crippled-by-default games that require you to pay extra in order to have what should frankly be called “the finished game”.

Once you’re paying a monthly fee, the games had better be complete, offering all available content as the games were meant to be played. Otherwise, it would be just another scam to seem “cheap” until you add up all the extra charges to download more.

Define "complete". The vast majority of day-1 and post-release DLC is content that was created by the development team after the gold master (the thing burned to retail discs) was complete, so that the studio doesn't have to lay them off.

There is the question of how this interacts with digital-only releases, but you don't see it as much there.

Also: Why is it your business to say whether somebody can sell expansion content for a game or not? Are premium services somehow immoral?

The problem is that what passes for a finished game these days has diminished compared to years ago, for the same base price. It is easy to see for instance that an older RPG easily had 100-150 hours or more of play, while modern ones top out at 40-50 “unless” you pay more for extra “chapters” (read: stuff that should have been there when you bought the game). They release HALF a game for the same $60-$80 or whatever they would have charged years ago, except now they know full well that they will demand another $5-$20 or more to obtain the rest of the game. It is a racket that rewards crippleware over quality.

I can empathize with your displeasure here but this argument represents a complete misunderstanding of games and how they're constructed.

'100-150 hours or more of play' is completely meaningless. A game can be 150 hours because it's completely padded out with awful grind (i.e. WoW's widely reviled kill 10 rats formula, widely disliked formulaic Ubisoft Open World Games with repetitive side-quests), or a 5-hour experience with adjustable difficulty, optional objectives and high replayability (multiplayer!)

You simply can't judge the value of a game based on play time, no more than you can judge the quality of a piece of software by the length of its features list or the quality of a film by its running time.

I would make arguments that the quality of the experience you get out of retail games is much higher than a decade ago, due to increased budgets, better technology and general design refinement:

* Almost universally better tutorials

* More widespread access to options like control remapping and sensitivity adjustments

* Access to patches that fix obscure bugs and performance issues found after launch

* More consistent UI and narrative feedback telling you where to go in a game (so you don't get lost if you take a break)

* More consistent availability of adjustable difficulty levels and 'gimme' help in response to multiple retries

* More games that offer alternative paths and solutions

* Cloud saves

* Automated checkpointing

You can view some of these things as steps back from what you liked in (picking random examples here) Final Fantasy 7 or even Final Fantasy 12, but for the vast majority of game players (now a HUGE audience compared to a decade ago) these changes make games more accessible and are generally steps forward, despite some weak points.

I'm the sort of person who happily dumps 100+ hours into a JRPG, but I still find that things have generally moved forward. Most of the high-profile 'short' games I purchase are stellar experiences, some of them are genuinely on par with movies. Others are cheap enough that the short duration is not a weakness - I didn't spend much on Life is Strange or Firewatch but they were very memorable and delivered exactly what I paid for. If you want a big sprawling RPG those are still out there, and they're great - Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy 15 and Xenoblade X are 3 recent titles that I thought stacked up well here for a lower cost (considering inflation) than you would have paid in the past (especially if you use Amazon prime to buy games below retail!)

I don’t have a problem with making games more accessible. The problem is that game companies aren’t being honest: they are charging prices AS IF the game were complete, when what they should be doing is stating up front is that what’s shipped on Day 1 is worth FIVE dollars, not much more. They should state clearly that DLC is not just “extras” but virtually half the game, for additional charge, withheld from the start.

Similarly, I agree that patches to fix bugs are useful. Unfortunately, game companies have realized two things: (1) apparently it is now “OK” to ship games on Day 1 that ARE BROKEN, especially if you reach a certain point in the content where major breaking bugs are revealed or maps are practically empty or areas have been cut off, etc.; and of course, (2) is that companies realized updates don’t have to be just for bugs, they can be used to siphon more money out of people for the content that belonged in the game from the start.

It's a really bad experience to be playing a game and encounter a quest that asks you to pay for and download an expansion. This actually happened with Dragon Age 2, one of the fairly early quests shows up just like any other quest, but requires a paid download to complete. Very frustrating.

Another example is Rocksmith. Paid DLC songs show up in the song browser in-game in the same list as songs that you already own, but when you pick them to play it takes you to a screen where you have to put in your credit card and download them. It makes it seem like the game has more songs than it actually came with out of the box.

