Xbox’s Game Pass is ever popular these days, but should it be welcomed? Or should we be afraid of what it stands for? Platforms like Stadia have come and gone, but the future is still unwritten…
Transcript:
Is anyone else worried about the direction games are heading? Not in terms of quality really, but moreso how we pay for them.
There’s so many ways to get games, that you’re almost spoiled for choice. But there’s also this dark force that’s been bubbling up over the last couple years. And it truly has me frightened for things to come. For the future of game ownership.
Before all that, let’s establish a baseline. Then we can talk about the end times. I got a real ace up my sleeve, I’ve noticed one particular method of paying for a game I haven’t seen done a lot. Stick around to hear about it.
For decades, the main way games were purchased was that you paid a fat wad of cash for a game on a disc or cartridge. That game was effectively etched in stone. Developers had to take care to make sure that the game files being inserted into that physical medium were as polished as they could get it, because there were no second chances.
Once a game was put out into the world, that was it. Whatever bugs existed in the code would exist in perpetuity.
And I think that’s kinda beautiful. I like the idea that the developer had to put their foot down at some point and just say “No more coding. Ship it out.” Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64 will always have the backwards long jump glitch. Despite Nintendo using a version that patched it out in almost all modern releases, you can still do that technique if you buy an SM64 cartridge.
Today, thankfully, you can still buy games on disc and keep them on your shelf. Just as you owned Final Fantasy VII on the PS1 back in 1997, you can own Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2022.
But… things are a little more complicated, aren’t they?
What’s on the disc is still unchangeable. But modern consoles don’t even use discs for much. Inserting the game will copy the files from the disc on the console’s drive, and the game is run from that. Having the disc inserted is mostly a DRM-measure to make sure you actually own the game.
But eventually, the contents of the disc and the game files being read off the console’s storage drive will start to diverge. Developers will push out updates over the internet, and they’ll be automatically downloaded. Files on the storage drive are patched, while files on the disc are left as they were after they were initially made.
Think about this for a second.
Is Destiny 2, the game that shipped on discs in 2017, the same Destiny 2 you can download from digital storefronts today?
It most definitely is NOT the same game.
Bungie straight up REMOVED the campaign that shipped with the base game in 2020. Like the storyline that players experienced at Destiny 2’s release can no longer be played through. It’s just such a stupid idea, I can’t believe they’d even think to do it in the first pla- huh? Hold on.
What’s that? They’re doing it again? They literally JUST removed the campaign of the first major expansion? That cost $40 at launch? Oh, that’s just… ugh…
Thankfully, most games aren’t like that. You can still buy God of War on the PS4, and what’s on the disc is 99% the same as what’ll be downloaded when you buy it digitally. And I’m gonna take a brave stance here and say that God of War’s campaign will NOT be patched out. Anytime soon, at least.
For better and for worse, I think it’s good that games can receive updates. Destiny 2 locking out content is the outlier.
Take Terraria. That’s a game that cost $10 at launch in 2011. It’s been getting MASSIVE content updates over 10 years later. No season passes, no dlc, none of that. I’ve been cruising off that $10 purchase for a decade, and I’ll still be playing it long into the future.
Of course, not every game can utilize that business model. Even games that just get a few bug fixes are welcome. If a game shipped with a game-breaking bug 15 years ago… I don’t even know what the developer would do.
There’s not much more to say about the “pay $60 and you’re done” model. It’s the most widespread amongst all the others and it’s what people are used to. When a new method to sell a game comes out, people get a little hesitant.
Look at the season pass. They don’t usually represent a whole game’s worth of content, but they augment or add to an existing game. It’s a purchase you make alongside the purchase of the base game. It’ll add missions, weapons, challenges, whatever. It depends game to game.
With a season pass, you can support the developers as they make new content for a game that already came out. Doom Eternal launched in 2020 and a season pass was announced, with promises of new story content and missions. Those missions would come out months later.
So what does this mean for the gaming experience? Is it consumer friendly?
Well… it depends on the game.
