Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours / month

Game Pass Premium: 10 hours / month

Game Pass Essential: 5 hours / month

And if you’ll allow me to editorialize, there’s a popular enough conspiracy theory that these platforms want to funnel you into cloud gaming for constant subscription revenue. I think the Why We’re Making These Changes section is exactly why these services will never be able to deliver that service at a price people are willing to pay. It’s expensive to provide this service, and they’re making sure they don’t lose any money on it by charging at least what it costs to provide.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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    7 hours ago

    Why? It made it really important for developers and publishers to release a polished game that worked on day one, because if you fucked up, you’d have to recall the cartridges or discs for replacement.

    And you know what you bought would keep working, wouldn’t require a patch or download if you used it in another game console, decades after, without needing anything but a functional cartridge/disc+console, even if the publisher/developer/console maker doesn’t exist anymore.

    • iamthetot@piefed.ca
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      5 hours ago

      You’ve got some rose coloured nastalgia glasses on, methinks. Games were not always polished to a shine, and they certainly were not bug free. Watch any speedrun of retro games of you think that’s true.

      Updates allow for improvements over time. I think that post release updates for games have been way more of a pro than a con in the grand scheme.

      My much bigger issue is server side connections being required for things.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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        2 hours ago

        Yeah it definitely wasn’t all perfect, but at least major bugs were ironed out before launch. I don’t mind the glitch here and there, what bothers me is the quality of games when they release, some are truely pushed out to be sold way too early because the worst thing that can happen is a bit of bad press.