Microsoft is about to launch a bunch of somewhat fixed-length games and they want you to pay more than $1 to beat them. So, that’s my guess as to why this is happening, and why this is happening now. 20 million Spider-Man and God of War sales last generation alone, to start with. That may not get them all the “consumer-friendly” praise that Microsoft gets for Game Pass, but it does get them…millions of dollars. Sony, meanwhile, now gets to sell millions of copies of its game at $70. Microsoft already has to justify Game Pass’ offerings of new first party games for the monthly sub, but I imagine that gets a lot harder with a slate of upcoming releases that could be acquired and beaten within that $1 first month. This is the difference between Microsoft’s Game Pass philosophy and Sony’s “we’re almost never going to do big game launches within subscriptions” model.

Starfield, being a mainline Bethesda game, probably has a few hundred hours buried in it, if not thousands, like past Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, but exploration and multiple playthroughs aside, it is fundamentally a single player game you could beat in a month if you were looking to only spend a buck to play it on Xbox or PC. My guess is that Redfall, certainly, could be completed within a month, if not a week of hardcore play.

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