That’s called a bait-and-switch. Once physical games are no longer a thing, I would expect to see the GamePass library shrink, the subscription get more expensive, or some other unanticipated switch that drives up the cost. Companies don’t operate at a loss[0] for the benefit of their customers. They’re conditioning players to later extract more value later.

0 - https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-xbox-game-pass-negatively...

The same thing that happened with Netflix. Everybody loved it when it started, now things come in and out of the catalog, quality has gone down, prices have gone up ads have been added, and you need to subscribe to 10 other services as well.

Why are people acting like gamepass is a good thing

My guess is that they'll introduce tiers where your current price gets much less access. Presumably this will be done when customers have no where else to go for the titles that they want. Customers will get angry, many tweets will be sent, many articles will be written, maybe MSFT will even issue a statement saying they will pause the plan until they can "better communicate the value to our customers". Then, they will jam the plan thru anyways and their customers will deal with it. This movie is a remake.

I thought it was terrible news. But Bungie is so much smaller than ActiBlizz - they have one active franchise in one genre and maybe another one starting soon in roughly the same genre. Meanwhile ActiBlizz has something like a dozen popular franchises.

It's like the difference between Comcast buying a small, local ISP vs. Comcast buying Verizon in terms of scale and number of people impacted.

I've been campaigning against this consolidation since EA bought Westwood in '98.

To be frank, Sony seem to have bought Bungie more for its live service expertise than its IP. Not fond of this direction but it's hard to argue that Sony bought them to starve Microsoft of game releases - Bungie has like one franchise that's so-so in popularity.

For me personally, neither Activision nor Blizzard has released a game I wanted to play since Legacy of the Void (2015). This will not have any impact on how I play games for at least the next 3 years.

I have long term fears that month-to-month game subscriptions will eat the world and in 15 years people pay for games in the same way they currently pay for streaming videos ($10-$20/mo to many content providers).

That's just playing on Xbox/Windows with extra steps.