They also promise first party games within a year, so if you’re a backlog gamer it probably has everything you need. Ultimate now just includes a bunch of frivolous stuff most people wouldn’t take advantage of anyway. It genuinely feels like they don’t want anyone on it .
Jelly . I’ll definitely have to watch CDKeys (loaded) for sales now and see if I can max out my stacked GPU. That is the one silver lining, because of stacking I’m able to just enjoy the added benefits at no extra costs for more than a year. And speaking of Microsoft could turn this into a win just by announcing heavily discounted yearly subs. $60 a year for essential, $120 a year for premium, and $200 a year for Ultimate would be nice. I wonder how many people are panicking and stacking? Will Microsoft even get more money from these changes?
I’ve never heard of them, but did the codes work and was your credit card or personal info stolen? That’s all that matters really. If they have cheaper US cards then I’m all for it.
If I do for Canada it’s much more expensive than that. You got a crazy good price there, I would max out for 3 years at that price before they run out lol
I pay month to month so I’m kinda cooked. $420+ yearly at this point.
99% chance of it going up again next year as well.
This is what happens when Xbox stops seeing PlayStation as competition, the opposite is the same on Playstation’s end. Only ones who suffer for it is us console gamers who will get squeezed every year for all we got for the foreseeable future.
It’s a shame but it is what it is. I’ve kinda fallen out of love with gaming in general over the last 2 years so I’m not as upset as I would have been if this happened in like 2023.
Some will unsubscribe, some will continue to defend it, it all doesn’t matter, the cycle continues either way. It’s a good month for gaming y’all, hope you guys are enjoying or will enjoy the dope games releasing this month!
I purchased three codes, none of them worked, said they had been already redeemed. Used Google Pay though, so no card deets exchanged. Crap though it’ll take up to 22 days for a refund to snake through to my bank account.
Oof. Well I guess that’s the answer. Thank you for your sacrifice trooper. I hope the refund goes through with no issues. I guess it’s pretty good they at least offer refunds for faulty codes, but it’s highly concerning that 0/3 worked.
This is really important because it needs to be made clear that none of the three consoles are really competing with each other anymore. They all understand that gamers are mostly fixed and that the wider console market isn’t growing. They also have all fallen into their own niche and are looking for ways to grow outside of consoles (be it with PC and cloud or theme parks and media). We’re also seeing them be more protective over their properties (Nintendo and the patents) or looking to consolidate and grow as publishers (Microsoft).
It’s not just that consoles aren’t competing against each other anymore, it’s that they aren’t growing with new gamers at all, so they’ve lost all reason to be attractive offers. 10 years ago (gosh, that long now) Xbox was doing a big push to make Xbox consoles the most valuable place to play. That investment was done because they thought they could bring in new gamers and compete with PS and make their own gamers more engaged, and everything but the latter didn’t really happen. And they are a for profit business, so 10 years later they aren’t really going to try to appeal to new gamers or existing consumers with the highest value propositions (at least not crazy good ones) and will instead do what the market says to do. And the market says to jack up prices because it doesn’t matter.
It’s crazy because you can directly compare what’s happening on console with what’s happening on PC. The Xbox Ally is very competitively priced for that market, the Xbox Full screen experience is a free update everyone will get eventually, and standalone PC game pass continues to exist so people who are just PC gamers can enjoy it. All this is because Xbox is actually growing on PC and there’s actual direct competitors on PC (if you invested in a PS4 and bought tons of PS4 games then it’s hard to move to Xbox, but if you invested in Steam or Xbox games then it’s not difficult to just choose another storefront next time you buy a game).
If you asked some Steam users to use a different storefront, they would act like a CEO of a different storefront very publicly kicked a puppy, to put it lightly. Not to mention all those Steam users that aren’t even aware different storefronts are a thing.
No day one third parties like Clair Obscure or Wuchang unless they amend that and add them as well. That’s the issue with their ‘Premium’ appellation of the formerly Standard tier: the drip feed of titles released on the service is measly compared to Ultimate. It’s just mostly old games that have all been discounted for years, which is fine if people know what they’re subscribing to but it’s a very real downgrade from Ultimate.
I think the real ‘kicker’ here is adding Ubisoft Classics to Ultimate, causing some confusion in the process because some folks think it’s Ubisoft+ (I’ve seen people looking for Star Wars Outlaws and wondering why they can’t download it…) when that same collection of old Ubisoft titles is available on PS Plus Extra… for half the price of Ultimate. I mean people can defend the price hike by saying “but Fortnite!” although that is questionable in and of itself, i.e. are Fortnite subscribers interested in forking over the huge price differential for Game Pass Ultimate? It’s not a sure thing.
The real main takeaway here is Game Pass was a sort of added value to the Xbox brand since 2017 and something you could just casually subscribe to and not think about. That’s over now. $360 a year for a rental service (over $1000 if you subscribe continuously for 3 years…) is a kick in the privates whenever you take a glance at the discounts on the store for owning these titles (especially older games that make up the bulk of the service). And adding those old Ubisoft games (Black Flag? Seriously?) like it’s something to boast about is a bit too far into suspension of disbelief.
Okay true , but not my point. They physically wouldn’t lose or risk losing anything by using a different storefront. They would still have access to all their steam games on not just the same hardware, but any windows device. And all PC games (should) have free cloud saves and social friend lists follow accounts which you can sign into on anywhere (or even link with other gaming Launchers in some cases).
The only barrier between storefronts is popularity, trust, and how much people like consistency. It’s a tad annoying swapping between launchers, but that’s it. Jumping between console platforms is a much larger undertaking and will mean leaving games you bought behind. Some you might have to buy again and start over or you’d have to keep all consoles turned on and plugged in and swap between them (also not really the end of the world, but more effort than changing launchers).
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. I’ll definitely have to watch CDKeys (loaded) for sales now and see if I can max out my stacked GPU. That is the one silver lining, because of stacking I’m able to just enjoy the added benefits at no extra costs for more than a year. And speaking of Microsoft could turn this into a win just by announcing heavily discounted yearly subs. $60 a year for essential, $120 a year for premium, and $200 a year for Ultimate would be nice. I wonder how many people are panicking and stacking? Will Microsoft even get more money from these changes?
