PC Gamepass (formerly Xbox Game Pass for PC), now includes EA Play! [XGP:PC]

Sure, and SB is right that it's hard to justify the expenditure to match Steam's feature set, which is a large part of why. I just think his diagnosis of the solution is off. Trying to catch up to and create parity with Steam isn't going to work anyway. A competitor with a chance of being really viable has to do something Steam can't, at which point the feature disparity stops mattering so much. Right now that's just Game Pass. There isn't quite enough value there yet, imo, though. If they fix their issues with modding so that Starfield and ES6 can run exactly the same stuff as Steam would let you run, and/or they do something big like buy Paradox, that'll change though.

 

Well, Microsoft is removing the UWP requirement, so I think we are moving in that direction. I guess only time will tell, because Skyrim and Fallout 4 already have the mod shop built into the console version, so maybe they would consider that enough. Maybe MS will lock Starfield and ES6 to the Windows store as an exclusive, even if only for a limited time.

 

I don't think removing the UWP requirement would be relevant to Game Pass due to the necessity of having full control of access to the game's executable in the case subscriptions ending.

 

They have none. At least for now, it's all done with account verification in the support libraries.

Thus, if you create a secondary account on your PC, log on, log on to Xbox with your Game Pass-subscribing account, download games, and finally log out of Xbox... You can then keep on playing the downloaded games on the secondary account, even after Game Pass expires on the primary, as long as you don't log back into Xbox with the primary account credentials.

This "exploit" has been known for as long as PC Game Pass has been available. Might be that it's working as intended (too much hassle to make fully secure as well as pissing off multi-user household subscribers) and not seen as a major problem. At least until they launch the Game Pass family plan, or somesuch.

 

Steam manages to know if have a license to play a game regardless of if you have it installed. I don't see how this would be a limitation for Gamepass when Steam figured it out years ago.

 

The point isn't that implementing at a bare minimum storefront amenities such as Steam has will allow a competitor to automatically pull customers away from Steam.

The point is that without doing that, a competitor has almost zero chance of competing with Steam regardless of what they otherwise do. At the bare minimum they need to match what Steam provides to end users in the form of convenience and "extras". Convenience includes things like user ratings of games and user comments as well as developer ability to update news and add patch notes to the home page of a game. Things that EGS refuses to implement. After all, the thinking there goes that if a game is reviewed negatively by users than consumers might not buy the game. So don't let users review games and thus bad games will generate more sales. It's a particularly slimy thing to do, IMO.

Without such things they'll always be at best a bit player WRT consumer spending. Epic estimates that they "might" become profitable in 2-3 years, but I'd argue that they'll never become profitable until such time as they decide to actually invest in their storefront to offer at a minimum an equivalent user experience. However, investing into the storefront as Valve does is costly, and with Epic committed to just a 12% revenue share of game sales, they can argue that they can't afford to do it. However, they are dumping millions of USD into offering weekly free games as well as buying timed exclusivity. I'd argue that the money would be better spend if did a bit less of that and actually improve their storefront and client.

The same goes for Microsoft. Game Pass is disruptive, no doubt about it. But it doesn't really dent Steam's revenue. When it comes to buying games most consumers will still prefer to buy the game on Steam even if there's a discount for the game through Game Pass. It's just a generally better user experience to have the game on Steam than the Microsoft Store.

So, yes, matching Steam's user facing features doesn't allow you to automatically displace or even compete with Steam, but without it, you have virtually zero chance of competing.

Regards,
SB

 

if they copy steam user facing features, I hope they do their own twist for the UX. Steam is too confusing (in some places) and a mishmash of desktop and "big picture mode".

 

they half fixed it after spiffing brit nmade a youtube video showing how to exploit it

 

I really don't think most of Steam's platform features are nearly as important as you're making them out to be. I don't think purchasing decisions are rooted in the lack of good social chat features when everyone's using discord anyway, or content streaming when they're using Twitch. Or barely moderated and at best occasionally useful forums populated by at most a low single digit percentage of users. Or a review system that's as prone to abuse and review bombing as being useful.

Steam Workshop maybe matters, but I think people frequently assume far more mod use than actually happens.

The big thing with disruption is that it doesn't care about feature parity. If PC Game Pass takes off massively it won't be because the Windows Store is suddenly a place people go to buy individual games like they are on Steam, it'll be the place they have a subscription. And the needs of a storefront and a subscription provider are different.

