10 Video Games To Blame For The Current State Of Games
2. The "Good Enough" Subscription Game - Gears 5
First things first - Xbox Game Pass is an absolutely incredible service that presents arguably the best dollar value in modern gaming.
It's the closest thing to Netflix the medium has, and while that affords players a massive library of games at a minimal entry cost, it also has the by-product of perhaps affecting the quality of games created specifically for the platform.
To analogise the point: you probably wouldn't have paid a movie ticket price to watch Michael Bay's new film 6 Underground, but there's a good chance you were happy to watch it as part of your Netflix dues, right? It sucked, but because you didn't lose any direct money out of your own pocket, you didn't mind as much.
Similarly, Game Pass and subscription services like it can theoretically invite a general lowering of standards towards games that are mediocre or merely decent, such that because we haven't directly paid for them, they're "good enough."
For example, the recent Gears 5 was one of the first AAA games to release on Game Pass day-and-date, and while it was a fun ride while you were playing it, it was ultimately a pretty typical, relatively forgettable entry for the franchise.
Had the game only been available through conventional retail, one suspects the response would've been decidedly more mixed. Instead, Gears 5 was largely met with positive notices from a gaming contingent that mostly played it for "free."
Similarly Crackdown 3 was an abject dumpster fire earlier in 2019, but because it was part of Game Pass, nobody got too mad about it.
With Microsoft now dropping every single first-party title on Game Pass day one, one hopes that it doesn't result in games being rushed to release simply to fill up their content library, with the smug confidence that even negative reviews don't matter that much.