This one's all about Xbox Game Pass
Last week was one of the best I've experienced in my time as a Game Pass subscriber; oh, and I let my PS Plus subscription lapse
Last week seemed like just another week in the life of Xbox Game Pass1 with new games announced and others offering notice that they would be leaving. Except it wasn’t just another week.. The service has come under scrutiny once more after the latest round of fee hikes — something the US Federal Trade Commission has not taken kindly to. Then news emerged that certain Day 1 exclusives would only be available to subscribers of a certain tier of Game Pass (the pricier ones obviously). And so this seems as good a time as any to explore the ins and outs, pros and cons, and such-like of the service.
But first, let’s look at why this strange week was one of the best I’ve experienced since I signed up to the service. It wasn’t because of a lineup that would typically set cash registers ringing or send people to their local videogame store in droves. Viewed dispassionately, it was quite an unassuming list of games. However, from the point-of-view of discovering new varieties of videogame fun, it was quite stellar. Within the space of four-or-so days, the service launched five distinctly different, but equally fascinating games. I have yet to complete any of them, but I’ve spent a few hours on each of them and experienced a whole host of thrills, spills and a tiny number of yawns. Let’s go!
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Combining hack-and-slash combat mechanics with tower defence, resource management and base-building, Capcom’s Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is one of the more unique games I’ve had the fortune of playing in recent times. Imagine an extended (across the length of an entire game) escort mission in which you accompany a princess in her quest to purify defiled land. The catch? She’s pretty useless at everything other than that, so you will need to provide protection throughout. To aid in that endeavour, you recruit villagers, assign them roles (just as in a tower defence game) and organise them across the battlefield.
The learning curve isn’t monstrously steep, although it does help to revisit old sections after you’ve unlocked new roles for your villagers — and in doing so, sharpen up your defensive and offensive strategies. That the hacking and slashing part is rather more rudimentary is a good move, because rather than burdening you under complex combat mechanics, the game leaves you with enough bandwidth to tweak the deployment and strategy of your villagers on the go. The story so far seems virtually non-existent, but then that’s not really a core feature of this game.
Dungeons of Hinterberg
This was another game without a solid core feature, but a variety of different elements that contribute to a most entertaining package. As per the publicity blurb, Microbird Games’ Dungeons of Hinterberg is an “action-adventure RPG that includes monster fighting, puzzle solving, magic wielding, and relationship building”. Truth be told, it was the visual aesthetic that hooked me a great deal more than the number of dungeons that I would have to clear — 25, to be precise. After one look at the trailer, I went into the game hopeful that I would get to spend a significant amount of time exploring the stunning ‘Alpine village of Hinterberg’.
I did, as it turns out and at this point, it is as much of a delight as I’d hoped it would be. Beyond the exploration (that is a veritable treat), the relationship-building gameplay was deeper than I’d imagined, as were the RPG mechanics, the puzzles were a fun and breezy challenge, and the combat — though fairly basic — and traversal were quite engaging. On the strength of relative difficulty level and the game’s own allure, this is the one I expect to complete before the other four.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
The heaviest hitter of the lot — at least that’s what the pre-release promotions on Game Pass suggested — was A44 Games’ Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn. My first impression from the promotional still (not much to go on, I’ll admit) was that this would be another Forspoken, a game that I found stunningly laborious. So much so that after the demo, I palmed off the review code to a then-colleague and invited him to do the needful. Not the best start, but hell, I hadn’t even watched the trailer yet. And I never did, until now when I had to source it out for your viewing pleasure, dear reader.
I preloaded it and gave it a whirl just out of curiosity. And soon, I found myself deep into a ho-hum opening that clumsily attempts to situate you within the context of the game’s story — including gods, hordes of the dead, coalition armies decked out in colonial armour and so on. After putting the player through the basics of combat, our protagonist Nor Vanek soon suffers a mighty fall, and the game opens up. We are introduced to the fox-like god Enki who revolutionises our understanding of traversal. With portals, double jumps, mid-air dashes — all wonderfully animated — traversal soon becomes the centrepiece of the game, much as in the Marvel’s Spider-Man games. I’m only four hours in, but alongside from the traversal, the challenging but logical combat has been a highlight. The less said about the plot and the voice acting though, the better.
Flock
Hollow Ponds’ Flock was next on my list and as a fan of the studio’s previous game I Am Dead (review and interview with studio co-founder here), I was eager to give this a shot. The premise is quite simple and charming: You fly around on the back of a bird, exploring a vibrant world filled with diverse landscapes, and along the way, build a collection of weird and wonderful creatures. This basically entails teaching your bird a particular song, which draws said creatures into a cloud that follows you. The game, multiplayer by nature, does allow you to fly around with your friends and collect creatures together, but I chose to partake of the experience all by my self.
Colourful, magical, relaxing and a bit rough around the edges, this bears all the hallmarks of a classic Hollow Ponds title. Thus far, I haven’t found the absence of an overt story particularly disconcerting, although the amount of time I end up spending on it may depend on the presence of a slightly deeper narrative, but we’ll see. For now, I’m enjoying the process of unearthing critters and uncovering new habitats.
Magical Delicacy
I’ve been going through something of a pixel art phase that’s seen me lavish hours on the magnificent Until Then (review here), chasing down every scrap of information on the upcoming Detective Dotson (interview with studio head here) and waiting to clear my backlog before embarking on A Space for The Unbound. And it was the continuation of that phase that brought me over to Skaule’s Magical Delicacy. At face value, it is a platformer with cooking and management sim mechanics.
