Are people dumb? How else will microsoft fund their AI features for another additional 2 weeks?
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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I was thinking about giving it a try for a while, the PC version, anyway. Won't be doing that now.
Literally had the convo with someone to get it Saturday, glad I didn't jump on it
I was considering canceling anyway since I found myself using it less and less, so this was a good deciding factor.
Why do people even play on consoles? Just build a PC and be done with this shit.
Building a PC that can compete with a console costs like 4x as much as a console. A modern graphics card alone costs more than a console
Every time I ask someone to show me the mythical build that performs as well as a console does while costing less, they either disengage because they realize it's impossible, or they come back with a $600 build that performs just about as well as an Xbox One
3070 ti can be bought used and does the trick. Also you can find a PC on marketplace for a few hundred. And upgrade the GPU. You’ll get a PC going for just about what a console costs now.
My wife and I have been slowly over the last few years finding ways to cancel our subscriptions and just own things. If I want to play a vintage game, I buy a physical copy and boot up an emulator. We also set up navidrome and started collecting discs to rip. My wife backed up her spotify playlists before cancelling and we're trying to find a way to link them to music tracks that we own and make a list of what we're missing.
Not a terribly challenging task, but I looked around online to see if anyone else was doing it. What I found was dozens of projects going the other way. People saying "I'm looking to ditch my MP3s and move to Spotify."
It's certainly less work, but I wonder how all of these people will feel when they're locked in and their monthly costs for these services increases and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
Definitely not alone. For the music I've rediscovered record stores. They're great ways to fill in the gaps of your music library while also discovering new music. I buy CDs and take them home now, happy to keep them on my shelf.
I switched to music streaming (Qobuz) because hi res is too expensive for the amount of music I listen to.
Movies are Garbage quality in streaming though, buying a Blu Ray is so much better and I don't watch many movies anyways.
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Right. Microsoft’s website is struggling. The same Microsoft whose core business model is selling server/cloud infrastructure? Yeah, I definitely believe that.
Counterpoint:
Do you remember Xbox Live?
The thing I hate the most about XBox live is it convinced Sony that they should make the PlayStation network paid for as well.
Sure I know someone has to host all the shit, but man it sure would be nice to play games without having to pay for other services after paying for the game.
The number of games you can play offline seemed to plumit after Microsoft/Sony made paid for network access.
So, I actually used to work for MSFT a decade ago.
The uh... Xbox people and the corpo business people were, once upon a time, wildly different kinds of people, literally problematic 90s pc gamer dude bros vs ex IBM stodgy walrus people.
Basically, the walrus people won, made all the big boy business decisions, and things rather rapidly went to shit in terms of the business decisions being just insanely corpo.
Like uh, at the time Xbox Live came out... well there was this whole other paradigm for online video gaming set by Valve, but uh... lets just say you shouldn't talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus.
I didn't really have that important of a role, but lets just say I knew that half of Xbox 360s were coding 3RR or faulty in some way that necessitated a complete replacement (they'd just swap your hardrive into a new model and claim they refurbed it LOL) ... yeah I knew that about a decade before that became wider public knowledge.
But anyway, here we are about 20 years later, Valve is having MSFT's cake, eating it too, and the remaining husks on the gaming side of MSFT absolutely know they are fucking cooked, and are fully in the 'suck all the money outta this shit while we still can' phase, before the entire concept of MSFT gaming basically transitions to more or less a legacy system.
They're rapidly headed toward just being a B2B oriented company, maybe they'll use their hoard of IPs to effectively liscense out game dev, but when 'everything is an Xbox', fucking nothing is and they know that.
Game server uptime isn't as profit able as business server uptime, either pump those numbers up or your branch of MSFT goes the way of the Windows Phone and Zune.
You know they are like, massively downsizing, right?
Yeah, Seattle (and environs) is looking fairly fucked these days with Boeing imploding and all the major tech companies doing mass layoffs, BelRed property values are probably gonna tank lol.
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They most likely, and purposefully, relegate few assets to a cancellation page.
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Jesus Fucking Christ, it was $4.99/month a few years ago; what did Microsoft expect? Even at that price it was hardly worth paying for...
I haven't paid a subscription for entertainment for a handful of years now, but now I'm starting to understand why people are canceling streaming services en masse. Disney+ was $6.99/mo back when I had it but I heard it's also $20-something a month now too. People just needed a good excuse to cancel, and now they have one.
