Serious question for the other folks here who actually have an XBox here…
Does anyone here actually subscribe to XBox live gold, and not Gamepass here? I’m sure there are folks somewhere who do, but I’m curious as to whether anyone here falls into that category of user.
Not I, I just have game pass. Xbox Live alone just doesn’t make any sense to me, even at the current price point.
Nope. Switched to Ultimate once it was rolled out. Even at full price, I feel it’s the better deal.
Nope. I have 2 ultimate subs I have to share between me and my 2 kids.
Ultimate household here too.
My brothers don’t really keep up with gaming news as much as I do, so they were only on Xbox Live Gold for a while, until I told them, hey, you should convert your subscription over to Ultimate after making sure your gold subscription is stretched up to 3 years. And they did it. I’m not sure how long it would have taken for them to find out on their own. Xbox has certainly pushed it a lot on their dashboard, so I think they would have found out even without my prodding.
I’d expect there to be very few here, but you have to keep in mind just by visiting QT3 on the regular you are not the average gamer. Gamepass is only a value if you take advantage of it, there’s a sizeable chunk of the market that are low volume gamers i.e. they only play/buy 2 or 3 games a year like CoD and Madden, or heck free-to-play game like Fortnite, and most of these games (the paid ones) aren’t coming with Gamepass at launch anyways, so for that consumer it’s not actually worthwhile. There’s the harder to quantify aspect of discovering games you like by getting to try them, which is really just taking the onus off of developers to create demos, but again I’m not sure how much value that brings to the CoD crowd. To the high volume gamer that visits a gaming site daily, yes Gamepass is a great deal and I’d be surprised if you were an Xbox owner on this forum and didn’t subscribe to it.
Ya, I realize that we are a more dedicated community than most. I just wanted to see if there actually were any folks here who had XBLG.
Seems like the answer is no.
It’s really hard to get a handle on the market right now because COVID shortages and demand are throwing everything for a loop. OTOH, if it lasts two years than that demand “is” the demand, there’s not really a hypothetical non-COVID market.
There are really only two things i can tell about the Xbox market - there are about 7x as many reviews for Xbox Series X as there are for Xbox Series S on Bestbuy.com (something like 7000 to 1000) which probably gives at least some vague indication as to sales figures. Specifically:
Playstation 5 full - 7980
Playstation 5 digital - 1737 (surprisingly high imo, as this seems like the hardest version of the four models to get)
Xbox Series X - 7824
Xbox Series S - 1382
I do think that Microsoft is closer to Google in the sense that they’re always fussing around with services. Pretty much everyone expects Stadia to just disappear one day, but MS isn’t exactly out of sight behind them with their need to fuss with services. OTOH, the conglomerate model companies like Nintendo and Sony “feel” a bit more boring and willing to accept less optimal service design out of an unwillingness to “fuss” with their services as much. I’m sure Microsoft wants to consolidate all their services to GamePass - but, then, charging $15 a month for online access feels pretty steep compared to Sony’s (effective rate of) $5. For whatever reason (corporate inertia, competing departments and visions) it’s hard to just wave their hand and fix online multiplayer when they’re trying to hard to consolidate everything into GamePass at the same time. It’s moments like these when the Microsoft ship seems more like the unwieldy corporate glacier it really is than then nimble upstart it wants to be.
My answer is no, I don’t have XBLG because there isn’t anything I currently play online with my Xbox, and hasn’t been in a while. I don’t have a new-gen Xbox of any flavor yet either. My console time is split between PlayStation and Nintendo these days.
But if suddenly my small gaming group decided we all needed to play Destiny on the Xbox or something, I’d sign up for XBLG and not Game Pass, because I’m not interested in Game Pass. I don’t deny it’s a good value for what it offers, but I wouldn’t really take advantage of that value. I tend to rotate between two or three games, replacing them as I finish or give up on them, but the majority of those games are long investments. It takes me six months to finish something like an Assassins Creed.
I already have a backlog of games purchased during sales or picked up as part of the PS+ free games. I don’t lack for options if I want to jump to something else. So I’m not really interested in paying to expand my possibilities, without the time to actually indulge the possibilities I have.
Just feel the need to point out that if you got the gamepass, you’d get destiny for free with all the expansions and stuff, so in that particular case, it would probably be more efficient to buy gamepass.
If we played for about 3 months, I’d roughly break even, more than that and I’d be losing money on Game Pass.
Well, right now, you can get gamepass for $5/mo, so you’d be able to get a year of gamepass for the price of a single game… But that deal will be going by the wayside soon.
But sure, i think your point is valid that gamepass isn’t a great value of you don’t want to leverage any of the gamepass functionality.
However, here’s how I think about it…
So i banked 3 years of gamepass, for $5 a month. The cost of 3 games (less than 3 at the new $70 price point.)
Am i going to want to play 3 games on gamepass over the next 3 years?
The answer to that question is obviously, “yes.” With the acquisition of Bethesda, all the games from that huge set of developers, are going to be free. It is guaranteed that i will want to play some of them.
So, just with those, I’d break even.
But then i also get XBox live gold, and cloud gaming. Plus the other million awesome games that maybe i wouldn’t have bought directly, but can now just try out for zero cost.
It’s just a totally crazy deal.
It’s cute you guys think any of that stuff is even remotely comparable to waking up on Friday with a plan to double the price of Gold subs in the middle of a pandemic.
You’re so silly, Brad.
How about when they announced in September they were increasing the price of their games to $70/€80 during that same pandemic?
I was vocal about my displeasure about this aborted price change when it was announced, but now it’s just turning into a troll-y fanboy food fight of haggling where everyone falls on the corporate shittiness continuum.
That was fast. Especially for one of the biggest corporations on the planet.
That’s the big takeaway, I need to get me some.
I was probably one of the few people still looking, but if you are, this guy (bot) on Twitter, Wario64 has been very reliable if you have a Twitter window up all the time. Xbox and PS5s, as well as game sales in general. Managed to get an Xbox at Target this morning thanks to him.
Target had them in stock for a good 15 minutes before I even got to it, so I guess they are easy to get now.
Now I need a new 4k TV/monitor with a high refresh rate. Do we have a thread around here for that?
I created one 4K TV thread in the technical sub forum when I was looking for a good one a couple years ago. No doubt it’s probably out of date now, though I am happy with my LG.