Because it's not, like Uber or Uber Eats or Airbnb or Netflix. They get you hooked with attractive prices early on, then jack it up 50% over 5 years.
Its exactly this. And to drive the point home: at the end of the day, everything you paid for is basically pissed away, the ROI is zero, its pay per view really, packaged in a monthly sub. Its a bit like all you can eat restaurants, it sounds like a great concept because you can eat a lot, but in practice you won't be eating more than you would have making an ordinary meal at probably 1/4th of the price. And the next day you'll take a regular shit regardless of where you've been to. But the home cooked meal leftovers are still in your fridge, too.
And then you get those all you can eat fans saying they've made a smart move. Lol. Apparently people forget that ownership represents value, too. Quite simply because ownership means independence and independence means you can do things without touching on yet another commercial clusterfuck to get somewhere or do something.
See, I can just reinstall any game I own and play it. Cost? Zero. It means I can go a full year paying nothing, instead, to still have entertainment.
Its as simple as those AirBnB's you visit: those home owners are
making money off their property by renting you that room, and you're pissing it away by renting it.
So, your reply is to be insulting and just an outright ass? I mean if you buy 4 games a year.... some do buy more than that.... that's $240 a year (assuming $60 a game, though I see some going for $70 or more) and that's $960 for 4 years. I'd much rather save the $145 and get access to many more than 4 games a year.
Just because someone has a different perspective and things may make sense to them and not you, doesn't mean you need to flame them.
If you buy games
new, sure. But why would you? Consider the different kinds of games that get released:
- Single player oriented games: there is no need to play them at launch, there is no online community for it, and you'll miss the DLCs that inevitably flesh out the main content further. Waiting allows you to get the complete experience in one go, and obviously at a much lower price than launch prices. More often than not when games get a big DLC/expansion, the vanilla game goes on a deep discount, losing an easy 50% - 75% of the cost. They're also bug free, which they are not at launch.
And what if you're the type to play a SP game once, and then again when all the DLC have arrived? Sucks to figure out that by the time the game's feature complete, it somehow isn't on the Pass anymore. Or that you're not done with it yet, and it vanishing. Or it announcing to get removed in a couple of months, forcing you to play what you didn't intend to play.
- Live service games: a big part of live service games is MTX and other such stuff, and a lot of them are low cost of entry or free. There is literally no reason to pay a separate subscription for it, and if you would, you're still better off buying the game yourself so you don't have to go through several online portals to get going. Also, live service games often take a lot of your time, which you won't be using to play anything else, further reducing the advantage of playing live service
within a service with a separately paid subscription fee.
So sure it might make sense to you, but its not sensible in any way financially, or objectively. Its like getting fast food instead of real dinner. Its easy, its lazy, and gets you fed. But it isn't healthy or a great choice, ever. The path for on demand service models is to be like fast food: presented as the cheaper alternative to real food, getting a whole society fat and lazy. We already have a live example in the world of that society, now turning to expensive pills to fight obesity. I refuse that reality, and you should too.
And then I haven't touched on other issues with an on demand service, such as the complete lack of control over what content you get offered, while there are stores full of discounted content around you offering full flexibility, and the result of that lack of control as it removes consumer power because you're no longer buying the games you really want, but rather what you get served. You've basically killed off your own ability to vote for stuff you like and get more of it.
Microsoft decides what you vote on, now. That's a comforting thought, isn't it, a near monopolist deciding what you like.
Last year I spent some 300 bucks on games, of which two were new-ish at launch price, and the rest was deeply discounted, indie, or just cheap; some I haven't played yet, others I've finished, and still others are ongoing or things I might return to periodically. But we're not talking 4 games here, or 6. Its more something to the tune of
30 games right there. Owned. Forever mine. Accessible any time for zero. And a collection of games I had full freedom in choosing. Not the ones MS happened to manage to strike a deal with; in fact, overwhelmingly
not those.
