Microsoft is about to launch free Xbox Cloud Gaming with ads
theverge.com
theverge.com
For one example of how Game Pass affects game sales, Microsoft internally estimated they lost $300 million in sales of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, the first Call of Duty game they published after buying Activision, due to Game Pass (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-ga...). They would have needed 15 million new subscribers for 1 month, or 1.25 million subscribers for 1 year, to make up the difference in lost sales. I don't think it's any wonder that we're seeing Microsoft hike the price on Game Pass and lay off thousands of game developers. I just wish they'd thought through all this beforehand so we could have avoided messing up all these people's livelihoods for what is a fundamentally bad idea (selling $60-70 games on a $15-$20 subscription).
It's great that it has quite a lot of games, but in practice we only played a small number of titles. This was fine for the original price, the benefit over buying games was that you could try more titles before choosing what you like to play. But we are certainly not going to pay 26.99 monthly for games that you do not own in the end.
It kind of feels gross/bait-and-switch'y.
In the meanwhile the Xbox is collecting dust we got a Switch 2. Sure, Switch 2 titles are expensive, but at least you own them.
But in practice, games that I’m into take 20+ hours to finish, and with my busy schedule, a $60 game gets stretched out to a year or so, so GamePass’ $15 fee (which is a lot higher now!) becomes too expensive
I am getting so tired of our Goodhart's Law Economy.
Still IMO better than Ads either in the larger streaming or in-game... or micro-transactions, or a number of other things that make gameplay worse.
https://xboxwire.thesourcemediaassets.com/sites/2/2025/10/In...
Xbox hardware is not as widely available as PlayStation. Maybe it is in USA but in Europe every electronics shop has PS5 section and almost never xbox. I have to go out of my way to find an xbox console to buy while I've seen PS5s being sold at a supermarket. On top of that Cloud gaming is available in a handful of countries making gamepass ultimate half baked for the rest of the world.
I wonder if it will offset all the cancellations they had due to the recent price hike.
Enough came through that it crashed their subscription cancellation page for quite a while and (admittedly anecdotally) I know half a dozen people (including myself) who decided the new price wasn't a good value and cancelled over the past week.
There has to be a limit to how much honest companies can fund via ads and I think we're way past that limit.
That sounds like a lot considering it is mostly a zero-sum waste, but I think it is still somewhat reasonable, and the trend was clear even decades ago (just think newspaper, radio, TV ads).
I think it would be feasible for the ad industry to leach even more ressources, but not too much more; I would not expect the sector to be able to double in relative size.
this comparison is meaningless because you're comparing market cap (stock) with GDP (flow). If you only compare revenue and GDP you get a far more modest 1.7%, and even that's misleading because you're comparing global advertising revenue with the production of one country.
I think we've reach the point where actual honest consumer products have peeked in terms of ad spend, and that's why we're seeing so many ads to garbage products and addictive online games. The "good" ads dried out long ago, and now we're more or less just scamming weak and addicted people.
But you might be right that the growth potential is pretty much exhausted. If everyone stopped spending on ads the industry might be able to collapse, but I don't believe in that scenario because it would require collusion, and also reduce demand for the whole sector trying it (e.g. if all softdrink companies stopped advertising, I would expect total consumption to decrease as well).
Sure, there's performance marketing where you pay for clicks, but at least last time I checked, paying for "impressions" (how that's measured is up to Facebook et al) is far more common.
And a lot of advertising I can think of is just "brand building" anyway, trying to get something in front of as many eyeballs as possible without a directly measurable result such as an immediate purchase. Sure, folks try to measure the impact of that, but it's hard, to say the least. The goal is that next time you need a new car, whenever that is, you're more likely to get an Audi cause there were a few in Avengers. Same principle outside product placement.
Add to that the somewhat common practice of advertisers trying to steal each other's customers (it's pretty common to buy a competitor's name as keyword in search for example) and you've got a pretty well oiled self powering money making machine.
Someone, please bring gaming back...
the old razor blades business model breaks down when people keep their razor blade for years.
But the thought of paying $30/mo to play a game is just too much. I only buy 2-3 games+DLCs per year. Game Pass was fine when it was $5/mo, I could leave it on in the background and not care if it wasn't utilized.
