The End of Ownership? (Premium)

I signed up for an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription yesterday, and now I feel like I've taken a step into the future.

It’s only a step, to be sure. The real future, the not-so-distant future, isn’t just about accessing a subscription library of Xbox games. It’s about a subscription library of games that works anywhere, on any device. That future, of course, is called xCloud. Or Google Stadia. Or PlayStation something-something. Or whatever.

But these things happen gradually, in stages. When it first launched, some incorrectly called Xbox Game Pass the “Netflix of video games.” It wasn’t that, and it still isn’t: Sony’s PlayStation Now, which lets gamers stream games over that service, is the closer fit; Xbox Game Pass requires you to download games---often really big games---before you can play them.

That distinction is critical, and it is the first important difference between the world of today and that of the future, at least here in Xbox-land. Where streaming content allows for instantaneous (or at least near-instantaneous) choices, downloading requires you to wait. The future is on-demand.

How on-demand remains an open question. Today, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate promises over 100 games on Xbox One plus another 100 on the PC. But those collections are small compared to the broader library of games available on each platform. And as bad, the collection changes over time: New titles are added all the time, yes. But titles are removed as well.

This is the way of things. Several years ago, I was visiting friends in France, and they were quite interested in Netflix, which was then officially unavailable there, so they needed a U.S. credit card and a VPN solution to make it work. Back then, Netflix wasn’t the original content powerhouse it is today, and its collection consisted mostly of middling TV series and straight to video movies, with just a handful of reasonably decent content.

My French friends hated Netflix. What they were expecting was a sort of iTunes Movies and TV shows experience, but on-demand. The shows and movies they wanted to watch were not available on the service. My response to this was that they needed to think a bit differently, that instead of expecting specific titles, they should browse through what was available, create a queue of those titles, and then choose from that when they wanted to watch Netflix.

That’s what Xbox Game Pass is like today: If you can find games you want to play, it’s a good value. If you can’t---I’ve spent the past 15 years playing Call of Duty games semi-exclusively, and there are no COD titles available on the service---then it probably seems like a huge waste of money.

Microsoft is counting on two things here. One, that the library will improve to the point where it will attract a wider audience. And two, that there are fewer gamers like me than there are those who like to experiment and play a diverse range of games.

It’s a good idea. But I’ll point out that the...