Scratch the surface, and so far anyway, it is exactly that. And very little else. The story seems reluctant to peep out of its shell and say hello, the characters seem drab and I feel like I’m mainly running around town doing mundane busywork. I’m willing to give the game a bit of a longer run, but I can’t shake off the feeling that not only is this the weakest of the bunch, but that it’s taking away precious minutes from me that I could be spending on the other four games instead.
The case for Game Pass (and subscription services)
Okay, so maybe the last of the list above will end up being a dud, but I’d still take a dud that’s trying new things than a run-of-the-mill iteration of a well-established franchise with some updated textures, rosters and skins. And that, for me, has been the biggest attraction of the two2 major subscription services in console gaming: PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass. The opportunity to try out a variety of new indies and AAs or those that may have slipped below my radar has felt worth the price of admission alone.
Very few platforms tend to pull off ‘discovery’ like Steam, but it’s fair to say that both Game Pass and PS Plus improve the chances of games being discovered by players. This is especially so when you aren’t out there looking for a specific game. Take for instance my own dabbling with Game Pass detailed in the section above. With the exception of Flock, I hadn’t heard of the other games I downloaded last week. There’s a good chance at least one (if not more of them) would’ve passed me by.
As an add-on, this is also a relatively low-risk way for customers to check out games about which they aren’t 100 per cent sure. Would I for instance have bought retail versions of each of those games on a whim? I seriously doubt it. With Game Pass, I have the power to try out a game (or five) and drop them if I’m not totally sold on them, without a time limit or any other such constraints.
The case against Game Pass (and subscription services)
It was back when I was very young that my late grandfather brought to my attention just how valuable a library card is. If memory serves, this stems from him finding mine lying carelessly discarded on the floor at one point. He believed the library card was a virtual passport to new worlds that were to be found in a library. He also held the view that a library was a sort of community of its own, an ever-growing one with new perspectives sitting alongside older ones.
I wonder what he’d think of libraries if books were frequently going missing, if publishers were suddenly recalling volumes without warning or reason, if the pages of books would randomly go blank turning them into bricks, or if the price of membership continually increased without any proportional increase in the size of the library’s collection. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure he’d be too impressed with the current console subscription services.
Aside from what’s mentioned above, you — although the presence of the game on your hard drive might suggest otherwise — do not own any of the games you snapped up from PS Plus or Game Pass. This should be fairly obvious, but it merits repeating. Plus, these games can and do disappear from the service with a bit of warning. So if it’s the chance to play a game over a long period of time or the warm sense of ownership that you desire, these services aren’t for you. Further, month after month of insipid additions, only two Day 1 launches worth talking about (Stray and Tchia) and an ever-increasing subscription free drove me to let me PS Plus membership lapse.
The developers’ take
Subscription services, as you’d expect, are a double-edged sword and this is particularly so if you happen to be on the development side of the gaming universe. As alluded to earlier, discovery and marketing is one of the biggest reasons for putting your game on Game Pass or PS Plus. By doing so, you are almost ensuring that your game is seen and promoted, so that’s a plus. And if your game happens to be a super niche indie title, then you’re almost guaranteed to make more money from the deal with the subscription service than you ever would in sales.
However, there is most definitely a downside and a brief chat with an industry insider brought it to light for me. For starters, you stand to make very little money from sales for the duration of your game’s stay on the service. And this is the same with a Netflix or Disney+Hotstar. If something is available for “free”, why would I go out and purchase it? Second, unless you happen to be a AAA studio, the amount paid to bring your game onto the service isn’t very much at all. Perhaps it can keep the lights on for some period of time, but there is an argument gaining momentum that the cost of being on these services is that the quality of games being developed tends to be lower. I am yet to see empirical evidence to support this, but I can see how having less funds to allocate to certain key areas like QA would impact the quality of future games.
So where does this all leave us?
It’s tricky to even pretend to put together a solution that will satisfy every single set of stakeholders. There are different types of gamers: Some seek to complete every little substory or side quest, and collect every trinket before they consider a game completed. Others will play three games on the go and tend to just mainline the main story and move on. Another set of gamers will not consider a game complete unless they’ve completed it on every difficulty setting. And then there are those who will only play a game if it’s available on physical media.
In a very similar vein, you will find many approaches when it comes to how people like to put out their games. Take the good people over at Larian Studios for instance. They were adamant that Baldur’s Game 3 would not pop up on a subscription service and this would not hurt its reach, and that confidence paid off with the number of sales that game has racked up. Elsewhere, the likes of Gareth Damian Martin — the solo developer behind Citizen Sleeper — has been vocal in their praise for Game Pass and its role in “keeping a lot of indie studios going”.
So the best way to deal with these subscription services is on a case-by-case basis. Personally, I thought last week vindicated my decision to get onto Game Pass. And the last few months pushed me to the door with PS Plus. But you’ll have to decide what makes most sense to you. And on that note, here’s a poll.
For the uninitiated, Game Pass is a subscription-based videogame service for Xbox consoles and Microsoft PCs that gives you access to “free” games, discounts, deals and early access.
I feel it’s worth elaborating that there is a third: Nintendo Switch Online. However, this service largely acts as a gateway to online gaming, a source of expansion packs for first-party titles and provides a steady stream of emulators and emulated titles from older Nintendo (and the odd SEGA) consoles. It isn’t being included with PS Plus and Game Pass in the analysis because it typically does not offer a library of games or new games.