Unfortunately for Microsoft, this will not stop me from letting my Gamepass sub lapse in September. COD on gamepass represents a good deal for those who already have gamepass and a bad deal for everyone else. If you only play COD, subbing to gamepass is a bad deal because you'll end up paying 3x the price to play the game that you could have bought outright. If you play COD along with a variety of other games and aren't currently subscribed to gamepass, it's unlikely you'll do so for COD. Why? Because up until the announcement of COD, the gamepass lineup failed to prove enticing enough to subscribe.
Frankly, this just appears to me like a desperate hail mary play and a poorly thought out one at that. Over time, xbox has trained their user base not to buy games but instead subscribe. This has lead to a drop in game purchases on the platform, hardware purchases on the platform, etc. This is going to be a huge error that they'll never recover from. When this eventually blows up and they try to go back to selling COD a la carte, people just won't buy it in the same numbers. I expect xbox to get an initial uptick from this and then a slow decline to a worse position than where they started.
Bobby K said himself, game subscription services are value destructive. Thus will almost certainly kill what's left of xbox and lead to demise of the executives that greenlight this endeavor. Gamepass will not offset the sales revenue and this will have a negative effect on COD sales on other platforms. You can bookmark this post. In 3 years, this will go down as perhaps the worst idea in the history of Xbox.
Finally, after trying Gamepass for 3 years, I've arrived at the conclusion that it offers no value. Microsoft studios for the most part release very poor by the numbers games. The second reason is that Games are not like music, TV shows, or movies. It's hard for the average person to juggle multiple games at once. As a result, it's more cost effective to just purchase the games you want. The average gamer purchases 2-3 games per year and owns about 10 games at the end of the console generation. As a result, it makes 0 financial sense to subscribe to a games service. I purchased a series s for my brother and sister in law while letting them use my gamepass subscription. They barely use it. I let my other brother use my gamepass for his pc and he barely uses it. When he does, it's to play the same set of games with his wife. In the end, I just gifted him the games on steam.
I wish Microsoft best of luck but, it's hard for me to see how this works out positively. In an Era where epic and sony give away games for free, game prices drop quickly after release, the biggest games like fortnite are free, it's hard to make a compelling argument to subscribe to a games service.