[1] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/10/05/snack-with-doritos-mt... [2] https://www.purekick.com/products/forza-fuel
Double.
How many of us have more games in our Steam libraries, bought during a sale ("It was only $7, how could I resist?!") than we could reasonably hope to enjoy in a human lifetime? How many Game Pass subscriptions are actively used vs. just forgotten about and drawing revenue on auto-renew and autopay? How many people regularly comment online about how anti-consumer Nintendo has gotten with their IP lawsuits and remastered game sales, only to gladly preorder those same games on the new console?
Vote with your wallet.
Is it though? IMO video gaming is fine, in a great spot, even. Consumer prices have stayed (unreasonably!) cheap for decades and especially the indie market is thriving right now. I remember paying more for games 15 years ago than I do now.
But I primarily play indie titles on Steam (currently Silksong), so that might warp my perspective.
Regarding commoditized nostalgia: I don't think pricing is that unreasonable. For instance, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Age of Empires 2.
Terrible example IMO. Microsoft has both disabled new purchases of "traditional" Age of Empires 2 on Steam and also spitefully patched out offline LAN play.
So when I can get enough people together about once a year to have a LAN party and we want to play AoE2 it's either everybody pays $35 each for the "definitive" edition, so we can play for just a couple hours, or else we just don't play it at all because not everybody even has a Steam account never mind their own gaming computer. And Steam also nuked the ability to buy multiple copies of a game when it's on sale and keep them to give as gifts later.
To compound this, because I only own the old edition (that nobody can buy anymore) and not the new one, I can't even leave a negative review (where it will actually be seen) warning people of Microsoft's shitty behavior.
I'd argue that recreational products (which video games very much are) should remain unreasonably cheap. I get screwed on every other aspect of existence, the thing that I use for an escape shouldn't replicate this.
So, if I start playing a game and the system decides it's time for me to watch more ads, how does it handle the game I am playing? Does the game pause? What about in the middle of an intense fight? What if it's during an unpause-able section? What if it's a multiplayer game?
With these questions in mind I have a hard time understanding how this will end up working in the long run without completely ruining the experience.
Or you’re holding back tears as a beloved character makes the ultimate sacrifice in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the orchestral soundtrack crescendos in a perfect welling up of complex emotional storytelling, as you get an ad for Dude Wipes. DUDE WIPES: WIPES FOR EVERY DAY SH*TUATIONS. GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER WITH CODE SHITBOX
Preroll ads play before the game. I also imagine there could be queue to play which makes it the perfect time to show ads.
I definitely would have used this experience 15 years ago. I’m not actually opposed to it, but it is funny to imagine a depraved utopia where truly nothing is sacred, furthermore these jokes serve as a way to inoculate ourselves against reaching that technologically possible but hopefully ethically dubious destination.
Humanity is pretty good at predicting dystopian futures, we always just struggle with the timeline.
But in my opinion, having an ad-supported tier is actually a good thing. It makes gaming more accessible to people who can't afford/don't want to purchase expensive gaming PCs.
Plus, it adds competition with nvidia's geforce streaming service (which is already ad-supported).
We'll see how ads will warp gaming as ad-based monetization proliferates, but given that it's an interactive medium it could be very intrusive.
I'm sure many would take 30ms input latency and 408p over no games at all, or whatever games are available on the xbox 360 or whatever. Moreover nobody is forcing you to play the shitty version, there's always the option to not play, same as before.
>Like Google has done with YouTube: you can no longer watch HD videos if you don't have Premium. You can select 720p or 1080p, but the video won't be HD.
It objectively is HD because it meets the requisite resolution. It might not meet the bitrate that you'd like, but arbitrarily calling something as not "HD" because its bitrate isn't high enough is misleading, and leads to weird conclusions. Is netflix "not 4K" because it's not the same bitrate as a blu-ray? Is a blu-ray not 4K because it's not using jpeg encoded frames that movie theater projectors use?
Or they could pirate some games, or borrow a friend's Steam library with Steam family, and get a much better experience than enshittified Game Pass would be. That's a lot better than no games, and unless you're desperate for Call of Duty 69: Unicorn Madness, probably the better bet. Unless they somehow only have an Xbox Series X and no PC, but that seems like an odd choice for someone without the money to buy games wholesale or pay for Game Pass.