Rundown (10/05/2025) Entertainment Excess

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Entertainment Excess
• Electronic Arts is Going Private! (Saudi Arabia and Other Callous Dastards Are Buying EA)
• Natalie Complains About Private Equity (A ‘Scrapped’ Segment)
• Microsoft Price Hikes Game Pass by 50% (CANCEL YOUR GAME PASS! NOW!!!)

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Header image is a heavily modified version of this pretty picture by Murgoten. I originally wanted to use it in Rundown (8/10/2025) Goon Out To Your Thoughts, Bro! Instead, I decided to try editing it for this week’s Rundown. That was a mistake. This shit took like three hours to make!

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Entertainment Excess

Something that I have personally been struggling with since… forever, basically, has been the sheer excessive mountains of entertainment flooding my radar. Works of all mediums demanding my attention, trying to get me to engage with them, and promising to offer impactful experiences by virtue of their pedigree, marketing, and reception. From books I want to read, albums I want to listen to a good five times so I understand them, comics I want to read or re-read, videos I have to watch, anime I want to see, films that I think I would enjoy, or games I want to play. There is so, so much on my list of things to possibly do, which is before getting into my hectic work schedule, spending time with my Fantastic Friends, writing Rundowns about entertainment/political news, and writing my novels. …God, I don’t even want to count how many months this hiatus has gone on for.

The problem is not that there is too much entertainment for any one person to enjoy, partake in, or get invested in. That has been a ‘problem’ for a century. Before Malcolm X was born! The problem is that people want to do a lot, but lack the time needed to do these things. There are too many distractions, too many obnoxious responsibilities born from the inefficiencies of society, and too many entertainment black holes for people to do the things they want to do.

This has been a problem for gaming enthusiasts since real video games began in 1983, and everybody who has stuck with the girthy core of the medium for a few years has accumulated a backlog of titles they wanted to play or finish, but never gotten around to it. Nowadays, gaming is only staying afloat because people keep hoarding games they’ll never play. And recently, this problem has only been exasperated by how many good games keep coming out. For as much as people can bemoan how storefronts have become a wasteland of shovelware, back-to-back bangers are coming from established developers every month. Shiny new FOMO-driven time sink live services are cropping up at a steady click. And I genuinely cannot imagine anybody genuinely having a lack of games to play… unless they fall into a variety of edge cases.

Like poor people with expensive tastes and little self control. People with hyper-niche tastes who really only like five games and their derivatives, but hate how developers have mishandled them. Someone so crippled by decision paralysis that they find complaining to be more enjoyable than spinning the wheel on something new. Or a particularly vapid genre of person who is unable to look back at the past, exclusively interested in new things.

Knowing how many new things are coming out every day. How big people’s backlogs are. How the economy is going to go to shit in the US in the next few months, I have to ask if this excess of entertainment will lead to a crash. That exorbitant subscription prices will see people reject convenience and just start snagging things again as, well, it’s pretty easy if you know the sites. If you put some X behind your 1337, elongate your Japanese meows with an extra A, or take an F outta yiffy. Old video games… primarily live on the euphemistic C. And if you want to download an album… Google’s got you covered, dude.

People could just reject the new hotness and rejoice on free stuff on their YouTubes and Twitches and Trump’s TikTok propaganda machine. Or they could always go and say… screw it, let’s just go back to the old stuff. If people want entertainment, we’re just good on that. Do you have any idea how much music is on a storefront like iTunes? How many songs are on Spotify, or how many sick-ass bangers are on Bandcamp? At this point, I feel that it is not an exaggeration to say there is enough music to fill up an entire human lifetime. Do you know how long it would take to read every book in my local library? Literal lifetimes! Or watch every movie, TV series, or whatever they have there? Effectively a lifetime!

Now, will this GLORIOUS DEATH happen? Eh, I doubt it. Hype and FOMO are powerful drugs, and the youngsters are tempted by it on the regular. The past might not be legally available, but if you know how to look for stuff, you can find it. And considering the current precarious state of mainstream, or even niche, media, I would not blame people for hunkering down on the oldies, just ignoring, if nor rejecting, the flow of time. With America spiraling down into a fascist dictatorship, a lot of ‘mainstream entertainment’ will be sanitized out of fear, not wanting to rock the boat or displease this White Supremacist regime. Even European or Canadian works would not want to do anything too radical, as the US is too valuable a market to alienate, or get banned from.