When was game pass ever $5? I always remember it being 10.
Theoretically, now that Microsoft owns half the AAA studios, you could expect Gamepass to have a lot of day 1 AAA games.
Unfortunately, they just bought all the studios and... ordered them to stop making games or something.
I'd cancel if I hadn't done it several years ago. Oh well.
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This is the endgame of all subscriptions. I have not one. Purchase where they will let you purchase without DRM, for the rest: 🏴☠️
Unfortunately piracy doesn't help the people who need it here. Hard to pirate on an Xbox, and Xbox players aren't generally the type to just ditch the ecosystem where all of their game progress and friends are just to jump to a platform they have no experience or history with
Switch to gaming on Windows? Windows sucks compared to Linux, but for people who don’t wanna leave the ecosystem, Windows should be quite compatible with most Xbox games and multiplayer. Also it’s absurdly easy to pirate games on using a .site like fitgirl-repacks
Two problems: I'm a console player because I have no money for PC parts, so I'm priced out already. But also, if I did have a good computer, I'd have to convince my friends to all pick up PCs as well, and I think they'd sooner quit gaming altogether than switch to mouse + keyboard
It was always going to end like this. If you're surprised, I hope you learned a valuable lesson.
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Oh yea, I knew I forgot to cancel something after switching my gaming pc to Linux.
I was planning to cancel it a while ago but this actually made me do it.
Why?
- because of life obligations I consider myself lucky if I can play something once per week.
- with the money that I spend on the subscription I can buy a (more) older game(s) and keep myself entertained for half a year.
- having the latest releases is nice, but I can wait one year and buy it on some sale and if not... mneh... Whatever...
- sure you get hundreds of games with Game Pass, but most of them are either noise or not my type of genre.
- fuck Microsoft.
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Hah oh man I hope this is indicative of a Great Cancelation Event coming to punish all the capitalists, where we take the relatively minor power we have a individuals and combine it to smash the fuck out of them.
The Kimmel Disney thing showed people that we have the power at the end of the day, I hope these XBox games can hang tough and kick Microsoft right in the dick.
(Also maybe give these conglomerates some second thoughts about buying another company...)
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The inevitable, it was always going to rise, it was loss-leader to get market share.
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This was just the reminder I needed to cancel as I moved over to Linux and they don't support Linux or have an app. Didn't realize that it was going to go up again.
Just cancelled my subscription and 365 subscription. $360 back in my pocket every year.
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how about not having to pay for playing online on the console? i know this is about ultimate but i am still pissed that i have to pay everytime i want to play something else online then fortnite
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I used to think Game Pass was a good idea but more and more I rather owning my games.
(yeah, yeah, I know, you're only buying a license)
Unless its from GOG of course, because then you really do own your game
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GOG. It’s not all games, but you can own some of them. Steam, in spite of the CEO that keeps it decent, started this lease under the guise of buying model.
That said, subs are much worse. If the Disney/Kimmel situation taught us anything, it’s that boycotts work.
Subs are costing most Americans, on average, $300/mo. (More Perfect Union covered it.). That’s a monthly grocery bill for 1-2, if you buy right and cook. Subs are part of the “squeeze” that siphons money to the top 1%.
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WHAT? I didn’t fucking know that. Shouldn’t they notify you of shit like that? Me and my wife are both cancelling ours for sure.
Maybe I'm too old, but I never understood the appeal of game passes, you can't play hundreds of games at the same time unless you have nothing else to do in your life, and most of them are garbage anyway.
Only reasonable subscription model to me is MMOs, because those require a complex infrastructure to run, but non-MMO games? No thank you, I'll just turn to indies that still sell games without any live-service bullshit.
When a new game costs 60 bucks, just paying for a game pass and have access to a random library seems appealing. It's also a nice way to try and discover games I guess. I never used it.
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Microsoft on BDS list: 
Microsoft make treat bigger price: 
No more mr nice guy
Even if 1/3 of their subscribers cancel they still come out ahead because of lower infrastructure costs. i doubt they are going to see a 1/3 reduction in subscribers, so capitalist exploitation and enshittification will win again.
It's still better for people overall if the parasites take larger sums from fewer willing idiots compared to them taking less each from more people, even if their bottom line is unaffected.
There's been a glitch on my Xbox where I haven't paid for one pass in 10 years but still have access to all the game. I never intentionally subverted the rules but it somehow happened
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