I wrote a while ago about how companies seem to have gotten the idea into their head that subscriptions are unconditionally good, rather than a contingent good based on the exact circumstances of the subscription: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/streampocalypse-and-first-pri...

Gamepass as a subscription to make sure you always have something to play, that has a lot of old games or indie games and other games that have no commercial value makes sense to me. The back catalog for any of the current consoles is plenty deep with games that have lost their ability to move units independently but still have a lot of value and can also give that perception of value. Such a plan is picking up pennies, but it's a lot of pennies.

I've never understood putting your new releases out on gamepass and bragging about that as your primary value proposition. Many new games are, say, 20-30 hour experiences, assuming you play them from start to finish once. One does not need to spend too much time with "this % of other players got this achievement" to see how many players tend to drop off of a game even that long. So if you put your new game that you would have sold for $60-80 dollars to me directly and it translates to three weeks of engagement on your $15-ish/month (depending on level) subscription, it's hard to see how that is an economic win. Put that game on Gamepass in a year or two, sure, that can make sense, but on release? And that not as a mistake, but a deliberate strategy? I can not fathom the mindset that leads to that.

As a deal for customers it seems to have been pretty good but I've never understood how Microsoft expected to make money on that plan. The streaming-video proposition of making a high-budget release to keep your subscribers makes quite a bit more sense, you could never have counted on getting $70 out of a customer for those anyhow, and even that economic proposition I think has proved more complicated than the streaming companies expected. The Gamepass model has just seemed insane.

I expect it to move to more like what I described at the beginning. As a way to turn a lot of old and hard-to-monetize content into a subscription stream it's brilliant. As a way of releasing new AAA titles it's crazy. Movie studios played with that model and I don't think they liked it at all.