Passing the Buck: Prologue

In 2022, I started a weekly series, one that stretched to six months, in which I plowed through the Kingdom Hearts series. In 2023, I started another weekly series, again for six months, that involved watching all the films of the Pokémon franchise. In 2024, it was monthly for a year, all about games released in 2009 and what they say about that era. “Dispatch from the Dive,” “Pikachu in Pictures,” and “Gun Metal Gaming” were all compelling experiences, albeit frustrating at times. Difficult gameplay and technical issues were recurring issues, and more than anything else there were those unmoving deadlines. As it turns out, these are really hard—the weekly ones especially. My internal clock would be absolutely out of whack, I can’t get edits or header images from my co-writers with such short turnaround time, and between the playing, writing, and graphics it all becomes very intensive. This is not sustainable. Even the monthly one was a lot at times. And so I decided to hold off on any of these series unless I both committed to better self care and found a topic that really spoke to me.

Enter Xbox Game Pass.

Image: Source Gaming. If nothing else, Game Pass has given us Pentiment, one of the most superlative games I’ve ever played. And as Microsoft’s multiplatform strategy has led to it being on every platform under the sun, you have no reason not to dive in.

The history of Game Pass may be the history of Microsoft’s entire gaming division in microcosm. In 2017, the greatest year for games, the house Bill Gates built came up with an exciting idea: “what if Netflix, but game?” I’m being flippant, of course, since an entire library you can play with the touch of a button is inherently enticing. We hadn’t fully understood the problems of subscription services, but even now it’s hard to not see so much stuff available and want to partake just a little. And although it was kind of chintzy initially, since then Game Pass grew a grand library of acclaimed indies, classics, and Triple-A releases. Many of them have also left; that’s normal for any service based on licensing deals from other companies. We’re probably past the library’s peak. But there’s still plenty of great stuff on there from Microsoft, the many studios it has acquired, and its third party partners. And notably, at least a couple classics were only made because they were buffered by Game Pass, which has become so crucial to Microsoft’s identity that they only report subscription numbers anymore, not hardware or software sales. That’s its best contribution to the industry. Something as deliciously niche as Pentiment could get away with not making money because all it had to do was stand out. It and Hi-Fi Rush could be fun alternatives to the latest Triple-A Xbox hit, the thing that drives the real engagement.

It was also an undeniable act of catch-up. When Microsoft announced Game Pass, it seemed like one last shot of air for the deflated tire that was the Xbox One, which spent its life being pummeled by Sony’s PlayStation 4. And as it turns out thanks to reports and courtroom documents, that’s been the story of Xbox as a brand. They managed great success with the Xbox 360—which still sold less units across its life than the Wii and oft-mocked PS3—but they never “won” any of the asinine console wars that drive the most loutish of gamer engagement. They didn’t have the history, more than a couple lasting intellectual properties, and, most importantly, a foothold beyond a few countries. Microsoft is treated as this third pillar of console gaming, but they’re often a niche commodity, with poor hardware sales and few works of real cultural significance. Though I suspect they won’t accept a place in the industry as anything other than a leader, so they marshall resources beyond those of their contemporaries to force their way in. Paying to win and too big to lose. Ergo, a subscription service no gaming company could match. PlayStation and Nintendo have their own, but Game Pass is on another level.

Image: Microsoft. A common (and ongoing) trope in this era is the idea that Microsoft is always on the cusp of releasing an epochal, industry-defining blockbuster, only for it to be “merely” good and not the equivalent of a Breath of the Wild or Last of Us. Starfield maybe have sold well over ten million copies, but it’s not Skyrim. It’s not a “must have” game.

But Microsoft remained in catch-up, and Game Pass has proven itself both a bugbear and a savior. Most fundamental is the fact that it doesn’t really make money, like most services of its ilk. The profit it generates goes into infrastructure and licensing deals for all the third party stuff. As for its partners, while several games do thrive from the model, and others survive off it, all of them are deprived of at least some revenue and are stuck vying for attention in a hyper-insular space. That seems to benefit larger, longer, expensive blockbusters over smaller projects (and in general, the vast majority of our collective play time goes into old live services, but that’s another problem). There’s also the possibility that the model has a side effect of discouraging purchases, even for stuff that isn’t on the service to begin with. That and the small player base would explain why Xbox owners apparently buy fewer games. But the biggest problem has been momentum, because although Game Pass is very successful—it’s about the eighth biggest subscription service in the world—it’s not successful enough. Its abundance of games has not been the selling point to bring everyone into the Xbox ecosystem, and going by third party stats hardware sales remain sluggish. Maybe it boils down to the big ticket games Microsoft describes as “high impact”. The likes of Starfield and Halo Infinite made bank, but after years of delays, obscene budgets, and mixed reception, all while Sony and Nintendo pumped out one modern classic after another. However, I suspect the issue is more basic. See, Microsoft’s target is an insane two billion subscribers, and it’s nowhere near that and probably can’t be. But they need that target because subscription services live on constant growth and flounder without it. Of course, growth isn’t infinite because there are literally only so many people on Earth and only so many extra purchases you can wring from them. It’s a model built around staving off death. That’s not great for any company, especially not one whose games division has been operating at a loss for almost its entire existence.

