Game pass. How to play new games on a weak computer

Back last year, Microsoft announced a new Xbox Game Pass service for users Xbox one and devices running Windows 10. It worked in the spring of 2017, but to this day it remains a little incomprehensible to a Russian user.

And in vain. Xbox Game Pass is a great option for renting hundreds of games for a nominal monthly fee that is charged once a month. But first things first.

What is Xbox Game Pass?

It will hardly come as a surprise to you that in order to play on Xbox One, you must first purchase the game. The price for one release can vary from a couple of hundred to four thousand rubles.

So Microsoft realized that it would be much more profitable for a user to subscribe to a whole arsenal of games for a fixed monthly fee.

Basically, Xbox Game Pass is a streaming service for games. Instead of buying tracks on iTunes, many have chosen Apple Music, and for one and a half hundred a month they get access to millions of songs.

It's the same with Xbox Game Pass. You pay once a month and get access to a large library of games right now.

How much does a subscription cost?

The cost of a subscription to Xbox Game Pass is several times lower than the cost of a good shooter from a renowned developer.

Microsoft asks only for access to over a hundred games 599 rubles per month.

What's more, Xbox Game Pass users can expect a permanent 20% discount on non-subscription Xbox One games and add-ons. The only "but": Microsoft offers a discount only a month after the release of new games.

But anyone can try the service right now. First 14 days free.

And what games are on Xbox Game Pass?

Microsoft Store censors estimate that there are over 1,300 games currently available for Xbox One. Of these, about 200 are exclusive to the console, and another 400 have already been recognized as classics of the platform.

Of course, none of these games are available with Xbox Game Pass. After all, this is not a premium service with access to all new items on release day. New items arrive here with a slight delay.

For example, from the upcoming releases: the shooter Crackdown 3 will be available to subscribers immediately after the release. And play State of Decay 2, released a few days ago, right now. And even the unusual Sea of ​​Thieves is available for free with a subscription.

In addition, such large publishers have already entered into an agreement with Microsoft:

2K, 505 Games, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Capcom, Deep Silver, Focus Home Interactive, SEGA, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Microsoft Studios

In short, there will always be something to play.

The catalog of games available to Xbox Game Pass subscribers is updated monthly. Acquainted with full catalog can be on the official Xbox website.

And do not forget to add support for Windows 10 to this variety with all the subsequent releases for the platform.

What about Xbox Live Gold then?

Yes, Microsoft has another platform - Xbox Live Gold. This is a kind of premium Xbox Live account with advanced features for gamers.

The main thing about Xbox Live Gold is that you can play with friends. That is, a full-fledged multiplayer mode is provided.

Plus, Xbox Live Gold subscribers have regular discounts on games and the ability to buy releases with impressive discounts of up to 70%.

But with an Xbox Live Gold subscription, free games are available to you only occasionally and strictly for a specific time, and on Xbox Game Pass on a regular basis. And the assortment of the Xbox Game Pass subscriber is much wider.

If you wish, you can get a full luxury by subscribing to both services.

Definitely worth a try

Peace console games- an expensive piece. At least for a newbie who has purchased an Xbox One, the first time it is very difficult to get used to the fact that you have to pay for everything. Also, 4000 rubles per game.

With an Xbox Game Pass subscription, you can experience the harsh reality of life a little softer. For a symbolic amount of 599 rubles a month you can get access to hundreds of interesting games.

Agree, this is much more profitable than buying each game separately. In addition, it is unlikely that you will go through the same shooter for months or endlessly cut into a dynamic RPG. Variety is priceless.

A major upgrade or buying a powerful gaming computer with today's ruble is comparable to buying a used car.

• Budget GeForce GTX 1060 + average Core i5 will cost about 40 thousand rubles.
• Average GeForce GTX 1070 + older Core i5K or younger Core i7K cost around 60 thousand rubles.
• The top GeForce GTX 1080 + revealing its older Core i7K will lighten the wallet by 80 thousand rubles or more.

We add a motherboard, cooling, RAM, SSD, case, power supply, monitor (in the case of a GTX 1080, they take a 4K screen, otherwise the meaning is lost), accessories, and the price of the initial configuration from current components with a good backlog for the future reaches 80 thousand rubles ... The middle peat is over 100-120 thousand. The cost of a top-end game assembly is even scary to count.

System requirements for games are growing, people do not have money for new computers or an upgrade, and the following statistics are obtained:

• Over the past three years, the share of eligible gaming computers and laptops in the population has declined from 23% to 5%.
• 76% of gamers are not satisfied with the power of their computers.
• 48% of gamers are deprived of the opportunity to invest in a computer upgrade, and only 6% of game fans can afford upgrades worth more than 20 thousand rubles.