Some games, like the aforementioned Doom Eternal, deliver exactly on what was promised. There was no messing around with player’s expectations. Those missions were just more Doom Eternal.
Let’s take a quick hop onto another Bethesda published game, Fallout 4. The previous 2 Fallout games had amazing season passes. Fallout 3 had 5 DLCs and New Vegas had 4. All but 1 of those DLCs take you to vastly different areas from the base game and tell crazy stories.
Fallout 4’s Season Pass was announced to have 3 DLCs. Not as many as the previous 2 games, but if those 3 are REALLY high quality, then it won’t matter too much. And they better be good, cause the pass was 30 bucks. That’s definitely on the higher end for a season pass, especially back in 2016.
Sometime after release, they detailed those three DLCs. I remember being really excited for these, considering I REALLY enjoyed the DLCs of New Vegas.
Far Harbor was described exactly like I expected. Go to a new area, meet new people, do a buncha quests. Right up my Alley.
Automatron sounded alright. It was an hour or two long questline that added robot companions. Definitely a step down from what I was expecting, but okay. Customizable robot followers are neat.
What’s the other one? I’m sure it’s really gonna hit it out of the par- oh no.
Its just some stuff for Settlement building.
Don’t get me wrong, I thought settlement building was cool. But it’s definitely a let down compared to what I was expecting.
At the end of that blog post, they announce that they’re… increasing the price of the season pass from $30 to… $50. As they promise more DLC to come in the future.
Okay, okay. That’s alright. Maybe they’ll go all out and have like 2 or maybe even 3 meaty DLCs like the other games. I already bought the season pass, so I don’t have to worry about the price increase.
Oh… It’s just 1 lackluster new area and 2 settlement building packs.
I’m sure some of you out there have felt a similar disappointment in a game’s season pass before. And I’m also sure there are others that are angry at past me for buying a Season Pass before I knew what was in it. But everyone’s gotta have their “bad season pass” cherry popped sometime. Once it happens for that first time, you never forget it.
If you ask me, that’s what Bethesda was banking on. For some reason or another, they decided to step down from the season pass structure of previous Fallout games. They likely saved money by not having to develop so many new areas and players, who perhaps naively expected more of the same, were let down. But Bethesda didn’t care. They still got their $30 and eventually $50.
But honestly, I think what Bethesda did was worse than most bad season passes.
They announced a price increase, which is sure, a good thing. They gave people a couple weeks to buy the season pass before the price went up. But it’s important to note that NONE of the DLC was out by that point. When Automatron, the first pack, came out, the price had already increased to $50.
So by announcing that the price was increasing to $50 soon, they just put a shitton of pressure onto people that were holding off on buying the season pass.
If you didn’t buy it at that point, you were the sensible one. You were waiting to see what the content would be like before you gave Bethesda your money. But would you still wait if you knew the price was gonna nearly double?
I’m sure Bethesda sold a shit-ton of season passes in those 2 weeks after they announced the price increase but before it took place. Like I said earlier, $30 for a season pass of a single player game was on the higher end of what you’d normally see, but $50? That’s a STEEP ask.
And come on… You know it’s not gonna go on sale for a while. Might as well save $20 and just get it at 30. You were gonna buy it anyway, because you’re a big Fallout fan.
Ugh… Look.
Season passes are great. They have the potential to add so much meaningful content to a game post launch. The developers and publishers get paid to make more content, and the player gets to have some new experiences with a game they love. It only sucks when the player’s expectations and the developers/publishers plans aren’t aligned properly.
Now that we’ve talked about the traditional “pay $60 to get a game” and the ever-popular season pass, lets take a trek off the beaten path and discover another, slightly less popular way, that developers sell their games.
This method came about when some developer saw how well season passes were selling and thought, “Can we make the whole game a season pass?”
Enter, the episodic game.
We don’t have many of these nowadays, do we?
