I was, and there was not many from my recollection. I was just about around for the actual games crash in the 80s. Even with consolidation it’s not working out, hence gamespass pretty much being flat growth, microsoft could buy every studio on the planet, but they can’t all be making games because they aren’t generating enough revenue via subs to be releasing them all for £100/yr.
Gamespass is a great deal if:
You have little income
Your a kid
Same with ps+, I have both, I generally already own everything on them, the occasional game shows up that I’m interested in and don’t own. Just enough to warrant the sub. For kids both are phenomenally good deals.
I ran a studio back when apple first launched, and saw the race to the bottom on pricing and we now see the consequences of that. Mobile gaming revenue models have been a blight on the industry and have spread to console games. But they were necessary because the audience was trained to demand everything “for free”. Apple in more recent years have tried to offer something that addresses that with Apple Arcade, premium mobile games without all the ads and microtransactions, but despite its popularity recent reports seem to suggest it is failing, payouts have declined greatly, many games cancelled. Making people expect things that cost a lot to produce, borderline “for free” is just bad business.
A lot of the things we used to expect to be “free” things like news etc, relied on ads to make money. Ad targeting via things like fb etc meant ad revenue was sufficient to support all these free ad supported models. All it took to break that and cause exploding costs for advertisers to acquire customers (advertisers including such as MS, Netflix etc) was a privacy policy change from apple, along with vastly reduced payouts for ad impressions. We’ve since seen a massive rise in subscription models. There’s very few news sites etc that are now free, and once respected news sites reworking more towards clickbait or “first reporting” that breeds wildly inaccurate or misrepresented reporting to drive fear, hate, anger (those drive more clicks). There’s always a quality and societal cost to these things, which we overlook as consumers for short term apparent gains.