Microsoft announced earlier today the Xbox Game Pass– a great subscription service that, for the low price of $10 a month, gives users carte blanche access to a library of over 100 Xbox 360 and Xbox One games from Microsoft and third parties, allowing you to download and play them at will. It’s a great service, and one of the better examples of games as service- it is also apparently a threat to specialized game retailers.
You see, the announcement of this service has apparently sent share prices for GameStop, the largest retailer of video games in North America, tumbling. GameStop’s stock price has dropped by almost 8% since the service was announced, Venture Beat reports, with investors presumably being spooked by the threat of what Xbox Game Pass could represent for new and used game sales (which are GameStop’s bread and butter for generating revenue).
Their fears are not unfounded- for the casual user, it is entirely possible to simply buy an Xbox One, subscribe to Game Pass, and never actually have to buy a game after that. 100 games is nothing to sneeze at, and presumably, the library will continue to expand further, too.
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