Akumako: “Hey, Natalie, you’re getting lost in the weeds again. You were supposed to talk about how there are just too many games to play, because you read a Bloomberg article.”

Right, right, and… there is no good answer to this problem. People only have a set number of free hours in the day, and many of them are used ‘inefficiently’ as they dawdle about, chat with friends, scroll feeds, cook, clean, or care to their children. They want to do more, but there are too many competing forces vying for their attention, and they typically don’t think about what entertainment they enjoy on a deeper level. Because not everybody is curious like me…

Also, game developers really just need to make shorter games, so people can clear out backlogs. Yes, a 30 hour adventure for $20 is a killer value, and roguelikes are a genre built around infinite replayability, but…

Akumako: “We need more 6 to 8 hour experiences?”

…Yeah.

Akumako: “So we’re just repeating the same discourse that we have had for about a decade as elder millennial gaming enthusiasts became dads.”

…Yeah. Fine, fine, this was a lame premise, but now I’m moving on to… other stuff.

Akumako: “Just keep your word count in mind.”

Yes, Mother. I know.

Akumako: “Mother? Now you’re just going to confuse the audience even more!”

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Electronic Arts is Going Private!
(Saudi Arabia and Other Callous Dastards Are Buying EA)

Oh, damn it all. I just know this is going to be one of the biggest gaming news stories of the year. We might not feel the effects of this now, but in about three to five years? This will be the point where everything fell apart. Acquisitions have been a blight on the games industry over the past five or so years, leaving the industry smaller than ever, and in the hands of fewer, more powerful, corporations. Faceless entities, beholden to the whims of capital, who see games as little more than a tool for profit, engagement, and IP expansion.

Microsoft cleaved their way through the games industry after failing to deliver games due to Phil Spenser’s positively inept leadership, leading them to buy Bethesda, Activision Blizzard King, and far too many other studios to name. This resulted in a publisher with an army of highly skilled game developers at its beck and call, but leadership so ill-equipped and stupid that they have routinely poured tens of millions into projects only to scrap them. Because management never knew what they wanted and refused to let the game developers manage themselves. After pouring in nearly 100 billion into acquisitions, their current state is just kind of pathetic.

Ubisoft has been under routine threat of going under due to the mismanagement of the abusive and short-sighted Guillemot family, and only narrowly avoided a Vivendi takeover the late 2010s. But rather than rising in prominence and profits during the gaming boom of the pandemic, they only fell back into financial hardship and began ceding control over to Tencent. Now Tencent not only owns 9.99% of the company, but they own 25% of a newly formed subsidiary, Vantage Studios where Ubisoft has parked its biggest IPs, interweaving the two companies, and when that happens… the larger of the two wins.

Embracer Group blazed a trail through the games industry, buying up as many studios as possible, aiming to force themselves into being one of the biggest names in gaming. But in their race for the sun, they failed to develop a contingency plan for when a deal with the Saudi Arabian government fell through. They thought the line would keep going up, and wound up colliding back to Earth. From 2023 to 2024, the sheer amount of layoffs, canceled projects, shuttered studios, and fire sale-ing of Embracer’s studios was staggering. And it’s not done yet, with Embracer seemingly still planning to break itself up into three entities after buying up everything not nailed down.

These massive, major acquisitions are not good for gaming. They destroy jobs by introducing redundancy that is filled up with outsourced labor, where crunch and abuse are more acceptable. They destroy games via cancelation, because some manager felt like throwing away decades of man hours of labor. They limit customer choice by consolidating the industry, shifting it into an oligopoly that shapes the means of distribution, and production, as they see fit. And this all aids the worst people on Earth to profit off of the hard labor of people who just want to make video games.

