It's been a good while now since I last posted about how, for the average consumer, Game Pass is simply not as cost-effective as just buying the games you're actually interested in. My conclusion, based entirely on the numbers, was that most consumers would be better-served by just buying what they want.
Well, E3 has happened since then, and Microsoft and Bethesda showed off all the games that will be "coming day one" to game pass... eventually. Naturally, this has caused a lot of people to lose their minds.
Paul Tassi's take, over at Forbes, is pretty typical:
It’s clear that Microsoft is slamming the accelerator on Game Pass,
with or without a console attached to it, and they’re going to try to
not just have a large roster of old games, but continue the idea that
every new first party game debuts there, and now that includes all
future Bethesda games too [...]
Sony, meanwhile, has taken the opposite path. This generation they’re
not only sticking with selling individual new releases as they’ve
always done, not rolling them up into any sort of subscription, but also
increasing the price of their PS5 games from $60 to $70 [...]
It’s not ideal for each game you go to purchase [...] but once you
really start digging into this math, the longer this goes on, and the
more games are released for both systems, maintaining a roster of games
on PS5 is going to be very, very expensive compared to Xbox.
Let’s say you want to play 12 Xbox Series X first party games over three years, and 12 first party PS5 games over three years.
No normal consumer is going to want to do this.