lmfao true, but I mean I could be against something and still detach what I want/don’t want from what could actually happen.
I see where you’re coming from, but yeah, I don’t think there will be entire games that are exclusive to Gamepass but maybe features or things that make it be exclusive by virtue of other platforms not having said tech/infrastructure. Like for example, if Mojang uses Xcloud for some exciting new thing in the future, that might be exclusive to Gamepass ecosystem as it would have to necessarily run on MS’ Azure servers and not locally on any specific hardware, in those cases I think those things will be exclusive by default. I don’t see Minecraft releasing on Amazon Luna or Stadia for example, that’s where MS would leverage their ownership of Minecraft to exclude it from other streaming platforms.
But again, there’s nothing stopping Gamepass from coming to these other platforms like Switch and Playstation, they just gotta allow it which is still a real possibility but something very difficult to imagine especially on the Sony side. Nintendo’s case might be sooner than later given the rumors we have been hearing. Also, Xcloud will certainly decouple from Gamepass down the line, so it would further make Gamepass exclusivity less of a thing in this case.
So in conclusion, I don’t see entire games being exclusive even timed, because Minecraft is just too goddamn big and transcends the hardware/ecosystem war that Microsoft is leveraging XGS and Bethesda for. They don’t see Minecraft in the same way they do everyone else under them. This is why I think it goes back to the whole “Minecraft was a Microsoft purchase, whereas Bethesda was an Xbox purchase”, the goals are very different, and the former’s transcends the strategies of the latter for exclusivity-powered platform growth.
When gamers will stop buying games months after release?
Similar services on the movies and music entertainment industry have exclusive content because otherwise they would not be able to sell it individually (or volume is so low that they can ignore it in favour of a new business model).
We already have exclusive content in the perks section for games like Apex, FO76, Rocket League and many more so yeah I do see this expanding as time goes on.
They expanded that ecosystem natively to pc, but only way to consume the gamepass content outside Xbox and pc already is through the subscription like the other services.