I loathe these major acquisitions for what they have done to gaming, and I am confident in saying that they had a role in the malaise plaguing the world of gaming. After all, this is just another example of capitalism working as intended. Removing customer choice, destroying the free market, and extracting value from the peasants to the bourgeoisie. I hate what acquisitions have done to the industry, and I also know it is going to get worse. Desperate studios will take desperate measures to keep the lights on, to ship a game that’s 70% finished. In times of economic hardship, it is all too easy to discard principles in exchange for security, even if it means losing everything in the process. And in times of unchecked greed, it is easy for anybody with an immoral excess of capital to reach out and grab everything they desire.

This brings us to the actual topic of the day. Electronic Arts is not a good company. They have a history forged by callous business practices, controversies both deserved and self-manufactured, overt corporate meddling, and simply destroying studios. I like to think that EA hate peaked with East AR Wars, but they have only gotten worse in the interim. Their callous treatment of Bioware throughout the development of both Beyond: The Dylan Anthem (2019) and Dragon Age 4: The Veilguard of Dreadwolf (2024). Their mistreatment of the dedicated audience of The Sims, disappointing and under-delivering for a decade and counting. They blazed the trail for loot boxes in major AAA titles. Their incipient desire to turn everything into a live service, to turn every player into a repeat customer, née addict, spread through this industry like a fucking cancer. They went from producing sports games that actually tried to ones that don’t, teaching a generation of casual game players to expect stagnation and to value realism above all else. …I think I have hit all the classics at this point.

Because of all of EA’s transgressions, they have remained one of the biggest game publishers in the world. A position that should protect them from any attempted buyout, but in this world of consolidated wealth, there is no price that’s too high for some people. Or, I should say, the worst people.

EA has agreed to a $55 billion leveraged buyout from three investors, a veritable who’s who of truly reprehensible individuals. The least of which is Silver Lake, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, and to say they have a closet full of skeletons would be an understatement. Because you don’t get billions in this world by doing the right thing. And the idea of any private company having a control of the employment of 448,000 people is, frankly, disgusting.

Then there’s Affinity Partners, a Miami-based firm funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and led by Jared Kushner. Who, for those who do not follow American politics, is Donald Trump’s son-in-law, worked his campaign to get him elected in 2016, and served as an advisor during his first presidency. While this is not confirmed, Kushner is likely still influencing Trump’s second presidency from the shadows, and who knows how many of the evils Trump has ushered in were envisioned or signed off by Kushner. He is a positively evil little demon of a man, and [his organization] should not exist.

But the largest owner of them all, the baddest of the bad, having previously held a 9.99% share in EA, is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. I feel a gut reaction to whenever I criticize an Arabic nation, but Saudi Arabia is not a good country. It is an absolute monarchy where women are oppressed, gay people are killed, the press is vetted by the state, journalists are killed by state-sponsored thugs, and trans people like me are not particularly appreciated. I do not want the Saudi Arabian government to have influence over anything, yet they have been trying to carve up a powerful corner of the games industry. They own SNK. They are grabbing a decent chunk of most major publicly traded game companies. They bought the mobile giant Scopely earlier this year. They own Pokémon Go and are probably harvesting your location data when you use it! And now they are the largest head on the Cerberus controlling Electronic Arts.

FUCK THIS!

I do not like EA. I do not like their past decade and change of games. I hate what the company has become after having countless opportunities to pivot into being something better. Their management is filled with a bunch of lesser ghouls. But I also know damn well that they, by proxy of EA Sports FC, Madden, College Football, Battlefield, and Star Wars, are a major purveyor of video games, with millions of dedicated fans. The arrangement we had before was bad, but this is just so, so much worse. Now that EA is owned by private companies, their machinations, operations, and intentions will be more secretive. They will not be motivated strictly by profits, but by the whims and desires of their new masters. And with Kushner in control, they are effectively immune to the law until America wakes the fuck up and realizes that Trump is a fascist who would [REDACTED].

This is the worst case scenario for a company like EA. This arrangement has the potential, if not likelihood, to compromise all of their future titles to be distinctly pro-Trump, pro-Saudi Arabia, and distinctly anti-queer. Anything good that comes out of EA going forward is going to be the result of people fighting against a system and risking their careers to make a statement that management is probably too stupid to notice.

And as a result, I would encourage a blanket boycott of all EA games. DO NOT BUY EA GAMES. If you play them, keep a lid on it. And any future appraisal of their games should be suffixed or prefixed with a disclaimer that the publisher is, objectively, evil.

