One of the fundamental problems for any gamer is, well, buying games. At $60 a pop, they’re expensive, and as retail shelves shrink, finding older or rarer games becomes that much harder. Similarly, with the death of video stores, renting games has meant subscribing to a mail order service or borrowing stuff from a friend. So Microsoft is hoping you’ll consider dropping $10 a month on what amounts to a rolling game rental.
Xbox Game Pass is pretty much an all-you-can-game buffet. Importantly, it’s not a streaming service; you download the game. When it launches, in the spring, subscribers can pick from the hundred games on the service, download one, and play until either you’re done or it cycles off the service. That last, of course, is the catch: Once the game leaves the service, you’ll either need to buy it (at a discount) or let it drift back onto the pile of shame.
It’s an interesting idea, not least because the service will feature both big titles and backwards compatible stuff from the 360 (Microsoft’s announcement mentions SoulCalibur II as a potential launch title.) But it does also raise a few interesting questions, not the least of which is what this has to do with Project Scorpio, which Microsoft explicitly mentions as coming at the end of the year. Will Scorpio have this rental service built in?
(via Microsoft)