What to do? Credit? The toad will strangle, the wife will not understand. It takes a long time to save, but I want to play now. Accept and play what the current computer pulls? No. Modern technologies come to the rescue.

Gaming PC as a Service

You use cloud storage, mail, instant messengers, social networks, and so on. Their work is provided by data centers. You send and receive data, and remote servers handle the processing and storage.

Distributing content by subscription is far from new idea, the history of cable channels in the United States confirms this. At the turn of the 90s and 00s, HBO pioneered the cable revolution on American television, showing that the viewer was willing to pay for quality and interesting content. Other channels followed this path. With the development of the conducting ability of Internet networks, streaming services began to develop: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu - on this moment one of the largest players, whose profits allow not only paying for the work of employees, servers and purchasing films for online screening, but also producing their own films and series with the proceeds. In addition, there are services that make it possible to listen to music without limit (Apple Music, Spotify), read books or scientific articles.

In a couple of years, Netflix has been able to pick up momentum to release 20-30 TV series and shows a year.

However, for us in in this case first of all, Netflix is ​​interesting - a company that initially (since 1997) provided an opportunity to rent DVDs and developed a website with recommendations for viewers. In 2007, they began work on an online cinema. Seven years later, in 2014, the number of its subscribers exceeded 50 million people, and its net profit reached $ 266 million. In the era of Big Data, social networks and universal Internetization, the creation and study of a portrait of an ordinary user-consumer is becoming an extremely important matter. In addition to the fact that the algorithms themselves make up personal lists of recommendations for each user from the information content already available in the catalogs of Internet sites, these sites begin to focus on the consumer in the process of creating new content. The power of social networks is that people themselves are ready to fill them with content: they themselves are ready to tag films, write reviews, express wishes for future work. Feedback allows creators to find out almost instantly what people liked (and what they didn't like), and analysis of the behavior of tens of thousands of people even allows us to find out which episode of the series people mostly quit watching, or after which episode they will definitely watch the season to the end. And this data can really help in the creation of products in the future.

Thanks to online cinemas, the process of moving mid-budget cinema has also begun - Netflix can already release films for $ 60 million with Brad Pitt in the title role. Epic fantasy (Game of Thrones) and other niche genres have long been serialized, leaving only 200 million blockbusters in theaters.

The most striking example of this approach to content creation (full focus on the needs of the viewer) can be considered a series. It's a good show, but the main complaint about it was the lack of new ideas. He averagely good, stitched together from pieces of other works and constantly gives out references to already existing films and TV series, instead of telling and showing something that the viewer has never seen. Such an approach only leads to the fact that the created products become almost mechanistically programmed for success, where every action of the character is calculated according to the formula of meeting the expectations of the audience. What becomes important is not so much the author's desire to express himself as the creation of such a product that would satisfy the viewer in most parameters. Although this is a general problem of commercialization, which is only becoming more noticeable in the current realities. And the video game industry already faced these problems.

Unlike movies, music or TV shows, games are not static works, inside them the player interacts with an artificially built environment that can be changed by the developers at any time. The interactivity of games is not only in the interaction of the player and the game itself, but also in the fact that the developer, focusing on the feedback from the community, is able to improve an existing project or use the accumulated experience when creating a new one. The Early Access idea is not new to the industry and has been actively used by indie developers for several years now. Focus groups and closed tests have not disappeared anywhere (AAA projects still need them), but projects from no-name studios are quite actively developing with the assistance of the gaming community. Layers of Fear, Starbound, Rust are those projects that could not have become what they are without passing the "public tests". But this approach has a downside: what the players want does not always coincide with the wishes and plans of the developers themselves. And since the process is interactive, then there may be much more sincerely offended compared to traditional methods of creating content.

Draining the Steam redesign project.

Largest service digital distribution Steam games is trying hard to become a platform that could help the players decide on the choice of the game. Tags, user reviews, curators - all these are small steps towards creating a system that would be able to recommend only games that are interesting to a specific user. However, unlike Netflix, Valve has yet to start hiring freelancers to rate games and fill in tag columns. And they don't have a subscription to play "all the indies of this world" yet.

On the other hand, we cannot say that the industry is far from the global process of switching to a subscription system: back in 2010, Sony and 2013, Microsoft launched their own services that allowed users to play multiplayer and receive several “free »Games. However, these services differ in small details: after purchasing the game, you can play it on Sony consoles only with the Internet and an activated subscription, on Xbox 360 it will be possible to do it without them, and all Xbox One games will "burn" if the subscription is canceled. The third major player on the console market, Nintendo, is also thinking about introducing such a subscription, but its version seems to be the most “unfriendly” - after a month the game will simply “burn out”. But they have not yet launched their service for Switch, so by its release from beta in September 2017, the process of activating games may change significantly.