So Microsoft schemed. They considered ways to introduce Game Pass on its rivals’ systems, by force if needed, so you’d always be in their economy. They started putting games on PC (and now PlayStation and Nintendo) for much needed side revenue. But more than anything else, they made acquisitions. Obsidian, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory were among the first, but they were small potatoes compared to Zenimax and Bethesda, whose 2021 buyout included Fallout and The Elder Scrolls and DOOM and Dishonored. In 2023 they went even further by purchasing Activision Blizzard King for over $69 billion, giving them the crown jewel of Call of Duty alongside World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, Diablo, and ex-PlayStation mascots Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. This gave them the lasting brands they could not organically make and ensured a wealth of content for Game Pass. It also put them in a position to make historically multiplatform franchises exclusive to their hardware, though they’ve backed away from that thanks to legal threats by the FTC and, later, that whole revenue issue. But the ABK acquisition in particular appears a Pyrrhic victory, because it simultaneously cost so much and has made them so much money that it appears to have pushed them into a tier of size and success that can accept nothing but sizable successes. Massive profits and ceaseless growth. Hence firing thousands of employees, destroying studios or forcing them into support roles, and punishing small wins because they aren’t large ones. Microsoft has always pulled this stuff, but it’s been constant since the buyout and brazenly flies in the face of the “gamer-first” posturing that executives Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond, and Aaron Greenberg took on when the Xbox One started to fail.

Ironic. Microsoft bought Activision, and that seems to be turning them into Activision.

Image: Microsoft via Kotaku. Promotional image from a trailer of Xbox’s new conglomerate. “All that stuff you love? We bought it!” Smash Bros. is toyetic and kinetic, Astro Bot is accessible and polished to a mirror shine, but no Microsoft crossover could be as true to the brand as this image.

Anyway, Game Pass became something of an epicenter of these constant shifts of mass layoffs, purchases, growth, and financial instability. A big part of that was due to Call of Duty alone; that’s the best-selling game almost every year and extremely expensive, so giving it to tens of millions of people for free badly eats into Activision’s profits. Their solution was to make multiple price hikes in 2024, severely worsen the already unpopular lower tier that I always thought exists only to give an illusion of choice, and focus on Game Pass over their Xbox Series S | X. It’s available on PC and actually better than it is on console. Culturally speaking, Microsoft has placed itself in an odd position, where their goals beyond “be the biggest” and “sell Game Pass” are nebulous and they’ve been quietly undermining their own hardware. Don’t buy Xbox since “This is an Xbox” and all that. This also means they’re actively taking part in a decade-long history of third party publishers slowly deprioritizing Xbox (Microsoft may not be sure, but mostly because it’s been outsold 2 to 1 by PlayStation, has onerous barriers for third parties, and just sees fewer sales. Again, that one might be a knock-on effect of this service). Maybe the success of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will turn things around, or maybe it’ll just reinforce these issues. Probably both. Those small, niche, artsy Microsoft works that made Game Pass special have been deprioritized in favor of more “high-impact” blockbusters. And while their entire gaming business is laser focused on this, it’s also hard not to see it as yet another weird excursion by a company long in need of cohesive direction. Will Game Pass be another Kinect, another Mixer? And more importantly, how does it fit in a consumer culture spoiled for choice and more eager than ever to devalue the worth of what we consume?

As someone increasingly fascinated by the economy of the games industry (and, if I’m being honest, desperate for any form of distraction right now), I’d been thinking about diving into Game Pass for a while. Not as a long term subscriber, god no. But I’d like to try it for a bit. And while a lot of that comes from the many indies on there, I’m most intrigued by the Microsoft stuff. There’s so many series they’ve bought that I find distasteful, don’t think about, yet for which I have some form of curiosity. Never played Gears of War or Crash Bandicoot or Forza, which is perhaps not great for a games journalist. And fortunately, there are tons of Game Pass deals across the internet; the idea is that they bleed you dry only after you’re through the door and enthralled by pure FOMO. But hearing about the price increase—at a time where several high profile Game Pass releases had left, lessening its value—really spurred me on. I got a great deal on a code for three months of Game Pass Ultimate before the price hike last fall. Ninety or ninety-one days, I dunno. Even with all the Nintendo games I normally play, that’s still a lot of time. But it also means I gotta get as much out of it as I can on my Series X. It would be uneconomical not to. Those days are mine, I bought ‘em, and I’m using ‘em. Starting today, January 1, 2025.

Image: Microsoft. Some of the games I’ll be playing, like the language deciphering mystery Chants of Sennaar, are games that fit inside my wheelhouse and would play anyway. These are primarily indies that can thrive on Game Pass through Microsoft’s at times shockingly high licensing deals.

