Xbox Gamepass – First Impressions

So, I finally gave in and used the Xbox Game Pass. I say “gave in” because I’m not typically a fan of subscriptions… and even that’s weird since I’m using Discord Nitro, Amazon Prime, Humble Choice and Spotify Premium – and I’m not complaining about those. But Discord Nitro is essentially why I got Game Pass. So, there was this “gift” in Nitro for 2 free months of Game Pass… So, I went there to the website to check out the Game Pass and I essentially got to purchase the first month for 1€, two extra months for free… and then I can cancel it and add the other two months from Discord Nitro to it… Which sounds like a real deal.

But even though I’m essentially paying 1€ to use all these games for the next five months… I don’t quite like it? Don’t get me wrong, I love the Game Pass… But I don’t like that I only paid 1€ for it and that I don’t know how it works. What I mean is that games can essentially be played practically for free and even if I were to pay the full price of 15€, I’d still think that I’d be underpaying it. 

The game selection is pretty big as well. It doesn’t have everything, obviously, but it’s obviously not Steam. Yes, you can buy items but that’s not the main attraction. You can even play games through EA Play… and I might actually play some Crysis, Halo, Mass Effect, Dead Space, and more because of it. More importantly, however, you can filter through a bunch of genres and look for all sorts of stuff. What’s pretty cool is that I can look up Indie Games with certain genres, capabilities, and numbers of players… So that’s quite handy. Similarly, the selection is pretty huge! A lot of games that I’ve been looking forward to trying are on the Game Pass and I just can’t help but question how all of this works. According to an article on PC Gamer (ugh, I know…), the deals are different from dev to dev. Some devs demand upfront payments while others want their production cost to be paid… and others want money based on the usage. Either way, I’m not entirely sure if all of this is fair since they don’t seem to have a fixed plan for this. 

And I’ll happily play games like Library of Ruina, Spirit Farer and The Falconeer on Game Pass as they’re pretty “out there” and I’m not sure if I’d pay money for them on Steam… but if I do enjoy them, I’d probably also buy the game on Steam to go the extra mile. I’d love to do something like that. I know that I absolutely love VA-11 Hall-A right now (post soon) but I wanna finish it on Steam, especially considering that it’s leaving the Game Pass soon!

Now, as far as issues I have with the Game Pass go… I hate the design! The colours are basically just three shades of grey with green as an accent colour. I find it ugly and it reminds me of Epic Games in some regards… and Steam’s older colour palettes were a lot better still due to their attempt of making stuff seem cool and fresh with their blues and other themes and ideas. I’d love to see a setting for this somewhere so that I could change the Game Pass window’s colours, especially since I find white text on dark backgrounds quite hard to read at times and it can feel rather exhausting. More importantly, however, I found it a bit overwhelming and would have loved to see a guide of sorts to navigate the area. Yes, it’s not that hard once you get used to it but I found it quite tricky to find the game selection for everything initially and it turned me off. 

Overall, though, I like the idea though. It’s a lot of value and I guess if developers wouldn’t profit from it, then they wouldn’t allow their games on the store. Similarly, you can still buy the game just like on Steam with the difference of Microsoft taking your money instead of Valve. And well, I’m looking forward to trying out some more titles that I don’t own on Steam yet… but I’m most likely gonna buy them on Steam as well once my situation is more stable. Hope you enjoyed this post! Did you get to try out the pass as well? Do you use it or do you dislike it? Let me know!

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!