The Great Game Pass Debate Returns

gamesreviews.com:

It seems for a while everybody had settled on the idea that Game Pass wasn’t some kind of weird space/time hack. It works, it’s profitable and it’s popular. Then Starfield came along and broke everybody’s minds all over again.

Is six million players enough for Microsoft to be happy with Starfield’s release? Have enough people paid for the game through Steam to subsidise the obvious losses made from a subscription service? Should we be concerned that only one million people were playing the game concurrently on launch day? Are Bethesda lying about it being their biggest launch?

I don’t know why people feel the need for this game to be unsuccessful. And I don’t really understand the need to ignore reality to make it happen. Six million players in a day or so is amazing. A million concurrents is a figure most games just won’t ever reach, even when released across every platform. By any metric, Starfield is a huge success.

But the Game Pass of it all upsets a certain kind of gamer. If you can’t find a metric to compare it unfavourably with Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk or Mass Effect, then clearly it’s cheating. For this game to be successful, it needs to sell more copies than any of those titles and still be in Game Pass. Only then will it “make sense”.

This morning I saw someone talking about the failure this game will turn out to be if it doesn’t inspire X amount of new subscribers to jump in the longterm. Thankfully, that’s not how any of this works.

Everybody having access to day one releases is good news. It’s a no brainer that it’s creating these huge launches, where Halo, Forza and now Starfield have all set studio highs. Unless I physically need to buy a game new – by which I mean it’s a Metal Gear or Final Fantasy