Does anybody remember whenI started playing Hitman for the first time late last year and got hooked? Well, that is what happened – instead of playing the year’s most recent releases like a good, dutiful games journalist, I instead dug through Xbox Game Pass’ offerings, picked a game I’ve always wanted to play but never got around to, and got stuck in it. I have to make my subscription worth it somehow, and considering the vast majority of games I play in a year don’t release day one on Game Pass, the archives are what give me the most value. Besides, the more games I play, the more knowledge I have to speak on things. It’s all background knowledge, in my eyes.
But eventually, I had to set Hitman aside to play more recent games. After all, I had a2023 Game of the Yearlist to write, andHitman World of Assassination(specifically Hitman 3) is a 2021 game, so no matter how many hours I sunk into it, I could not technically put it on my list. So I put it away, vowing to myself to eventually go back to it when I had some free time. December passed in a flurry of indies and triple-As as I tried to play every recently released game I possibly could. Then January began, and so did my journey to finishLike A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. We’re almost three-quarters through the month, and I predict I’ll finish Infinite Wealth by mid-February at the latest. At that point, I would probably check out some shorter indies as well, and be able to finally have a single leisurely weekend of playing Hitman in bed till my vision blurs.
Except I won’t, becauseHitman is leaving Game Pass. So are Persona 3, Persona 4, as well as Grand Theft Auto 5. I’m not mad about GTA 5 – I played it when I was a teenager and I don’t need to play it again – but I intended to play Persona 3 and 4 at some point, and I’m just as upset about this as I was when Persona 5 Royal left Game Pass. I was 10 hours into my first attempt to get into P5R when it unexpectedly disappeared from the service, and at that point I wished I’d never started at all. If I want to keep playing Hitman, I’ll have to buy it, and honestly, I might do that. Onthe off chance that 2024 has any empty gaming months, I’ll be returning to old favourites, including Hitman.
In this sense, Game Pass is working as intended. I played a game for free, and liked it so much that I’m considering buying it now that it’s no longer on the service. That’s a win for the developers and a win for Xbox, both of whom profit if I choose to buy the game on Microsoft’s platform. I definitely don’t mind putting money into IO Interactive’s pocket, considering it made a game I like this much, so that’s not the problem here.
However, it’s not a win for me, the consumer. Much has been made aboutthe Ubisoft executive who said that gamers need to get used to not owning their gamesthe same way that we’ve gotten used to not owning CDs and DVDs. That’s a stupid statement, considering that streaming, across all different mediums, is becoming increasingly complicated and infuriating and inherently disadvantages the consumer. In television, for example, my colleague Eric Switzer wrote aboutthe difficulties of trying to stream the Pokemon animeand the different subscription services the average viewer would have to jump between just to watch a single show.
I don’t want that for gaming, and I think peopleshouldown their media. The fact that the things we pay to have access to can be retracted from us at any time with little fore-warning is bleak. Though I’ve seen multiple games I wanted to play pulled from services like Game Pass, it’s becoming painfully clear now that subscription services are more of a way to trial games for free than to have permanent access to them. Perhaps that was the plan all along. Nobody but the consumer benefits from their favourite game being indefinitely available to them for free, and that’s not going to make anybody richer, so that won’t happen. I’ll be buying the games I love, because I don’t have a choice.