That being said, I’m not going to give someone shit because they buy Veilguard (2024) for $10 or Mass Effect (2021) for $6 or Titanfall 2 (2017) for $5. That’s basically nothing and won’t even make it onto their internal financial reports. But I will give a stink eye of disrespect to anyone who, say, buys Battlefield 6 (2025) for $70. Or anybody who buys EA sports games while purporting to be a leftist. Because while you don’t need to do much to be a leftist, you need to try to avoid giving evil companies money.

I hate being this direct, but every EA game you buy is effectively supporting one of Trump’s many scions and the actions of the government of Saudi Arabia. While I understand this may be hard for some people, that they have a strong connection to these games, well, this is what it means to have principles. If you believe in something, and hate the owners for being overtly evil, do not give them any money, stick it to them where it hurts. And unlike credit card companies or banks in general, you can easily find just not engage with EA’s output. Find something else to play, something else to engage with, or just stick with their older catalog. Well, unless they decide to take it away from you…

Akumako: “What about people who are still playing Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)? Are they class traitors?”

Uh… I’m gonna say no. Because they already own the game, are using EA’s servers, and presumably not giving them any money. They indicate a demand for a new Star Wars Battlefront, which I don’t see happening anytime soon. But I do not see many people buying an 8-year-old game, or at least enough to make up more than 1% of their revenue. So, basically nothing. You can keep playing SimCity 4 (2003) until the world stops spinning. But supporting a new release? Nah, fuck that.

Also, if anything kills off Bioware, a vehemently progressive studio that was including gay relationships back when gay marriage was illegal, it’s going to be this. They will probably be shut down shortly after this deal, with the next Mass Effect game canceled. And, frankly, I would not care at this point. Bioware has been rampantly abused by EA over the past decade, and if EA wants to kill them, I will simply stew in righteous rage. Though, I will be concerned about the employees. Edmonton is a big city, but it’s not really known for its robust game development scene.

As for Maxis? They have already been put into their The Sims 4 (2014) gulags, and I cannot imagine the studio still being about by 2030. Sims is kept alive by its queer community, and I cannot imagine the Saudi Arabian government even tolerating this side of the fanbase. Fans are already pissed at how the game has been handled. I know that there are plenty of skilled devs who want to push against their new masters and continue creating a place of creative expression. But I simply do not see a future where The Sims can continue without being a homogenized homosexual-free version of itself. And at that point… there is no point to The Sims.

Every studio, every IP, at EA is in trouble. Because rather than just BUY the studio with their money, this trifecta of evil has opted to take out $20 billion in debt that EA will need to pay back. This means more corporate greed, fewer expenses, and less benefits to employees. Anybody who has worked through a leveraged buyout knows how it goes. It creeps up on you, starts with some locations shuttering, but after 7 years, the company will be a shadow of its former self.

So, again, what’s a regular poor bitch s’posta do? You divest. You stop supporting the company, and to poo-poo their name whenever it comes up, without being an ass about it. This is a good approach, hurting these capitalist vultures right in their pocketbooks, the closest things they have to hearts, but this position is becoming increasingly less viable.

Private equity companies— along with other flavors of organized evil— are not only eyeing entertainment, tech, retailers or manufactures. They intend on buying up everything they possibly can until they effectively own countries. Not content with already owning national phone lines and carving up internet services by State, they are buying up utility companies, condominiums, and a deluge of real estate. They are ravaging communities in order to create data centers that destroy the local environment, polluting it with noise and industrial run-off. All while being shielded from any sort of legal liability, because when one has enough capital, thou art a god unto the world.

Things are deeply messed up in the world. The ruling class will do NOTHING to help the average person. And all we can do is rally together, act in our own class interests, and fight back, cling onto the structures of power, and knock down anybody who compromises their value for the sake of capital.

…And I just realized that I wrote a bit about private equity that I cannot cleanly fit in this section. So I’m just going to relegate it to the next section. Because why would I ever throw away quality content?

…Also, in lieu of any other way to end this segment, Skillet Caso says hi to all you nice folks in the audience. Give her head pats in the comments section!

