Video game subscriptions are all the rage. Or, maybe that’s not quite right. It video game subscriptions be all the rage, in the distant future, things carry on in the direction they’re going right now.
Right now, of course, people are getting their games in more or less the same ways they always have – buying them outright, or downloading them as initially free-to-play – but right now, too, the biggest tech companies around are toying with their own, subscription-based alternatives. Google has Stadia Pro, Amazon is rolling out Luna (alongside Prime Gaming, formerly Twitch Prime), Apple has Apple Arcade, and more internally to the industry itself there are plenty more, from EA Play and Ubisoft+ to PlayStation Now and, sitting atop the monthly payment pyramid above all, Xbox Game Pass.
Game Pass is, officially, big. Subscribers jumped a whopping 50 per cent, from 10 million to 15 million, between April and September 2020 – before the Series X and S consoles had even launched – and have continued to grow in the months since, reaching over 18 million as of late January 2021. Putting that number into context is tricky – Xbox doesn’t do console sales figures anymore – but it’s over a third of the number of people subscribed to PS Plus, which hit 47.4 million this year, and you need that to play online in any PlayStation game that isn’t free-to-play. As for a share of audiences as a whole, Xbox Live has around 100 million active users as of this year, Steam has over 120 million, and PlayStation about 114 million. In brief: 18 million people out of a 100 million-odd, on a premium subscription? Big.
The reasons for that kind of still-quite-early success (it rolled out gradually from mid-2017) are obvious: Game Pass is a steal. Right now, for £11 a month ($14 in the US), you get the online multiplayer and free monthly games of Xbox Live Gold (notably, the subject of a major price hike, then instant reversal, from Microsoft last month); plus EA Play’s 84 games and 10 per cent discount, plus the actual meat of Game Pass itself: more than 400 games, with 300-plus available on console and 200-plus playable on PC; plus a discount on permanent ownership if they leave the collection; plus day one access to every first-party Xbox game to come; plus, finally the ability to stream about 200 of them. There are caveats – a lot of those 84 EA Play games are your FIFA 15s and UFC 2s, for instance – but still. With those two subscriptions alone coming to around £70 for a year, and one brand new game at launch like, say, Halo Infinite, now reaching £60-70, some quick maths says £131.99 a year for it all is, by most accounts, a bargain.