To clarify, in case there’s anyone out there that hasn’t really dealt with episodic games before, an episodic game is released in parts. So when it launches, a fifth of the game will be playable. Then, the second fifth of the game is finished up, and launches a couple months later. Then the third part, and so on. The word “episodic” invokes the comparison to TV shows. But TV shows are filmed and edited beforehand, as they’re aired weekly. Episodes in episodic games often take months between releases.
These were popping off in the 2010s, thanks to Telltale. Telltale was known for working on like a dozen existing IPs and developing them one 3 to 4 hour chunk at a time. The Walking Dead, Batman, Back to the Future, Borderlands, Game of Thrones, everyone wanted their IP to become a Telltale game.
And honestly, it was kinda fun.
The first episode would come out and everyone would get to experience the new world. Then that episode would inevitably end on a cliffhanger and people would speculate about what would happen next.
Each episode release was it’s own little event. People would play it, then talk about the choices they made in that episode. If the whole game came out all at once, discussion would be a lot less focused. But this way, people couldn’t just rush to the end and the narrative had room to breathe.
Despite a major closure of the studio in 2018, Telltale returned and is currently developing a sequel to one of their more popular games, The Wolf Among Us. And it’s gonna have an episodic release as well, so it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.
Outside of the Telltale game space, there’s a couple of unexpected games that have dabbled in the model.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is technically an episodic game. There is going to be an indeterminate amount of games “remaking” Final Fantasy VII. The first one, confusingly titled just “Final Fantasy VII Remake” only covers like a fifth of the original game and adds a crazy amount of filler to make that original 5 or so hour experience into 40 hours.
What they’re doing is definitely more than just a simple remake, and I’m excited to see what they do with it.
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on a massive video talking about Final Fantasy VII and the remake. Get subscribed if you wanna see that.
Anyway, onto perhaps the most prolific episodic game, outside of Telltale stuff that is.
HITMAN, the appropriately titled game from the Hitman series was released in 2016. For those not familiar with the series, you play… a hitman. Before each level starts, you’re given a target to assassinate. How you go about doing that is up to you. Shoot them in the head, poison their food, drop a chandelier on them, drop a target onto another target and kill them both, you get the idea.
Hitman is at it’s best when the player is given access to a ton of different tools and are let loose into an open world. And by all accounts, Hitman is at it’s best… in HITMAN.
Each level works like you’d expect it to in real life. In this fashion show, you can’t just walk wherever you want. So you kill a guard and take his outfit, so the other guards don’t mind you going into the higher security areas. Or you can just take a pass that’ll give you access. Or you can just sneak around outside of everyone’s vision.
The targets have routes, and at pretty much every stop they take, there’s an opportunity to kill them. Replaying levels are fun because you can experience a kill that you didn’t get to before. Maybe on your first try, you poisoned the target so he’d go to the bathroom to throw up, then you drowned him in the toilet. So on the second try, you sneak an explosive into the camera of a news reporter that’s gonna interview him soon.
I hope I’ve done a good enough job describing just how open this game is, it’s hard to convey. The enjoyment of a Hitman game comes from replaying levels. When you just go through a level as quick as possible and shoot the targets in the head and dip, you’re missing so much.
Which is why, when this game was announced, I thought it was a smart move to release levels in an episodic fashion. When it launched in March of 2016, it would only have a smaller training map, and only one larger, more traditional map. They announced beforehand that there was gonna be 6 levels altogether, so its not like this was sprung on the players just before release.
In my mind, I think that’s a great idea.
I tend to rush through a game when I play, and while Hitman can be enjoyable if rushed, it’s a game that should be savored. Maps should be taken in and appreciated. Not sped through just to move onto the next level.
Maps getting released on a monthly basis forces the player to pace themselves.
But alas… there was outcry.
People were upset that they could spend $60 on the game in March and not be able to play all the levels until the last one was released in late October.
To their credit, IO interactive, the developers, had another pricing structure in place for the game. When the game launched in March, you could pay $15 for the first map and the smaller training map. And as the maps were released over the coming months, you could buy them individually for $10 a piece. So if you really liked the look of the Sapienza map, but had absolutely zero interest in the Colorado one, you could just buy the Sapienza map and not have to pay whatever portion of the normal $60 accounts for the Colorado map.
