Thanks to years of heavy investment and development, Microsoft’s Game Pass service currently stands head and shoulders above all similar products. It has just about everything one could want from a monthly game subscription: a healthy library of legacy titles, lots of high-profile new releases, new additions practically every month and an affordable price point. Even with the recent expansions made to their respective online services, neither Sony nor Nintendo are offering that kind of value. Here’s the thing though: they could. If either company were to truly commit to building out their products like Microsoft has, then they could easily compete with Game Pass. It’s just a matter of actually leveraging their own strengths.
It’s kind of amazing thatMicrosoft has managed to propel Xbox so far ahead of its competition when it comes to this kind of product. Not only has gaming been trending ever-further towards subscription services for years now, practically all media has. Making the “Netflix of Gaming,” isn’t a new idea at all, yet Microsoft was practically alone in its efforts until recently. Starting with their massive backwards compatibility project and in-house titles, the company has slowly and carefully built their product into the service so many gamers are enjoying today. Both Sony and Nintendo have the means to do something similar, and they’re likely going to have to if they don’t want to entirely lose this space to Microsoft.
The number of games available in the top-tier does seem to be greater than what’s currently available on Game Pass, but that won’t matter all that much if said games aren’t as desirable. Sony President and CEO Jim Ryanhas stated that their third-party partners are on board with the service,but has as of yet declined to elaborate on what that means exactly. In short, if it doesn’t mean day one access for new releases, then PS Plus Premium will still have a difficult time competing with Game Pass. Making more titles available for download will need to be a priority too.
As for Nintendo, it’s probably still not looking to directly compete with Sony and Microsoft in this space, but it would still do well to offer a comparable service. For reasons known only to Nintendo, the company has seemingly committed itself to not giving its customers what they want. In some ways, it’s gone out of its way to do the opposite.
Prime examples of this include the bizarrely limited availability of games likeSuper Mario 3D All-Starsand Super Mario 35. There was and still is high demand for both games, yet Nintendo simply will not allow customers to purchase them.Limiting availability of digital products does not in fact increase sales:it just ensures that Nintendo loses out on future purchases. This doesn’t apply to Super Mario 35 since it was freely offered as part of Nintendo Switch Online, but one has to wonder why a company would actively make its product less valuable. Such actions don’t exactly make customers eager to purchase.
While both Microsoft and Sony have had now problem offering their users some kind of access to more recent titles, Nintendo still shows no sign of offering the same.The publisher is like a dragon sitting on its hoard of gold,content to sleep on it while ensuring that no one else gets to enjoy its contents. This is why seemingly every announcement of products like “Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack” has been received so negatively by fans. The company should know what their customers want by now, and yet it appears to have no problem whatsoever ignoring those desires no matter how vocal fans are about them. Until this changes and Nintendo actually adds some real value to the service, Nintendo Switch Online will probably remain little more than a barely-tolerated insult to Switch users.
It’s strange to think of Microsoft as the example to follow, but it cannot be denied that it’s currently offering the best gaming subscription service. Sony could potentially catch up, but they’re going to have offer a similar level of value; older titles simply aren’t going to cut it. As for Nintendo, it needs to let go of this notion that it always knows better than its customers. The company is sitting on a largely untapped gold mine, and it could easily offer the single most valuable online gaming subscription service around if it would stop being stubborn, tap into it and just give the fans what they want already.
