~The Game Pass Thread~

Damn, that reminds me I installed The Master Chief Collection at some point (or parts thereof). Hope I can uninstall it at some point.

Oh sorry, I haven’t worked on this stuff for many years. I don’t even know who does at this point.

After solving (kinda) my problems, I got antsy and reviewed all the games on Gamepass, downloading a few I was interested. Which got my thinking, how many games I played thanks go Gamepass? Are we using the subscription well enough, or are we giving money to MS for free?

How many games have you played? I think this is my list

Games played at least a meaningful amount of time (some finished, but many didn’t):

Metro Exodus
Age of Empires 2 DE (not a lot, I have to return some day)
Rain on your Parade
Anthem
Astroneer
Carrion
Crown Trick
Dirt 5
Donut County
EastShade
Control
Fe
Forager
Forza Horizon 4
Gears of War 5
Genesis Noir
Halo 2
Halo Reach
Iron Harvest
Katana Zero
Monster Train
Omno
Ori and the will of the Wisps
Phogs
Pikuniku
Prodeus
Psychonauts 2
Sea of Solitude
SpiritFarer
Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order
The Artful Escape
The Ascent
Totally accurate battle simulator
Unravel
Unravel 2
World War Z
Yakuza 5

Games dropped after 30-90 mins:

Pathway
Haven
I am fish
Gonner
Call of the Sea
Zombie Army 4
Recore
Bleeding Edge

Looking it all together, like this, really makes you appreciate the service.

I still have some important games to play, pending of having time, like

Gears Tactics
Phoenix Point
Pillars of Eternity 2

I’ve played one through twice (Wasteland 3), A Plague Tale: Innocence which I’ve never finished because it makes me ill to play it too long, and Humankind which I intend on playing more of but am distracted by playing WotR right now.

That’s it.

But, at full price at release, WL3 and HK costs would be what I’ve paid for the service to date. As long as I play a couple new release games a year, it’s paid for, and it gives me the chance to play games that I may otherwise never finish or play if I owned them. Many of the games on the service I already owned elsewhere when I joined, so there potentially could have been many more.

So, as long as that trend continues, I’m fine with it. I watch the cost/benefits ratio pretty well for anything I do, so once it starts failing, it’ll be gone (much like how I dropped Humble).

For me, Xbox Game Pass has paid for itself several times over, easy.

Kind of barely worth it here so far in regards to games I would have bought but played on Game Pass instead, that number is pretty low, like under 5. Then of the checked it out because I could variety it’s been more misses than hits. If you are newer to games I think the value prop might be different, like there’s a lot of good older games on it now with the Bethesda stuff, but I played most of those years ago.

I have played one game on game pass. I got the deal that converted time for cheap, but shortly afterwards read about hard drive space potentially being eaten (on my all SSD system). I am just not into the tinkering or the headache to fix that sort of problem nowadays so I just ignore game pass even if there are games on there I really want to check out (Wastelands 3, The Assent, Gears Tactics, some Halo stuff, etc.). Push comes to shove, I’ll buy what I can on sale on Steam. Phantom death of drive space is a huge disincentive to using a service even if I already paid for it.

Is that the problem with having Delivery Optimization turned on in Windows? Turn that off and you won’t have the issue with hard drive space being used for games that are uninstalled.

I’ve never had the setting on, so have no concerns about it.

I made a spreadsheet when I had that thought too lol.

Here’s the ones I enjoyed:

  • Age of Wonders Planetfall (bought)
  • Aven Colony
  • Blair Witch
  • Bridge Constructor Portal (bought)
  • Cities Skylines (bought)
  • Crackdown 3
  • Dead Rising Case Zero
  • Deliver Us the Moon
  • Demon’s Tilt (will buy)
  • Descenders
  • Dirt 5 (bought)
  • Forza 7 (bought)
  • Forza Horizon 4
  • Fractured Minds
  • Gato Roboto
  • Gears 4
  • Halo Wars 2
  • Late Shift
  • Life is Strange
  • Life is Strange Before the Storm
  • Marvel vs Capcom Infinite
  • Nex Machina
  • Roundabout
  • State of Decay 2
  • the Touryst
  • Warhammer Vermintide 2

There’s a couple dozen I would’ve liked to play more and wishlisted for a big discount.

I’m the kind of gamer who wants to sample tons more games than I actually have time to play. Game Pass is a great way to satisfy that itch to just play something new pretty much whenever I want. That’s why it’s kinda beside the point for me to measure the value of the service by games that I played extensively or to completion. I’ve tried out tons of titles and completed maybe eight or ten of them.

I have played and finished, to completion, following gamepass games. I paid around 200 dollars for 4 years of it. So, it is a good deal, considering I will play many more.

From most recently finished:

The Ascent (8.5/10)
Psychonauts 2 (8.5/10)
Omno (7/10)
Twelve Minutes (7/10)
Injustice 2 (7/10)
Destroy All Humans! (7/10)
Anthem (7/10)
Battlefield V (3/10)
Gears Hivebusters (7/10)
Call of the Sea (6/10)
The Medium (6/10)
Halo 4 (7/10)
Tetris Effect (8/10)
Halo 3 ODST (7/10)
Tell Me Why (7/10)
Halo 3 (8/10)
Deliver Us the Moon (8.5/10)
Halo 2 (8/10)
Halo (7/10)
Wolfenstein Youngblood (8/10)
Blair Witch (7/10)
Halo Reach (7/10)
Rage 2 (8.5/10)
The Outer Worlds (7/10)
Gears 5 (6/10)
Gears of War 4 (7/10)

For me the value is not only in having all these games available that I would either never try or would buy but now don’t have to, but also in saving me from buying games that I would otherwise have bought but turned out not to enjoy. There’s at least 6 games I would have bought based on previews, recommendations here etc but I didn’t like at all as it turned out.

Wait, I thought this was a crappy game? Was I mis-informed?

I expected it to be crappy but enjoyed it, apart from the annoying bossfight at the end. Hell, I probably liked its setting and level design more than in Wolfenstein and New Colossus. Paris was great. Arkane was helping out with that btw.
I only played it in singleplayer.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the first level. I meant to go back to it, but I needed the hard drive space to install Microsoft Flight Simulator, so I’ll return to it after I finish New Colossus.

I’ve got the problem that there are too many games on gamepass that I want to play, and I lose track of them as others come online before I’ve gotten through the backlog.

I’ve mentioned this before, but that’s why I like to add tiles for every game I install to my Windows Start menu. Helps me keep track of the games I’m interested in. I barely used the Start menu until Game Pass came along.

Here’s how it looked a while back. Sometimes I rearrange the tiles by color or genre or whatever else I can think of.

I just put shortcuts at the bottom of my desktop, but I also don’t have nearly as many games installed as you do.

You could also use something like Playnite to keep track of all the installed games to.

Don’t listen to them rrmorton. That start menu is beautiful. I need to figure out how to do that. And how to get rid of the junk that’s currently in my start menu.

No wait, my wife uses the computer too. Maybe it wouldn’t be good to flaunt it as a games machine. Nevermind. I can just admire yours.

GoG’s client does this. And will even keep track of your console games.