In the past, I’ve talked about Xbox Game Pass and how I don’t think it offers subscribers as much as it seems to. It’s not just Game Pass, though. It’s all of these monthly subscriptions: Game Pass, PlayStation Plus and Nintendo Switch Online. They all offer access to lots of games, but I wonder how many of us actually spend time enough on those games to justify the cost. There’s also the issue of all those games going away the second your subscription lapses too. So even after spending all that money, you’re pretty much left with nothing.

I’ll just come right out and say it, I think these subscription services exist solely to justify charging players for online play. Think about it. Would you keep paying into the game subscription if you could play online for free like we used to? Or heck, what if online was just its own separate charge? These subscriptions aren’t cheap, after all. Nintendo wants $50 a year, Sony wants $70 a year minimum, and Xbox wants $120! If you could have just online access for say, $20 a year, would you really not just take that instead?

The idea, of course, is that simply having access to lots of games as part of the package makes up for the extra cost, but I don’t think so. I’d say that many games are of the sort that you wouldn’t have bothered with them in the first place if they weren’t on the “free” service, and, heck, you probably don’t bother with them even now. As for the games you might actually want to play, how many do you get around to each month?

I don’t play as many games as I used to, so I tend to focus only on the games that I really want to play. I’m not really looking to browse the catalog in hopes of finding something that might be just good enough to pass an hour or two. I’m not saying that there’s nothing good on these services, not at all. It’s just that even a really good game isn’t going to be interesting if you’re not really looking to play it at the time.

This might also just be me, but I feel like ownership (or even just the facsimile of it) makes a big difference. If you buy a game, you’re invested in it. You’ve got a reason to play it because, at the very least, you’ll have wasted your money if you don’t. There’s no sense of investment in these subscription services, though. It’s all just something extra you can nibble at while you enjoy the actual product (online features). There’s no drive nor urgency to play any of it because, well, most of it you just didn’t care about in the first place.

Quick Aside: The word “buy” is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to games, especially with digital purchases. We don’t really “buy” our games on these digital platforms. Rather, we’re just getting a license to access those games. A license which can, and often has been, revoked at any time by the licensor (the platform or publisher). Outside of jailbreaking your console and backing up the local data yourself, you don’t actually have any ownership. The sense of investment is still there, though.

This wouldn’t be any sort of an issue if paying for it wasn’t a prerequisite for accessing online features. But, Nintendo’s “expansion pack” aside, it is. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who really like being able to have a full library of games at their fingertips for the cost of a monthly subscription. I’m just not one of them. I’d much rather just pay a (lower) fee for only online features than having to pay these very high prices for access to games that I’m not really interested in. For me, the value isn’t there. How about you?

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Do you like these game library subscriptions? How do you think they could be improved?

Image is promotional artwork