Ha! Yeah, that popped up today for me on YouTube. It’s a good ad.
Yeah, unless we have a world of parallel universes in which we can A/B test, we’ll never be able to say with absolute certainty. But now with Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 both topping the charts in their respective months despite also being available in Game Pass really undercuts the presumption that Game Pass would kill full-priced copies.
SoD2 hitting #1 is even more impressive once you realize that NPD’s chart tracks revenue, not unit sales, so its $30 means it had to sell ~2x when the 2nd place game did if it was full price in order to get there.
Here I am, sitting here staring at a screen telling me my pre-ordered copy of NieR:Automata is due to unlock on the 25th. Well, it’s the 25th and I can’t play… oh wait, what’s this? It’s due to unlock at 9pm PST?
What the hell? Why did Microsoft change this? Why not call this the 26th (midnight EST) like they used to? I got bamboozled by this new formatting.
Thought this was interesting:
Technically it’s a demo, they’re saying, so no achievements. Not that it affects my interest, just thought it was worth mentioning.
Specific time gated releases has been a trend for a while now. At Blizzard we knew North America came online at 9PM Pacific / Midnight Eastern for a launch. Doing it this way helped us (theoretically) prepare for the release.
Unlock times are 100% up to the game developer to decide, and Microsoft offers them the tools to do whatever kind of release they’d like. Sometimes developers choose a worldwide simultaneously release, other developers choose a rolling release which gradually unlocks over time in each territory.
The store page will show you whatever your personal unlock time is depending on how the developer configured it.
Just a few more days until it’s July, will Next Up Hero still be released this month as part of the game pass?
OMG. I’m going to be playing so much SWOS.
Surprised we haven’t yet gotten a July GwG announcement. Gotta be imminent.
Yeah, it’ll be on the 28th.
Hmmm, SWOS isn’t showing up for me in Ready To Install and in the shop it wants me to pay for it. I definitely had it on XBLA. Seems from various threads on the internet it’s a fairly common issue.
A few good additions to Game Pass in July -
Nice! I’m looking forward to checking out Vermintide 2, I think @Jason_McMaster really liked it. Hopefully it’s good in single player, not just multiplayer.
Also look forward to trying Abzu.
My game pass ends near the end of July. This is a good reminder that I should stop playing my current round of games and go back to Game Pass games before time runs out. Then I go back to the other games I’ve been playing.
So that should be (currently):
State of Decay 2
DiRT Rally
TheHunter: Call of the Wild
Mad Max
DMC
In the off chance you’ve forgotten, might I remind you of the existence of Microsoft Rewards? I don’t pay for Game Pass or Xbox Live anymore, just a few Bing searches each day. Some may disagree, I consider it a fair trade.
Oh yeah, I stopped that back when they stopped giving out Microsoft points as rewards back in 2013 I think. It was a huge relief, not to have to think about what to search for on Bing.
I suppose I could try to start that again, like before, just view it like a financial transaction. My time in exchange for virtual money.
Well don’t tell anybody but I do it at work, it’s like five minutes out of my day. I nearly have another year of Live accumulated.
This may not interest anyone but me, but I’m kind of stoked to see that Ghost 1.0 is getting ported to Xbox One. I’ve had it in my Steam wishlist for maybe years, and just never pulled the trigger.
For anybody who didn’t click the link, this is a Metroidvania.
That should drum up a little more interest. I mean, I wasn’t interested until I saw it was a Metroidvania, since I enjoy those quite a bit.
I hope the game explains how a digital ghost differs from traditional ghosts.
And it’s only ten bucks. Of course it’s cheaper right now on Steam with the summer sale, but I like to Metroidvania on my Xbox.