You can gift games on Xbox?

I do not like day one games with Game Pass. Gears of War: E-Day is a product I am very much looking forward to. With a reported budget of 400 million dollars and it being only available on platforms that don’t require you to pay for it, the project is guaranteed to never be profitable. I’m not bothered that it’s an exclusive, I have both a gaming PC and an Xbox Series X. While the argument can be made this much shouldn’t be spent on creating a single video game to begin with, it’s certainly not wise to sell E-Day this way. There will be some who claim that I or others “shouldn’t worry about it”, but I think that’s reductive. Not only is it obvious that many of us have a passion for gaming that far exceeds playing them (we enjoy the industry itself) but I also want these products to succeed. I do not mind paying money for the games I play. Wouldn’t we rather pay full price for games we love and/or allow them to be on other platforms if it means the teams behind these projects get to make more and be rewarded handsomely? It’s also an age old rebuttal to say “but no one minds when PlayStation and Nintendo have exclusives” which drags the entire conversation down to the lowest common denominator of console warring. Insanely high budgets aren’t smart for any company, but let’s not pretend they’re in the same position as Xbox. If God of War: Laufey costs $400 million it will sell to an audience of over 100 million PS5 consoles and will not be given away on a subscription service. This is a massive difference. Player’s also spend far more per unit on Sony’s ecosystem than Microsoft’s, leading to additional revenue streams of consequence past the expensive AAA game release. When it comes to Nintendo, their budgets are dramatically cheaper to begin with. Their software will also sell in the tens of millions far more frequently than their competitors. Look, I love Xbox and I love a good deal, but day one AAA Game Pass games haven’t made sense for a long time and I’m not entirely convinced console exclusives do either. I think hardware needs exclusives to sell, but E-Day on an Xbox Series X|S in a time when the consoles are too expensive to produce and a small number of people want to buy them to begin with is not it. Game Pass was a great Hail Mary early on, renewing interest in the brand with an extremely affordable price and budgets that hadn’t ballooned beyond all reason, but those days are long behind us. Countless acquisitions have been made to feed the machine, including Call of Duty which was fought in court for only to be removed from the service within two years after everyone told them it would never work. The Game Pass experiment failed, it’s time to move on.

From warm days in Paradiso to cool nights in Neon, our photo themes are focused on friends and fun this June. Share your pics each weekend w #StarbornSaturday and tag us for good measure Catch a smile out there Captains!! 🫡⛱️🌃 #Starfield @StarfieldGame

Xbox's strategy so far under Asha seems to have been just cheap wins and chasing their tail. I'm not sure why they feel so inclined to talk so much and do interviews, but they should probably just stay silent until they have a plan in place. If people in the industry are confused about what they are doing, I can't imagine how confusing it is for a casual gamer.

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