I became a thrifty gamer many years ago and so for new games I would wait till Spring sales. But my time for gaming became shorter and shorter and I had a growing backlog. So I essentially stopped buying games and stopped playing games for a while. At that time I bought these games on the PS4 because they were the better version, but my hard drive would be full and juggling all that was a pain especially when it didn’t have external hard drive support. So it started feeling like work for some reason. I also quit my job to make games full time and so I felt it far more productive and rewarding to work on that.
But then I started again when my friends (who are also in their 40s and don’t play many games) started playing Fortnite as a way to hang out so we played every weekend. That was the extent of my video game playing since 2017.
But on December of 2018 we all decided to get the $1 Gamepass deal because it included Xbox Live for 3 months. So really it was for cheap Xbox Live.
But I saw some indie titles on there that were game of the year candidates. I thought it would be a good learning experience for myself to study these games, being they were heralded contemporary games, and to see how they do various things from the main menus to achievements to their level of polish.
So I started playing The Outer Wilds and was blown away. Then played MINIT, Edith Finch, Carrion, Dead Cells, Celeste, and Tacoma. So under the guise of studying these games I became a huge fans of them and I crave more games now. So I canceled my Netflix subscription which was $17 in Canada, and replaced it with a $17 Gamepass Ultimate subscription. It logically holds that as a game developer I should be playing more games than watching TV in my downtime. I now only watch one comedy and one drama a week for my TV consumption.
As a one-man development team I find it a valuable resource. I’m also playing some AAA titles as well to get some inspiration and to take note of how they go about things. And not every game is perfect I’m finding out things I want to avoid.
I’m also playing with a bit less pressure of beating the game if I’m not feeling it. My aforementioned backlog includes titles that I wasn’t really getting into. If that’s the case here I can just simply drop it after learning what I can from it. I have friends at work at big game development companies and they have libraries of video games where they can play pretty much any title from the 8-bit era onwards. I feel like I have that same resource with Gamepass. If I want to study the battle system of some new RPGs I can just try them out for a few hours and drop them. If I bought them for $60 I would feel obligated to play them through.
Oh and I figured out why I stopped playing games for that brief moment. I’m the sort that likes all sorts of genres and I realize that I crave certain games on certain days/weeks. Sometimes I just want to play a fighter, and others I want to play a platformer. And others I want to play an FPS game with some story like Wolfenstein. Gamepass and an external drive allowed me to jump in between all of these games whenever I felt like it. And if I bought all of these various games it would cost me $200 a month. Applying this mentality to my physical backlog of 360 and PS3 games would have me playing more games. But I didn’t realize it back then. I somehow felt that I need to start a game and complete it in that month. Gamepass sort of taught me that I can jump in between all of these games depending on my mood, much it’s like how I’ve always done with music and Netflix. I no longer have that paralysis through choice.
In short, it’s changed a lot for me.
The best part though is that I discover so many great games that I would never have played before. I have broadened the genres I play, and I play more games in general.
