Video game subscription services are simply too complicated

ILike everyone else, I’ve come to greatly resent the insidious intrusion of subscription services. I started with an affordable, shareable Netflix subscription, many years ago. Then came Spotify, then Disney+ when I had kids, then Prime Video, all of which I could just about justify. Then my Fitbit started wanting to charge me to unlock features on a device I’d already bought. Google now charges me monthly to store photos I take with my Google phone in the cloud. I pay annually for an app that lets me look up guitar tabs. Last week I tried to buy some protein powder and discovered I could only do so if I committed to a minimum three-month supply. It’s infuriating.

As for gaming: I’ve been an Xbox Live subscriber, on and off, since 2003. PlayStation Plus came later, and then Nintendo Online, very belatedly, with the arrival of the Switch. I don’t play games from live services often, or I’d probably pay £8.99 for battle passes too. Into this already complicated situation, Microsoft last week added an update to its gaming subscription offering that requires a spreadsheet to understand.

There’s now Game Pass Standard and Game Pass Core, two words that mean the same thing. There’s also Game Pass Ultimate, and some of these options apply to PC, but others don’t. Some offer new Microsoft games on day one, some don’t; some include cloud gaming, some don’t. Plus, they all cost more now. I’m not stupid, and even after going through these options multiple times, I can’t tell you 100% what they mean and what the differences are without looking at a table.

PlayStation Plus is now almost as confusing and expensive. The options are called Plus Premium, Plus Extra (another tautology), and Plus Essential, with a linguistic clarity that makes me want to scream into a pillow. They all have different benefits, but you can’t play online with your friends without paying. As for Nintendo Switch Online, well, it barely has any benefits, which makes it feel like a tax on Splatoon 3 or Animal Crossing. But at least it’s simple, with just two options, and drastically cheaper than Xbox or PlayStation.

I object to feeling like I’m paying a small mortgage to every entertainment and service company out there. You could argue that each one is a choice, but it doesn’t feel that way. And outside of the gaming world, most of these services have been shown to capture a market with fairly cheap introductory prices, switch everyone over, and then jack up prices once the competition falls far enough behind. That’s why I’m wary of things like Game Pass in general – right now there’s no denying that it’s a hugely generous offering with a huge library of games, but in 10 years, if Microsoft bought up even more of the gaming industry and then decided to charge you £30 a month to play Call of Duty, you’d be in trouble.

I often fondly tease my partner about his unwavering devotion to physical media: in addition to a collection of thousands of discs and shelves full of Blu-rays and DVDs, he also still buys boxed games on discs and cartridges like it’s 2005. But his way of doing things is starting to feel like an act of rebellion. At least we still have the option to buy and own games, despite the decaying state of video game retail.

In the future, when I pay £100 a month for the Ultra Super Game Cloud Box Plus to access and play a digital library of games I already bought a decade or two ago, he’ll be the one laughing.

What to play

I’m reviewing Herd This week, a very simple, short, anxiety-relieving game, which involves riding a bird around a colourful and strange landscape, identifying wild creatures and charming them into joining your entourage. The animals all look a bit like flying fish, but you get a sense of the difference between a Piper and a Greeb, a Bewl and a Drupe, and some of them hide. In fact well into the setting, making it feel a bit like a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to find a creature from single-sentence lines in your field guide.

I thought this game could have been a lot more (the creatures that follow you rarely do anything, for example), but what’s here is relaxing and stylistically interesting.

Available in: PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC
Estimated playing time: 5 hours

What to read

• Last year I reported on the Olympics’ somewhat hesitant attempts to include esports. Now the IOC has signed a 12-year contract with Saudi Arabia to host a new series of events, The eSports OlympicsSaudi Arabia is already hosting the eSports World Cup and its Savvy Games group has invested huge sums in several gaming companies, all of which can be seen as an expansion of its wider sports whitewashing efforts.

• Old-school Rollercoaster Tycoon fans, listen up: Frontier has announced Planetary Roller Coaster 2a sequel to their highly detailed theme park simulator That will also allow you to build water parks..

• MobileGamer.biz believes that that only 2,000 people have paid Resident evil 7The company’s impressive iOS port, when looking at the reported revenue figures, makes us wonder if there is a market for premium console games on smartphones.

What to click on?

Block of questions

My well of questions is running low. Please send me one! I searched the email archive for this query. Luke:

“When it comes to layoffs in the video game industry, the state of console gaming, and late-stage capitalism in all of this: where does Nintendo fit in? in all this? As the only one of the greats “Three is primarily a gaming company, rather than a division of a larger tech company, and it is moving forward without major rounds of hiring and firing. Is that a byproduct of its company culture or something else?”

There are many things that make Nintendo especially resilient: it has huge cash reserves, it sells consoles at a profit rather than a loss on hardware and profit on games, and it has incredible staff retention, allowing for the passing on of institutional knowledge. Much-missed former president Satoru Iwata made headlines during the Wii U era for cutting his own salary to protect staff from layoffs. That’s hardly unique, though: Japanese companies generally don’t resort to hiring and firing rounds, due to labor laws.

This article from Gaming Industry.biz It explains the labor protections that Japanese developers enjoy: unless a company faces bankruptcy, it’s more or less impossible to fire an employee. And that’s just one of many reasons why Japanese companies haven’t been affected by the current wave of layoffs: the industry is stable and, in fact, growing there, due to investment from China and the size and profitability of the mobile gaming market.

If you have any questions for Question Block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, Email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.