Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
If I have any personality flaws, perhaps the biggest one is that I am unrepentantly an Xbox user—which, in the video game space, is the only thing less cool than being a PC user. Nintendo fans are either children or hip adults, and PlayStation fans are elegant literati who play smart games about sad dads—which is why they have the confidence to put that hideous goddamn spaceship under their television sets without dying from embarrassment. But what do I have under my TV? A big black rectangle that is so visually unappealing that, if someone were to deign to come into the home of an Xbox user without knowing what the thing was, they would find themselves unable to perceive it. That’s how uninteresting the very concept of an Xbox has become.
And yet, as an Xbox person, I have access to something that the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 do not: Game Pass, Microsoft’s Netflix-like subscription service that gives you access to a big library of video games for a monthly fee. I’ve written about how great Game Pass is before, but I’ll say it again: Game Pass is great. It’s a fantastic alternative to losing your home or going without food for the gamer on a budget, and while it does have the unintended side effect of slightly devaluing individual games (because it incentivizes you to never buy a game in case it someday appears on Game Pass), I’d much rather pay $10-$17 a month to play a bunch of things I would never buy than never play a bunch of things I would never buy.
But this has been a weird year for Game Pass, and the service seems to be in a bit of an odd limbo state at the moment—which is made even weirder by the fact that it’s almost the holidays and Microsoft doesn’t seem to be putting a ton of effort into convincing people to buy Xboxes and Game Pass subscriptions for their loved ones (“This year, get her what she really wants: A thing that looks like a refrigerator crossed with a jet engine”). The service has had a handful of high-profile releases in 2023, most notably Starfield, which was available on the service on day one.
Despite being really good, though, Starfield wasn’t met with an overwhelmingly positive response, putting an uncomfortable spotlight on the rest of the year’s Game Pass offerings—because if freakin’ Starfield won’t do it for you, what are the odds something like the bizarre Soviet-themed BioShock clone Atomic Heart will? October’s Forza Motorsport is a very high-quality racing game (and it seems well-positioned to be the kind of “forever game” that companies love and players tolerate these days), but it’s a sim racing game and not a fun party racing game with a wide appeal.
Then there’s the fact that the biggest game of the year is not on Game Pass and maybe never will be, with the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 effectively telling IGN that their game is too good and too worth the money to go on the subscription service. Their justification makes perfect sense (the game is huge and doesn’t have any micro-transactions, which are usually very common in Game Pass games), and I certainly don’t think every game should be on Game Pass (just look at how Netflix is destroying the movie industry with the way it devalues art), but the fact that they’re comfortable sharing that take with the public speaks to some kind of failure on Microsoft’s part.
I don’t really think Game Pass or Microsoft are in trouble, and I don’t know or care about the economics of the service at all, I just hope they can turn things around and have a more exciting 2024 to justify the amount of time and money I’ve committed to this dumb cinderblock versus the other dumb thing that looks like a giant alien sandwich. Microsoft owns Activision Blizzard now, which will surely bolster the Game Pass library, but meh. Even I have found the inner strength to resist the annual call of … Call Of Duty. I just want a good reason to play my Xbox and I don’t want to have to pick up some boring new hobby like reading or going outside.