written by owen on 2025-Feb-11.

Just like many subscription services one has to ask themselves; "is it really worth my time or am I paying for something that is just sucking me dry?".  If you compare Game Pass (GP) to Netflix you might think that games are just like movies but there are not.  A game is an interactive story often 20+ full hours long - depending on how you play.  The time spent is up to your involvement more than the director/writer's skills at wasting the viewer's time.  Games are a directed form of "choose your own adventure".  Some games can be 100 hours if you really want to dick around.   Since you have to keep paying for the service in order to play the game you might as well buy the game and be done with the relationship.  But it might not be that simple. 

Access to a large library of games

It is true that you have alot of choice, similar to when we had game demos in the past(free) or game rentals from blockbuster(paid).  I guess making a game demo became too costly for the developers so they stopped doing it - I am not really sure why they stopped. A game demo is usually smaller than the full game which is good for consoles with limited data storage and slow internet transfer speeds.  Why download the full game if there is only a 50/50 chance you will buy it?  Small demos seem like a win-win for everyone involved.

A paid demo service

Many advocates say that the GP is a good way to test out games that you have never played before and would never get to play - most likely because there are no demos or rental services or ways to borrow physical games - because you never buy games.  So who is really to blame for this?  GP is actually worse than game demos because instead of downloading a small version of the game you need to download the full game in order to test it out.  With the current file size of modern video games you are looking at a huge download which may take some time depending on how fast your internet is and also how fast xbox lets you download the game (yes its limited).  So there is this lag time between finding something you are interested in and actually getting to play it.  A GP game can range in size from 20gb to 150 gb in size so you could be waiting a little while before you get to play something new.

I just like new games

Games are not like movies. It usually takes about an hour or 2 before a game gets really interesting and before you get full access to its features.  Movies tend to front load themselves to try to catch your interest in the first 10 minutes - plus movies are shorter than games.  Even multi-episode mini series are shorter than most games.  There are even game trailers you can watch - for free - that allow you to get a taste of what a game is like before you actually play it.  Some people get game recommendations from friends but at that point they could just lend you the game if they already bought it.  There are game reviews, podcasts, and many ways to find interesting games, GP is probably the worst and most time consuming way.  it might even be a trap for unsuspecting gamers.  Unless gaming is your only hobby

Hidden limits

If internet speed and file size is not an issue (which you will never know until you are in the thick of it) there are other things that limit what you can actually do on GP.  Storage is another major concern  If you like huge, graphically intense games like COD or MW you are looking at a 150gb download per game to save on the console's limited data storage of 512 gb.  You could delete each game after you test it out or spend extra for additional data storage.
So there are only so many GP games you can have on console at any one time, you can swap between them but never share them with other friends or family.  No multi-tv, multi kids, multi-room setup.  Let's say in the best scenario you download 6 GP games; you need to slowly search through the list, pick them, you wait for them to download, you play each for a couple hours.  By the time you actually get around to trying something else the month of GP would have already expired and you only played 6 games.  
It is like having an "all you can eat buffet" but you only have one mouth.  A full supermarket but small shopping carts.  Of course this is all part of the FOMO.  Xbox knows that you can only do so much in one month.  Having access to 420 games at one time only seems good on paper.  You are fighting a losing battle
Let's say you find a game you like, but then it rotates off the service - what do you do then?  You have limited time to play it!  So either you buy it or take the risk that it doesn't get delisted and replaced with something random or another old xb360 game.

The FOMO trap

So here is the kicker; you have access to all these games but you cannot play them all - not even 10%.  At most you can probably play 10 in a month  - but you still get that fever rush because your brain is fooled into thinking you can actually play all of them.  You blame yourself for not spending enough time to find the needle in the haystack.  It's not totally your fault, because the haystack itself is shifting around slowly in order to mess with your brain - every month there is a new thing, a new day one drop that you must play.  It is a similar situation with mobile gaming; there are a mountain of choices but all of them are basically different ways to waste your time.  Look out, your month of GP is nearing its end. What do you do?  You spent half the month browsing the game list, looking at thumbnails and adjusting filters.  Maybe next month you will find that one interesting game or 2 or 3.  The cycle repeats.

Conclusion

If you want to put yourself into that kind of situation where you are trapped in a fomo cycle then go right ahead - misery loves company.   It's often a case where you are not the one trapped but someone else has unknowingly recommended you into a trap - such is the case with these services.  Someone might go in thinking they only going to test out a few games and quit but then flash forward 10 years later you are still paying for a service that you are either not using or keep active just in case something pops up that you "might" like.  FOMO = Fear of missing out

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