PixlBit

I guess the future of games is subscriptions. I'm not opposed to it. 

When it was first bandied about, I was totally against it. "I'm not giving up my physical games." I said. Now I'm totally on board. I think it was that Microsoft had day-one titles from their first-party studios in Game Pass, That did it for me. Game Pass has already saved me money this year.

I feel bad for physical sales, but I can't really afford them right now anyway. Plus, I like the ease of having a game ready to go at any time without putting a disc in. 

My friend Mark, though, is still deadset against it. I tease him about it now. How things have changed. 

I'm gonna have to side with Mark on this one. I hate the games-as-a-service model. Games get pulled as soon as they stop making money, you lose all your games the second you have an interruption in monthly payments. I can see where people would like it, but I will support the games-as-a-product model with my dying breath.

I'd probably think a little differently if I had the money to build a library again. The games I really like I'd want something more permanent than a digital copy which can vanish at any time. 

I've been using Xbox Game Pass Beta on PC since it was announced. It's cool. The only caveat I see is that so far I can't mod any files because they're encrypted, and I can't back up the save files myself.

Interesting. I'm hoping I can either upgrade my laptop to Win10 or just get a new win10 device to play those games. I'm due for a new laptop or PC. It's just about a decade now on this old laptop. Actually, it's exactly a decade. I bought this thing Auguest 2009. 

I wonder about phone games. I heard Microsoft made some deal with Samsung recently to get MS software on Android phones. It'd be cool if I could play some phone games through Game Pass. Maybe they're working on that?

Knowing Microsoft then they're probably working on it haha.

I'm kind of out of the loop on Xbox stuff anymore, so what's Ultimate?

Ultimate includes: Gold membership, which gives you online play and several free games every month; Game Pass, which is a service that offers 150 games to download for free; and PC Game Pass which lets you play any PC compatible title in Game Pass. I had Gold and Game Pass before. Now I just added the PC stuff too for the same price. I'm going to try something on my old laptop sometime soon and see if it works. I'm guessing it'll require Windows 10 though.  

I just checked it out on their website and this sounds like a heck of a deal. That's a lot of games to play whenever you want on both console and PC. This would be fun to give a try on the PC but as it is right now I'm stuck on Gems of War

I've begun to have my hard drive always filled with several games waiting to download. It's a little bit much at times. Sometimes I wish for the days where I had only one game to play.