It gives the player more agency in their purchasing decisions. And I’ll always consider that a win.
If I’m thinking back on it, I can’t really imagine a good reason why someone would get upset at the move to an episodic release. I think there’s a good argument to be made that you shouldn’t buy the $60 version, since you don’t know anything about the upcoming maps, but if that’s the case, just don’t buy it. Buy the maps as they release and take the $5 hit you get from buying them all individually instead of bundled together.
That isn’t to say episodic releases couldn’t be done poorly. If the price difference between buying the maps individually was so much more than the bundle, to the point where you’d be paying 50% more or whatever, then we’d have a problem. But as it was, HITMAN handled the situation fairly. For whatever reason, HITMAN 2 and 3 dropped the episodic release schedule and stuck to the “base game + season pass” model.
Though there is still a remnant of the episodic release schedule present in Hitman 3 today. I remember when HITMAN was being hyped up before release, they were talking about how they wanted that game to be a platform for many years to come. How they wanted it to be the ultimate Hitman game, where they would just add maps instead of making new games.
And while they did go the route of making sequels, you can still play maps from Hitman 1 in Hitman 2. And and all those maps in Hitman 3. Not only that, they made a demo for Hitman 2 and 3, where if you owned the previous games, you could play them in the updated engine for free. There’s all these maps that they’ve put out over the years, playable in one game.
I think that’s pretty damn awesome.
With that, we arrive at the final method. One perhaps more controversial than the episodic release.
The access pass.
There’s not really a well-defined term for this type of game, as it’s in its infancy. But I basically see it as, an either free or priced game is supported through the purchase or subscription of continual passes. The previously described Hitman would almost fit in this category, but let me give a better example.
MMOs. You pay a flat fee a month to just get access to the game. Then every year or two, you pay double or triple that fee to play a bunch of new content. That method has been prevalent in MMOs for years, decades even. The Elder Scrolls Online has an interesting variant on this, where the base MMO itself is a boxed game. You just buy it once and play it. And then there’s always the new expansion you gotta buy when that comes out. But there’s also ESO Plus. In addition to a bunch of quality-of-life stuff you wish was in the base game, you get free access to DLC packs every couple months. These mostly add dungeons, but there’s the occasional new area.
And the kicker is that you have to be subscribed to play these DLC packs, you can’t just claim them to your account, then unsub. It’s basically just a roundabout subscription fee for the game, in a way. But it also allows less invested players to just buy the game itself on sale and play casually.
Let’s take a step out of MMOs. I’ll reveal my true wildcard here. Something I haven’t seen in a game like it before.
Trackmania.
Trackmania is a game where you race around a track trying to get the best time. It’s a game all about time trials. You can play online, but you aren’t strictly racing against each other, per se. You’re all competing on your own version of the course, trying to get the fastest time. So it’s like you’re doing time trials against other people in real time.
There’s no meta progression, no XP or upgrades, it’s all about how good you are as a driver. And how well you utilize those driving skills on the wide variety of maps. Trackmania is a series defined by its community and the maps they make. After all, the maps are what make the game. In previous games, the developer Nadeo would release the base game, and that was it. All other maps after that were made by community members in the track editor.
But, similarly to Hitman, Trackmania had an annoyingly named reboot. Trackmania is the latest entry in the Trackmania series. It’s got all the stuff you’d hope for in a Trackmania game. Customizable car skins, online multiplayer, and of course, a track editor. And did I mention the game is free-to-play?
Nadeo wanted to be more involved though.
Every season, they’d release 25 new maps. Not a bad idea if you ask me. Keeps the game relevant throughout the years and gives people who like official maps more to play.
What’s the catch?
The game has a subscription fee.
So while the game is technically free-to-play, you are limited in what you can do if you aren’t subscribed. Let’s take a deeper look at what’s going on here.