Gaikai was announced with OnLive in 2009. Unlike OnLive, which vied with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for the end user, Gaikai provided a platform for manufacturers computer games, where players could try demo versions of the latest new products for free. 2012 it was announced the sale of the service for $ 380 million Sony, and on its basis PlayStation Now was made.

Also, a year before the announcement of PS + at the international exhibition Game Developers Conference 2009, the OnLive cloud service was announced, which allowed you to rent games and play them from any platform, if only there was a good Internet and a keyboard-mouse / gamepad. A little later, OnLive went bankrupt, and other enthusiasts took their place. In 2015, Sony launched the PlayStation Now service in the United States, which allowed PS3 games to be played on a PC. In 2016, Remote Play appeared on PS4, allowing you to stream games from the console to the PC.

EA was the first to offer players a fundamentally new approach, launching the EA Access service in 2014, which made it possible for PC and Xbox One subscribers (consoles to play multiplayer would have to buy Gold) to play full versions games, as well as participate in beta tests and feel the trial versions right up to the official release. And at the moment the service can be considered successful, so it is not surprising that Microsoft went the same way the other day, Xbox Game Pass, a service that will give Xbox One and Windows 10 users the opportunity to play more than a hundred games ( most of of those announced it was released before 2015 or in 2015). Despite all the advantages, the main disadvantage of these subscriptions is already visible - they are tied to a specific publisher, the choice of games is very limited, and users do not have a clear and simple platform for feedback. And it is far from the fact that these services will allow developers and publishers to get something that previously could not be learned by employees from the marketing research department.

Ultimately, it is not entirely clear whether the gaming industry is capable of changing enough for thousands of games to be distributed by subscription, and developers can focus on the data obtained from such library services. Valve may have its own analysis tools Steam profiles(but there is SteamSpy and Steam Database) and the behavior of players in individual games, but it is not noticeable that they shared it in official press releases, and it is not a fact that they are seriously engaged in analyzing the available information - their plans (which we know for sure) so far, they are limited only to the redesign of Steam, in order to establish the work of what is already available now And whether someone will do something like that in the near future is still unknown. The music and film industries have already reached the point of giving out to the user all the content they have for a moderate monthly fee, it remains for game development.

Hopefully Microsoft can change the industry, and I will one day see Ubisoft's subscriptions on my PS4.

This product allows you to activate a subscription to Xbox Game Pass for one 1 month (30 calendar days). Only suitable for new accounts on which the Xbox Game Pass service has never been purchased / activated.

With Xbox Game Pass, you'll always have something to play. For a low monthly fee, you get unlimited access to over 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 games on Xbox One. Find and download games you've long wanted to play, including legendary older editions in full quality, without streaming or connection issues. Enjoy games of all genres such as action and adventure games as well family games, hard shooters and sports simulations. Do you like the Xbox One game in the catalog and want to buy it? Buy it and save 20% and get an extra 10% off any add-on for Xbox games One in the catalog. Xbox Game Pass gives you access to a catalog with new games added every month. You can cancel your subscription at any time.

Peculiarities:

• Always something new! - Play games of various genres: action, adventure, family, shooters, sports, puzzles and others. New games are added every month, so there will always be plenty to choose from!
• Download and play full games!- Download directly to your console and play full games online or offline without any streaming or connection issues. Enjoy the games as they were intended - embark on new adventures and re-explore familiar worlds.
• Discounts on Xbox One games- Want to buy your favorite Xbox One game? Looking to purchase an add-on or season pass from the Xbox Game Pass catalog? Enjoy 20% off Xbox One games and 10% off all add-ons (provided that base game available in the catalog). Xbox 360 games do not count towards discounts.

Note: You do not need to be an Xbox Live Gold membership to use Xbox Game Pass. Xbox Live Gold is required to play multiplayer with Xbox Game Pass. Xbox Game Pass is available only on Xbox One consoles. Activation is done through a user account.

* At launch, Xbox Game Pass will be available in at least 30 countries where the Xbox is sold. New regions will be added as the catalog expands. Countries where support is offered: Australia, Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Hungary, Germany, Hong Kong, Greece, Denmark, Israel, India, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, United United Arab Emirates, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, United Kingdom, USA, Turkey, Finland, France, Czech Republic, Chile, Switzerland, Sweden, South Africa.