What the Xbox Game Pass price hike says about the rising cost of playing games

In this week’s newsletter: The almost 50% increase in the cost of Microsoft’s game-streaming service is step closer to the model of TV, music and filmIn the music, TV and film industries, streaming has completely upended the business model. Instead of buying albums and films, most of us pay for a few subscriptions depending on what we want to watch, and maybe supplement that with the odd vinyl or special-edition Blu-ray. This has been pretty terrible for musicians, who earn approximately $0.004 per play on Spotify, while Spotify itself made $1bn in profit last year (admittedly after many years of operating losses). On the TV front, it’s increasingly annoying for customers: in my household we have to carefully bounce around between five different TV subscriptions depending on what series we’re into, to keep costs down.This model hasn’t really caught on in video games. Apple has its Arcade service that offers premium mobile games for £6.99 a month, but free-to-play games are the norm on phones and tablets and make gigantic profits through ads and in-game purchases. (Fun fact: around 85% of all revenue in the entire games industry comes from free-to-play games, mostly in territories such as China.) Netflix packages games as part of its subscription, but not very many people play them. PlayStation and Nintendo both have subscription services, but they only include older games, rather than brand new ones. And then there’s Game Pass, the Xbox subscription service, which has offered a library of 200+ games including all of Xbox’s brand new exclusives for an eyebrow-raisingly generous price. Until now. Continue reading…Technology | The GuardianRead More