So for as many of those ninety or ninety-one days, I’ll do my best to get what I can out of the service in our new series. Over the course of “Passing the Buck” I’m gonna try dozens of games, anywhere from a half-hour to the whole thing, and write up what I played each day. You’ll see the results every Sunday, the day of the week I’ve used to publish my previous weekly series. While I do intend to play at least the smaller games to completion (what’s the point of playing something short and sweet like Chants of Sennaar if I’m not gonna see it through to the end, right?), as well as some big ones, plenty will just be tastes. Most, I assume. The stuff I really love I’ll play more of and try to purchase after the fact, as a way of supporting the people who made them. Maybe I won’t play every day, maybe I won’t play as many games as I’d like, but I’m gonna try. Thirteen weeks, no more—like, actually no more, because my subscription will have run out and I’m absolutely not re-upping it. That’s half what “Dispatch” and “Pikachu” were. Totally doable, right? And unlike those, I can and fully expect to just give up on something if it doesn’t speak to me. I’m also going to try to hold myself to a paragraph limit; intros and conclusions can be longer, but each entry will only be between one and three paragraphs. This’ll hopefully cut down on terrible late nights. Similarly, refusing to commit to more of a game unless I emotionally want to means I’m charting the difficulty and thoroughness of this experience.

How’s that sound? Thirteen weeks, ninety days, and hopefully something worthwhile on the other side. Ideally, I’ll come out of this wanting to drop a ton of change on video games, but no matter what I should be seeing quite a lot. If you’re interested, I put down a list of everything I’m interested in checking out. A lot of this list came from the advice and input from my best friend and fellow games journalist Lily Bones, and PhantomZ2 (who also came up with that incredible header template) added a number of suggestions as well. If there’s anything you think I should try, leave a comment or shoot me a message. However, as I’m on console, games exclusive to the PC version of Game Pass are off-limits. Sorry, I guess, Quake III: Arena and Populous. And since planning for this project started months ago, it’s likely that some games will be removed midway through this series. Frog Detective, Persona 5 Tactica, The Quarry, and Somerville were all on here before their licenses expired. It’s even possible that a game I’m playing will leave while I’m partway through playing it. How potentially dramatic! And the inverse could be true; maybe I’ll be interested in new additions and have to alter the plan. That being said, in no way am I trying every single one of these goddamn things. This is a lodestar, not a homework assignment.

Image: Microsoft. I’ve always been dismissive of Crash Bandicoot and his games, but Microsoft spent that near-$70 billion on Activision, so I guess there’s no reason not to finally try the N. Sane Trilogy.

Games of interest (list finalized by December 29). Bolded are priorities, whether I think they’re culturally important or just more interesting to me personally:

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition
Age of Mythology: Retold
Alice: Madness Returns
A Little to the Left
Another Crab’s Treasure
A Plague’s Tale: Requiem
Assassin’s Creed et al. Origins and Odyssey are the natural choices over Valhalla, but Shadows—which is probably unlikely when Mirage isn’t here and it’s only coming out in a month—would be my preferred option. It looked pretty at Ubisoft’s terrible SGF show.
Avowed
BLACK
Botany Manor
Broken Age
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Chants of Sennaar
Cocoon
Crackdown 3
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
Crysis
Dante’s Inferno
Darkest Dungeon
Day of the Tentacle Remastered
Dead Cells
Dead Space (2023)
Deathloop
Diablo IV
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. I received both Dishonored 1 and 2 as gifts years ago, though I haven’t played them… I think this’ll be a fun taste.
DOOM 3
DOOM Eternal
Dordogne
Dungeons of Hinterberg
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
Exoprimal
Fable Anniversary
Fable II
Fable III
Fallout 4
Fe
Feeding Frenzy
Gears of War et al. I imagine Gears 1 and Gears 5 are the smartest ones to hit here.
Ghostwire: Tokyo
Halo 4
Hauntii
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Hi-Fi Rush
Hypnospace Outlaw
Immortals Fenyx Rising
Immortals of Aveum
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Indivisible
Inscryption
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Legend of Mana
Like a Dragon / Yakuza et al. As I own Yakuza 0 but have not yet played it, my main target will probably be Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
Lil’ Gator Game
Little Kitty, Big City
Lords of the Fallen
Maneater
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Minecraft
Mirror’s Edge
Remastered Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch
Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Peggle
Persona 3 Reload
Planet of Lana
PowerWash Simulator
Quake
Quake II
Quantum Break
Resident Evil 3
Ryse: Legendary Edition
Sifu
skate
Solar Ash
Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl
Still Wakes the Deep
Sunset Overdrive
Tales of Arise
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
Terraria
The Big Con
The Evil Within and The Evil Within 2
The Outer Worlds
The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season
Thirsty Suitors
This War of Mine: Final Cut
Shadow of the Tomb Raider, since Rise left in December.
Trials of Mana
Unravel Two. I actually own Unravel on PS4; I’ve just never played it.
Zuma