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Intrinsic on 19 September 2020
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I sincerely don't get why the whole gamepass thing causes such conflict over here. Like to me, it's super straightforward.

  1. Game pas is a subscription service. You pay a monthly fee and get access to all you can play.
  2. Now like with every subscription service, it will live and die on the content it has.
  3. Thre are to ways to get that content, make them yourself and/or buy it from someone else.
  4. Buying from someone else will cost you the equivalent (or at least very close to) what said someone else expects to have sold if they sold directly to the customer. Aka, it would be very expensive, we are talking hundreds of millions into billions type expensive.

So basically, rather than take $100M and make a game, you would be spending $350M+ to just ensure a major third party game comes to your service day one. And failure to do that will mean that people don thave a lasting reason to come or stay on your service. And this is in addition to having your own games on there. Now even if you make an average of 2 AAA games a year, what stops someone from just signing up for one month, ($10) and play al the games you made that year? Absolutely nothing.

So what do you do to ensure continuous engagement? You break your game up. Serialize the hell outta it or make them GAAS. Tha way you give people reasons to keep coming back or to stay. The alternative, is that you stop making big-budget games, and instead make smaller indie like games. Basically, you stop making $70 games and start making $10 games. 

The single-biggest thing here is, no one..not a single third party publisher will put their digest money makers on gamepass day 1. Not that they couldn't but that it would b flat out stupid forMS to try and afford them. Its simply better for MS to spend $100M on original content than to spends $400M+ just to secure one third party game. nd as long as all themaor third party games release directly to the consumer first, then gamepass will forever be an afterthought and will not grow. You will end up with a situation where you have a lot of people that use the service, but only buy-in for a month or two a year and just binge play like 5 - 8 games in that month. 

The gaming model isn't one that leans itself to a subscription model.It just isn't. And thats not just from the business side of things, even the consumer... gamers, will abuse it.