Microsoft has already made it very clear to us, actively and passively, that Xbox Game Pass is one of the most important business areas for the company today. When it was launched, there were many who doubted whether it made sense and whether it could have a commercial run. A point of view similar to the one we could hear when music and video on demand services began to appear, in which the concept of ownership of the medium disappeared (never of the content, of course), in exchange for a kind of buffet Free content for a monthly fee.
Today this discussion, whether subscription models fit the market or not, is more than outdated, and although legitimately there are users who prefer to purchase what they like (be it a music album, a movie or a game), to be able to enjoy them without limitations and permanently, many others prefer to pay a monthly fee for access to a wide catalog, and even those who maintain a subscription and sometimes buy some content of this type. Something for which, in addition, Xbox Game Pass offers interesting discounts.
Microsoft has stepped on the accelerator with regard to Xbox Game Pass, precisely to continue convincing more users of the virtues of its video game subscription service, a very long-term commitment, because as we can see on its official blog, they have published a entry in which they state that they are literally building the gaming platform for the next 20 years. If there was still someone who doubted the future prospects of Xbox Game Pass, I think that with these plans they will finish leaving doubts about it.
In said publication we can see some of the plans, from the closest to the furthest, with which Microsoft intends to consolidate its gaming ecosystem, and from what we see in said entry there is one aspect, in particular, that is not expected it is less interesting. And it is that after months with some rumors in this sense, Microsoft has confirmed today that Xbox Game Pass will add game demos to its content.
The arrival of this new function will not be immediate, yes, we still have to wait until 2023, at which point the demos of the games will begin to be added to the Xbox Game Pass catalog. And it is most interesting that this announcement and this movement occur just two months after NVIDIA has also added the demos to the content available on GeForce NOW, the technology’s cloud gaming service. A coincidence that invites us to ask ourselves a question: will the Xbox Game Pass demos also be added to Xbox Cloud so that they can be played without having to install them?
Be that as it may, movements like this one from Xbox Game Pass and the one from GeForce NOW recover the demos, a great way to try games before you buy them that became very popular between the 1990s and the early 2000s, but instead of depending on physical media, as in those days, it now takes advantage of everything that broadband connections offer us.
