No, and yet Steam is still winning. Game Pass can be a sick deal but many still prefer paying just a little more on a Steam Sale to own a game forever.
I do use steam so please don't misunderstand this as bashing, but you don't own anything on steam either. You rent it for life and access can legally be withdrawn if you act against the TOS. If you're looking to buy games GOG is the only real option I know of.
I hear u on this, I'm just speaking to the real world use case. I get that Valve could shut off Steam tomorrow and that would be it, but the odds of that happening are low. What I'm saying is, if I usually take 2 months to finish a single-player game, and the game regularly goes on sale for $20, I'm always going to buy the game on Steam vs. Game Pass. That way, if I decide I want to play it 3 monrhs later, I don't have to pay ANOTHER $10 to Microsoft to access it.
And if Valve takes the game away in 10 years? That sucks for game preservation reasons, but realistically I almost never play games that are more than 10 years old.
I had no issues with GamePass for years and was like this isn't as bad as people say. Then out of the blue I started getting the Download Gaming Services error and wasn't able to play anything. Looked it up and this has been an issue for years. I tried all the solutions I could find and ended up just canceling my GamePass and haven't used it since.
This is one of the reasons I don't use GamePass, because it all goes through the crappy Microsoft Store which always gives me weird download errors, and when trying to research the issue it just leads to nothing that works.
God forbid you reinstall Windows and have your GamePass games on another drive. It won't let you re-use that partition because the games folder is "owned by someone else" even when you're signed into the same Microsoft account, and it won't let you delete it because its protected by Windows… You either have to nuke the whole partition, delete it from Linux, or go through the whole take-ownership ritual which is buggy at best.
They can't even manage to beat Steam on their own OS to be fair lol
Write a more stable gaming launcher on your own OS than a 3rd party company (impossible)
Is Steam competing with Microsoft's "Netflix but with games" service?
No, and yet Steam is still winning. Game Pass can be a sick deal but many still prefer paying just a little more on a Steam Sale to own a game forever.
I do use steam so please don't misunderstand this as bashing, but you don't own anything on steam either. You rent it for life and access can legally be withdrawn if you act against the TOS. If you're looking to buy games GOG is the only real option I know of.
I hear u on this, I'm just speaking to the real world use case. I get that Valve could shut off Steam tomorrow and that would be it, but the odds of that happening are low. What I'm saying is, if I usually take 2 months to finish a single-player game, and the game regularly goes on sale for $20, I'm always going to buy the game on Steam vs. Game Pass. That way, if I decide I want to play it 3 monrhs later, I don't have to pay ANOTHER $10 to Microsoft to access it.
And if Valve takes the game away in 10 years? That sucks for game preservation reasons, but realistically I almost never play games that are more than 10 years old.
Steam versions of games just work a lot better. If Xbox had game pass on Steam, it would see a lot more take up I bet.
Except you don't own it forever, as ISOmorph already explained.
Not yet.
I had no issues with GamePass for years and was like this isn't as bad as people say. Then out of the blue I started getting the Download Gaming Services error and wasn't able to play anything. Looked it up and this has been an issue for years. I tried all the solutions I could find and ended up just canceling my GamePass and haven't used it since.
This is one of the reasons I don't use GamePass, because it all goes through the crappy Microsoft Store which always gives me weird download errors, and when trying to research the issue it just leads to nothing that works.
God forbid you reinstall Windows and have your GamePass games on another drive. It won't let you re-use that partition because the games folder is "owned by someone else" even when you're signed into the same Microsoft account, and it won't let you delete it because its protected by Windows… You either have to nuke the whole partition, delete it from Linux, or go through the whole take-ownership ritual which is buggy at best.
Fwiw, it's actually easier to play game pass games using the GeForce Now cloud service then it is on your own PC. Which is weird.