Steam will maintain a lock on direct sales. Direct sales will just take up a smaller and smaller slice of the total spend. As long as the core for actually playing games is there the rest of it doesn't matter; for PC Game Pass multiplayer matchmaking already is, modding needs some work, social exists but needs some work, achievements are there, and, something else that Steam doesn't do as well, cloud save and device cross progression works extremely well. If we're looking at a multi device future with cloud streaming, console and PC, Xbox is already very seamless and Steam is both isolated and clunky in comparison.

And I think that last one will be what ultimately pushes them aside. They're not set up to adapt to changes in how and where people play. They're not going anywhere any time soon regardless. Even if they enter decline it'll be a decade+ long process.

 

Tl;dr version: the only way Steam is going to be seriously challenged is if people stop buying games on PC in favor of sub services or streaming or something like that in large enough numbers that the business model itself falls out of favor. Feature parity is irrelevant to that, because the competition won't be a storefront.

 

Steam could offer a gamepass like service..

 

They could also bring back parlor games.

 

Quake 1, 2, 3 published on gamepass PC.



Now I can finally complete Quake 2! My Monster 3DFX at the time wasn't the best GPU for this game.

I purchased the Matrox G400 Max back in the day 'cos of Quake 3.

 

I purchased a Gforce 256 'cos of Quake 3. It was the first game that made me realise my Voodoo2 would no longer cut it

 

They were pretty much forced into that, just like they were forced into modifiablewindowsapps ... but for first party games I don't see them doing it.

They will be put into crippleware non true moddable windowsapps and that will be that, the end of true modding for Bethesda games. Windows gaming will become a bad console as far as I am concerned.

 

So, for the first time in almost 10 years (basically when EA stopped releasing their games on Steam) I finally decided to try playing an EA game on PC again.

Installed EA Play. OK, sucks to have another launcher but whatever, the games in it are included in Game Pass.

Decided to start with Battlefield 3. Installed just fine. And here is when the shitshow starts.

First off. Origin sucks ass, there's just no two ways around it.

First, why is the game even opening a browser window/tab in order to launch the game when I have to start the EA launcher in order to start the freaking game in the first place? Why is a browser even needed?

Second, it launches the game minimized. I didn't even know the game was running, I'm sitting here waiting for minutes wondering why the game hasn't started. Try to launch it multiple times from the browser before I notice that it's running in my taskbar. Great.

OK, click on the taskbar icon and bring the game up. Long unskippable intro made worse by the fact that the mouse appears to be disabled while the intro screens and crap plays. I started to think it froze my computer, but I could alt-tab out just fine which made me wonder if the game was frozen. Luckily I decided to wait rather than doing an end task on the game.

OK, menu finally comes up. It's in 1080 centered with huge black borders before it scales it up to my monitors native res. Not a great experience so far.

The best for last. I can't adjust video settings. Click on Video menu ... crash. Reboot computer for a fresh boot environment, start up the game. Click on Video settings menu ... crash.

Do a cursory search in the net and it appears it might be related to having an HDMI display. The workaround was to disconnect the HDMI display. All of my displays use HDMI... Uh, WTF DICE? That might not be the actual reason, but holy shit why is this even happening in the first place? I've never had a game crash by going into the game's graphics options.

Holy shit, I was not missing out on anything by not playing EA games for almost a decade it seems.

Man, if I didn't want to use Origin before, this certainly has made it so that I would never ever consider buying a game on Origin ... ever. Up until now the EG Store was by far the worst storefront on PC. Having now tried EA's storefront, I think it's safe to say that Origin somehow manages to be even worse than EGS. Surprising since I had thought it impossible for any storefront to be worse than EGS.

I'm now wondering if I want to even try installing anything else from EA Play or if it's all as crappy as Battlefield 3.

Regards,
SB

 

Here's something to cheer you up, if you rebind the jump key you cant complete the game

 

huh, interesting that they never took out BF3's reliance of web browser. it was ridiculed by lots of people years ago

 

@Silent_Buddha try playing one of their smaller games like Unraveled or FE or Sea of Solitude to see if it's horrible all around or only especially bad for the games released in 2011 (BF 3).

 

Yeah, BF3's launcher being in a browser was terrible at the time, and only got worse. Except, they either stopped requiring a plugin or the plugin stopped being updated twice a week so you don't have to constantly manage that update along with the main game.