Here’s the official- oof… That’s a hefty comparison chart. Alright, I’ll narrow it down to the stuff that matters.
For reference, the starter edition is free-to-play. Standard access is $10 a year, and club access is $30 a year or $60 for 3 years.
Basically all you can do in the starter edition is play the current season’s set of maps and the 25 training maps. There’s also the arcade section. These are basically the online servers that swap out maps every so often. In this version, there’s only one featured server you can play in. You can also make maps in the Simple Track Editor, which is admittedly, pretty simple.
The standard edition is where the game opens up.
You can access to all the maps from previous seasons. At this point, there’s been 7, so that’s 175 official maps. You also get to play the “track of the day”, a community map curated by Nadeo. You can also join any community server, you’re not just limited to the one featured Arcade room. And then there’s the Advanced Track Editor.
In the club edition, you get to utilize all the aspects of the club system. You can create and manage your own clubs, or groups. Here’s the whole list, it’s… whatever.
As someone who doesn’t really care about all this club stuff, paying $10 a year to play online maps and get the seasonal maps is a banger deal.
The way they’ve broken the pricing structure up seems extremely fair to me.
If you just wanna come in and play some curated maps every 3 months, then you don’t have to pay anything! If you wanna see more of what the game has to offer in terms of community maps, then you can just pay $10 a year. And If you really wanna go hard into the other community features, then you can pay $30 for one year or $60 for 3 years. The tiers appeal to players with varying levels of interest in the game, and for some, free to play is all they’ll need.
Now, there is something to be said about not being able to “own” the game, at any tier.
Trackmania Nations Forever is also free-to-play, and it launched all the way back in 2008. That game has no restrictions. There was no club system hidden behind a subcription fee. Granted, there was no club system at all, but that’s not the point. The game was truly free-to-play. And people are still playing, you could hop on a custom server right now and have your eyes bombarded with the busiest UI you’ve ever seen west of the HUDs in MMOs.
Will Trackmania 2020 be playable in 2036? Can we trust Ubisoft and Nadeo to future proof their games once it passes the point of profitability?
I made a similar point in my video about real-world timed content a year and a half ago. I went over how Monster Hunter World had a bunch of timed quests, and how we couldn’t trust them to make them playable once the new game comes out. To their credit, they did that. All previous event quests that used to be rotated out every couple weeks are playable whenever you want. So now future players can enjoy all the weird crossovers and monsters going forward.
I also talked about uhh… Destiny 2.
In the time since I made that video, they removed EVEN MORE content.
So while Monster Hunter World turned out fine, Destiny 2 is still hacking off content as new expansions come out.
Nadeo could very easily say, “Fuck you, we’re making a new trackmania game and shutting this one down.” Locking out all access to the content and servers in this game. Or they could just make all the features available to free-to-play players in like 7 years as they move onto something else.
The worst part is the uncertainty. Nobody knows how they’re gonna handle this game a decade from now, including Nadeo.
You see it in MMOs. It’s a wonder that fossils like Final Fantasy XI are still online. Hell, Everquest 2 is STILL getting expansions 18 years later. Some day, those servers are gonna shut down. Final Fantasy XI is gonna be permanently unplayable and stuck in your steam library till the end of time.
Spending time playing a game, then just losing access to it one day, kinda scares me.
On a completely unrelated note, let’s talk about Game Pass.
I’m truly on the fence when it comes to the service.
On one hand, it’s a massive value to your average gamer. It’s only $10 a month to get access to hundreds of actually great games. Gone are the days where you’re stuck with the single game you got with your console for Christmas. I remember playing Mario Party games SINGLE PLAYER when I was a kid. I wouldn’t be doing that if I had Game Pass. Get your kid a 6 month subscription for $60 and they’ll be playing all the hot new Xbox games on release day.
On the other hand, I don’t quite like what it stands for.
It represents a shift in the gaming landscape. A shift in how publishers try to monetize their products. Because at the end of the day, games are products. Sure, they’re pieces of art, but a huge priority of developers and publishers, especially at the tippy-top of the industry, is making money.