A really egregious example is Bioshock 2, where the paid DLC is actually on the disc already. So it was created and added to the gold master, but they still charge you extra money in order to access the content that's on the disc you already paid for.

Mankind divided wasn't finished and had 1 month DLC $12 and then another $12 recently. Game is rumoured never to be finished.

Smart idea, don't know how it will affect the quality of games moving forward as it seems that titles that would sell for lets say $40 a piece will now be included in a bundle and probably get a fee out of that $10 a month.

On the other hand yes subscription/rent is the way to move forward. You lease a car, you subscribe to netflix, prime, hbo, now you subscribe to gaming libraries etc at some point will happen with food if its not there yet.

I doubt it will, as this seems to be more of a "vault" system, similar to the already existing EA Access. How that works, is that they will release the game full price just as always, and after sales slow down they will add it to the vault. This seems to be more of a classic Netflix scenario rather than a modern one, where this is a way to make money after sales slow down.

The most reasonable solution is for games to get a cut per hour someone played them. This would tend to push replay-ability on the upside, grinding on the down side. However, expect Halo 27 to be sold for full price then DLC and only after that get added to the game pass.

[removed my comment]

I think this is somewhat balanced by the full price on new games.

Getting instant access to a large catalog of old games is mostly about replaying them. In other words, people will not be download that gem to replay it because they already got their three hours from it. Honestly though I can't think of a game that world be worth 60$ for 3 hours, but I can think of lot's of games that cost 60$ but did not hold my interest for 3 hours.

"Over 100" sounds like an incredibly small number. I'm guessing most people could just buy the ones they like used for less than a few months of the subscription. Although, the concept of "used" is a bit insane when the disc is little more than a key to get to the current version of the game that just gets downloaded.

>the disc is little more than a key to get to the current version of the game that just gets downloaded.

Hoo boy this burned me bad when I bought Half Life 2. It was 2004 and I had a dial-up connection, so I bought the DVD from the store instead of purchasing it from Steam. No way I could download that big of a game in any reasonable time. Well, it turns out the DVD I bought from the store was just an installer for Steam and a CD key, the game didn't actually come on the disc. So Christmas day, I'm attempting to download 5GB on 56k along with everyone else who just got the game that day.

What I remember about the original release of the game was that the DVD had the game, but it was encrypted. You could pre-load it onto your machine, and when it released, they'd provide the key over Steam, and the game would decrypt.

Or maybe I'm confusing that with a pre-release encrypted file that you could download ahead of time, to save the download later. I'll have to look at my disks when I get home; I was pretty sure that they had the full data for the game on them.

MS tried to embrace that fact and let CDs just be one time use keys for games and got torn to shreds for it.

I lament the decision because it means you need to manually switch out disks to play different games even though all the game data is on the hard drive.

I wonder if this will kill the second hand games market the same way Netflix murdered Blockbuster.

I don't really know how quickly you can buy a second hand game for a reasonable discount, but if games people currently buy second hand appear in a subscription instead I think that means GameStop is dead since that's their main driver of profit AFAIK.

Do we have any information about how game developers are compensated for including their games in this new subscription option?

Key thing for people like me will be the difference between this library and the Games with Gold library.

If you're new to Xbox though then this is an incredible value. Imagine a kid getting an Xbone for X-Mas and the parents spending another $120 and the kid gets effectively unlimited games for a year.

I was upset when I found out that changing my nickname costs $10. I don't even own an XBox and this was the game community thing on Windows. I think it's called XBox App or so.

They should have just limited the amount you can change your username in a given time. But I guess free money this way.

It seems a bit pricey. If they would throw the Xbox Gold sub with this, it might be worth it. EA Access has a great library and you can find an annual key for that for less than $30. Though this is definitely better than PS Now since you actually download the full game rather than streaming it.

> If they would throw the Xbox Gold sub with this, it might be worth it.

I think this would be an great deal for $10 a month.

It looks like this doesn't require Gold to run. If not, it doesn't seem too bad to me. But if I need to shell out $10 for this plus $10 for Gold, then that's probably too rich for me.

I support this. Gold sub, should come with a game pass.

Chances are the best multiplayer games won't be on the game pass anyways and you'll have to pay that standard $60 regardless

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