Despite owning an Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, I wouldn’t by any means consider myself an Xbox gamer. For the past 20 years, if a game could be played on PlayStation or PC, I’d play it there. If it weren’t for the exclusives—and the fact that I got both my 360 and Xbox One for a hundred bucks each—I’d probably never have touched an Xbox in the past decade.
However, a few weeks back, I saw the Halo Infinite story preview trailer. This reminded me that while I had played every main series Halo game—including ODST and Reach—I had never played Halo 5: Guardians. So I set about rectifying that. After a quick online search, I discovered that even though every other Halo game had been eventually released on PC, Halo 5 was still an Xbox exclusive. I looked at buying the game used as well as buying it on the Xbox store but wasn’t sure I wanted to spend $20 on it. Then I remembered that Xbox Game Pass exists.
Now to be clear, up until this point, I really didn’t know what Xbox Game Pass was. I never really paid too much attention when I heard people talking about it. I just passively assumed that it was the same as PlayStation Now—like that for a fixed monthly fee you could stream older games to your Xbox.
So I looked it up and found out how wrong I was. It’s more like PlayStation Plus than PlayStation now—only instead of 2 free games to download a month, there were dozens of games to download with new ones being added (and older ones being taken away) monthly. But the good news was that it had Halo 5 on it and the first month was $1.
It was only after I finished Halo 5 a few days later I realized just how awesome Xbox Game Pass was. Basically, the vast majority of games on the service can be played on PC—and my PC is far better than a launch model Xbox One at this point. But more than that, the new games of the service were legitimately blockbuster titles.
Using Xbox Game Pass this past month has been an odd experience. After Halo 5, I went onto Psychonauts 2. And a week later when I finished it, I genuinely felt bad for not purchasing the game—I felt guilty as if I had pirated it.
For the next game, I picked up the The Ascent. While it’s a fun enough game, I’ve quickly come to realize that I’d want to play it coop with my friends and not alone. Now normally. When I buy a game, I beat it—as giving up half way through would mean that I’d wasted my money. But with Xbox Game Pass, I’d spent only a single dollar.
This felt so alien to me and soon I figured out why that was. I’ve spent the last 15 years in Japan—a country where game rental is illegal. For all that time, I had to buy a game to play it (hence, why I still buy games on disk if I can—so that I can sell them later and recoup some cash). Being able to try out games and drop them if I’m not having fun with zero guilt is surprisingly liberating.
So while I had only intended to use the Xbox Game Pass for a single game, the service has absolutely won me over. In one month, I’ve saved literally $110. Moreover, it has a ton of indy titles on it that have been cluttering my Steam wishlist for months—games I want to play but haven’t been sure I want to buy. Now, I can try them out as I please. In the end, while I’m currently boxing up my Xbox One to put it back in storage, it looks like I’ll be an Xbox gamer for the foreseeable future.
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