Video game subscription services are simply too complicated

Like everyone, I have come to massively resent the insidious creep of subscription services. I started off with an affordable, shareable Netflix subscription, many years ago. Then came Spotify, then Disney+ when I had children, then Prime Video, all of which I could just about justify. Then my Fitbit started wanting to charge me to unlock features in a device I’d already bought. Google now charges me monthly to store in the cloud the photos I take on my Google phone. I pay yearly for an app that lets me look at 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. Egregious.

As for gaming: I’ve been a subscriber to Xbox Live, 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 live-service games often, or I’d probably also be handing over the odd £8.99 for battle passes. Into this already fraught situation comes Microsoft, last week, with an update to its video game subscription offer that requires a spreadsheet to understand.

There is now Game Pass Standard and Game Pass Core, two words which mean the same thing. There is also Game Pass Ultimate, and some of these options apply to PC as well, but not others. Some offer new Microsoft games on day one, others don’t; some include cloud gaming, others don’t. Also, they all cost more now. I am not stupid, and even after looking over these options several times I can’t 100% tell you what they mean and what the differences are without referring to 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 linguistic clarity that makes me want to scream into a pillow. All of these come with different benefits, but you can’t play online with your friends at all without paying. As for Nintendo Switch Online, well, it’s barely got any benefits, making it feel like a Splatoon 3/Animal Crossing tax. But at least it’s simple, with only two options, and drastically cheaper than Xbox or PlayStation.

I object to feeling as if I am paying a small mortgage to every entertainment and service company that exists. You could argue that every one of them is a choice, but it doesn’t feel like it. And outside of gaming, it’s been proven most of these services capture a market with cheap-ish introductory pricing, switch everyone over, then raise prices once the competition is far enough behind. This is why I’m suspicious of things like Game Pass in general: right now you can’t argue that it’s an enormously generous offer with a great library of games, but in 10 years, if Microsoft bought up even more of the games industry and then decided to charge you £30 a month to play Call of Duty, you’d be screwed.

I often fondly mock my partner for his unwavering devotion to physical media – in addition to a thousands-strong record collection and shelves 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 look like an act of rebellion. At least we do still have the option to actually buy and own games, despite the diminished state of video game retail.

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

What to play

I’m reviewing Flock this week, a very simple, short and anxiety-soothing game about riding a bird around a colourfully strange landscape, identifying wild creatures and charming them into your entourage. Every animal looks a bit like a flying fish, but you get a sense for the difference between a Piper and a Greeb, a Bewl and a Drupe, and some of them hide themselves really well in the environment, making it feel a little like a puzzle game where you have to work out how to find a creature from one-sentence lines in your field guide.

I thought there could have been a lot more to this game – the creatures that follow you around rarely do anything, for instance – but what’s here is relaxing and stylistically interesting.

Available on: PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC
Estimated playtime: 5 hours

What to read

• I reported last year on the Olympics’ somewhat faltering attempts to include eSports. Now the IOC has signed a 12-year deal with Saudi Arabia to host a new event series, the eSports Olympic Games . Saudi Arabia already hosts the eSports World Cup, and its Savvy Games Group has invested huge sums in various gaming companies – all of which can be seen as an expansion of its wider sportswashing efforts .

• Old-school Rollercoaster Tycoon fans, listen up: Frontier has announced Planet Coaster 2 , a sequel to its very detailed theme-park sim that will also let you build water parks .

• MobileGamer.biz reckons that only 2,000 people have paid for Resident Evil 7 ’s technically impressive iOS port, looking at reported revenue numbers. If accurate, this really does beg the question of whether there’s a market for premium console-style games on smartphones at all.

What to click

• A recipe for magical realism: Gabriel García Márquez and a video game about potatoes

• College Football 25: could this be the most anticipated sports video game ever?

• ‘Advergames’: how games platform Roblox became a corporate marketing playground

• The Last of Us has three main characters: Ellie, Joel and Gustavo Santaolalla’s music

• A child’s-eye view of the universe: Curiosmos makes space simulation fun

• Zenless Zone Zero review – stylish, enchanting and seductive

Question Block

My well of questions is running dry – please, send one in! I dug into the email archive for this query from Luke :

“When it comes to games industry layoffs, the state of console gaming and the late-stage capitalism of it all: where does Nintendo fit into all of this? As the only one of the big three that is primarily a game company, rather than a division of a larger tech company, it quietly chugs along without huge rounds of hiring and firing. Is it a byproduct of their business culture, or something else?”

There are lots of things that make Nintendo especially resilient: it has huge reserves of cash, sells consoles at a profit rather than loss-leading on hardware and profiting on games, and has incredible staff retention, which allows for the passing down 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. It is not unique, however: Japanese companies in general do not go for rounds of hiring and firing, due to employment laws.

This article from GamesIndustry.biz explains the worker protections that Japanese developers enjoy: unless a company is facing bankruptcy it is more or less impossible to fire an employee. And that’s just one of many reasons why Japanese companies have not been affected by the current layoff bonanza – the industry is stable and indeed growing over there, due to investment from China and the size and profitability of the mobile game market.

If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com .