If you thought this was too good a deal to be true, I guess Microsoft agreed. A short excerpt:

"You can no longer claim a trial of Xbox Game Pass for £1/$1, just days ahead of Starfield, the year’s biggest Microsoft launch.

“The option has been removed from Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass sign-up website (thanks, XGP). Now, you must simply pay the full amount for your first month.”

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      1 year ago

      17 a month. If the game has enough content and you don’t have a lot of time, you might end up paying more than you would by outright buying it.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          Looking at my game purchases a year and as a pretty heavy gamer, I come out just over the cost of game pass. Big thing is that I get to keep my games without needing to re-up the subscription.

          Yeah right now when there’s a lot of games coming out it seems great, but middle of COVID I remember nothing was coming out, and I would have had to keep paying for the games I had already played.

          Nah, I’ll gladly keep buying them.

      • ampersandrew@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        You could. But that’s also if it’s the only game you play and you don’t boot up Sea of Stars, Quake, Halo, Goldeneye, Yakuza, Unraveled, or what have you. I don’t have a Game Pass subscription, but the math on it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.

        • TheEntity@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          In this scenario above, playing Starfield and it being too enormous to finish in a month or two, you’d hardly have any time to enjoy these other games either.

          • ampersandrew@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            You could spend all of your free time for one month playing Starfield and have finished it for $17. You could functionally “rent” 17 games for $1 each to get a feel for each of them, one of them being Starfield, to decide which ones you want to stick with. You could beat two smaller games each month and spend the rest of your time playing Starfield, and four months later still come out ahead of the $70 Starfield would have cost you. There are lots of ways that math works out for you to come out ahead.

            Baldur’s Gate 3 came out less than a month ago, and I already know at least two people on my friends list who’ve beaten it, plus several others who put over 60 hours into it in the past two weeks, according to Steam. There are plenty of people who could get through Starfield in one month for $17.

        • bermuda@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah my dad only ever plays one game at a time so I can definitely see him setting aside a whole month for starfield if he gets it

        • Pigeon@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah. If you play a lot of little indie games, and tend to only play through them once, it’s an absurd bargain.

          It’s also great in that you can try a lot of stuff without having to research it at all first, so you get really nice surprises sometimes. And you can try things risk-free, so sometimes I’ll try something I wouldn’t have expected to like and wouldn’t have bought and be pleasantly surprised. It can open up entire genres to people this way, as an intro to different types of games.

          I do tend to buy a month or two, drop out, then buy another month when the catalogue is different though.

      • ram@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        $9.99 for a month of gamepass PC, or $10.99 for console (ultimate you’re paying for cloud access or online play, so it’s a disingenuous comparison) You can play starfield for a month, then buy it for 20% off through gamepass, so $55.99. $55.99+10.99 = $66.98.

        So you basically get a $11 month-long trial, then $2 off the full price if you decide you like it enough to keep.