I've had concerns about the model for years, but with Microsoft's confidence in the product, its clear success, and my own personal experience using Game Pass, maybe it really was going to be the future of the industry. There are numerous economic factors at play – and I won't pretend to be an economist – in addition to untold amounts of internal data that consumers are not privy to, but there's a very clear flaw in the Game Pass model that's been present for years: what would be full-price, first-party games are available on launch day for the price of a single month of Game Pass. Plenty of people will buy the game outright, but there's a massive incentive to play it through Game Pass, and this is the case for every single first-party game coming out of Xbox Game Studios.
Author: Kyle Gratton
Published at: 2025-07-07 22:30:22
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