And one $60 purchase isn’t enough for publishers these days.
Microsoft just looked to other media spaces and saw what they were doing. Movie and TV show streaming is a massive industry, but almost all services share one trait in common.
You’re not paying to own content anymore. You’re paying for the ability to experience content.
That’s a very important distinction.
I had a phase earlier in life where I was big into collecting blu-rays. I liked the idea of having a big shelf to display all the stuff I own, and how I could just pick one thing out and watch it. I, of course, had to pay for every single one of them, but it was in service of more than just watching the movie once. It was about having access to it indefinitely. I KNEW that as long as I kept a console around that could play a blu-ray disc, then I’d be able to watch it.
At some point though,… I just stopped. I subscribed to Netflix, Amazon Prime, all that stuff. It was much easier to just sit on the couch and browse a magnitude more movies than I could ever store in one room. The convenience of not having to get up and stick a disc in the console was great. I could just lounge on the couch and watch movie after movie without getting up.
Then the day inevitably came where I wanted to watch some movie I really liked, but it was removed. The license expired and they took the movie down.
That’s my biggest gripe with subscription services. You are at the whims of not only the platform, but the rights holders of the content you’re watching. Every show on Netflix has a deal made with the group that owns the rights, and at some point, that deal comes to an end and it gets yoinked off the service. Think about how many people got upset when The Office was removed from Netflix.
If you own The Office DVD box set, NBC can’t take that from you. They aren’t gonna come into your home and yank it out of your sweaty hands. But they can very easily choose not to renew their deal with Netflix, just so they can put it on their own service.
Game Pass has all these same problems. I’ve seen TONS of people talk about how a game they’re in the middle of is getting removed soon. Final Fantasy XII left Game Pass recently, and that’s a long game. It sucks that you’re basically forced to speed through it if you happen to start it at the wrong time.
And that’s to say nothing about people that replay games. I was never someone to replay a game often, but I know there’s a buncha people out there that have that one game they replay every year or two. If you bought Final Fantasy XII on the PS2 over a decade ago, you can still play that.
I know the convenience of Game Pass matters a lot to people, but the principle of it just kinda bothers me. I’m putting my enjoyment in the hands of Microsoft and the business deals they make. A lot of this video has been talking about how game ownership is shifting out of the hands of the players, and Game Pass is just that next step.
And the step after that is even scarier. Stadia, as a whole, was built with the idea in mind that you aren’t running anything locally on your machine. Let’s just try and imagine that, hypothetically, there was a Stadia exclusive that people liked. Then, after some number of years, the Stadia servers shut down. There is no way to bring that game back. When it comes to games hosted locally, there’s been tons of scenarios where hobby developers brought back games that shut down and became unplayable.
Toontown Rewritten only exists because fans could look at the original games files and rebuild the project themselves. That would be physically impossible with a game on Stadia. What you see when you play a game on Stadia is just a video stream, there’s no rendering done locally. So in terms of game preservation, it’s a nightmare. Fortunately, Stadia is mostly dead, but I have no doubts in my mind that we’ll see similar services pick up steam in a couple years time.
Ugh, It’s just draining. All these little shifts that have happened throughout the years have moved games away from the most consumer friendly structure out there. You buy a disc and you get what’s on the disc. The developer has no say in what you do with that disc afterwards.
Then games are able to be updated. Bugs can be patched out and new content can be added. Everything is swell.
Then developers start to remove content. Maps and storylines will be inaccessible, but at least the rest of the game is still there. And hey, once the game shuts down, there’ll probably be a private server up somewhere.
But we’re just on the cusp of games fully being locked away from gamers. The files are located like a hundred miles away in a data server and nobody can access them. At that point, you’re not paying for games anymore. You’re paying for access. And platform holders can revoke access whenever they want.
But this… Bungie will never revoke this. Only out of my cold, dead, hands.
Oh.
Okay.