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Natalie Complains About Private Equity
(A ‘Scrapped’ Segment)

Over the past decade or so, one of the more commonly cited corporate American evils has been private equity. And as someone at least related to the world of finance, I have a rather skewed perception of this genre of companies. If someone wants to start a business, they need money. They need the capital to pay for start-up expenses, to renovate a building, to pay people, get licenses, permits, and equipment. They need to get this funding from somewhere, from someone. A private wealthy investor is a classic example, but in the 21st century a venture capital, or general private equity, firm is typically seen as the go-to choice. (Thanks to The Great Recession of 2008.)

Private equity’s first purpose is to provide start-ups with capital, with equity, that they can pay off over years, giving their owners a share of the profits. Conceptually, there is nothing wrong with this. However, the problem comes from the fact that most private equity firms do not want to grow companies through the goodness of their heart, or do good while making good money. Hell nah. The era of caring about stakeholders versus shareholders is simply over in American business, and most people leading private equity companies only care about one thing. Themselves. They want their return, their money, and to see the line go up, up, and up. They front the money to build up companies, reap the rewards when they do well by either selling them, spinning them off, or just keeping them around. And if they keep them around, they look for ways to keep them as low cost and high revenue as possible.

This often takes the form of general employee abuse. Acts that should be illegal if not for the fact that American laws exist to protect the interests of the rich. Or the enshittification of services. Prices go up and quality goes down, cheap rates become exorbitant, and if they did everything right, then people will just suck it up and swallow a turd.

Spinning back to EA, you might be wondering why a private equity firm would want to buy an established company. One with a storied 40 year legacy, At least 35 years of which they spent being the bad guy! And the answer is simple. Financial manipulation, the accumulation of IP, and a way for the wealthy ruling class to get rich while other people suffer. When companies are not doing so well, they will frequently turn to private equity in order to keep the business running with an injection of cash in exchange for ownership. Sometimes this can work just fine. The private equity company can replace managers who value making a company that functions well, correcting the mistakes of previous managers. However, that is becoming increasingly rare.

More often, one of two things happen. The company remains alive, but gets worse and loses all the people who made the company valuable. Or the company is slowly folded up, collapsed, and liquidated. Shareholders are paid out, the stores and offices may keep running, but after a few years operations wind down, the elements of the firm are packaged, sold, and the private equity company nets profits that they can avoid paying tax on due to debt instruments that… are more complicated than what I deal with most days. And I deal with crypto accounting most days!

Private equity should be a neutral force, but American business has adopted a variant of greedmaxxing that makes Dick Ratters’s 80s look reserved by comparison. The billionaire class wants to chew up and sell every scrap of the country they can, profit off of its people, and burn everything in the pursuit of profit. They were emboldened by 45 years of lax Federal leadership, and with Trump in office again, they want to reap as large profits as possible before America crashes into a depression. They want to tear up American until it is a nation of debt peons, millionaires, and billionaires

Like most billion-dollar corporations, as opposed to the plucky million-dollar corporations ran by, like, four people (I do taxes for a few of those), private equity has chosen to be a negative force in the world. I do not trust them as far as I can throw them. …Though, if I need to work for them, I won’t object or anything. Somebody needs to do the accounting, file the taxes, and that person may as well be me.

Akumako: “Fucking class traitor!”

I DO NOT want to run a business, run a website, play video games, and talk to my friends all in the same room, at the same desk. That leads to MADNESS! I’d much rather work for a company that tells me what to do, while protecting people by helping them comply with the law.

Akumako: “See, I don’t get that about you, me. You say all of this commie-cummie stuff, but go back to wanting to comply with the law and help people uphold The White Empire.”

Uh, I chose to be an accountant, and to be a good accountant, you must comply with the law. I want to follow the law, but the law’s a bunch of bullshit! So, in my twisted way, I consider myself to be protecting people from the government, from being harassed. And if a client does not want to file a return, then I don’t snitch on them. I just send them a bill, send them my workpapers upon request, and end the engagement.

…And on that note, I gotta get back to doing tax returns. We have over 30 returns to get out and only… ten days left. Because my boss is a fuck up!

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Microsoft Price Hikes Game Pass by 50%
(CANCEL YOUR GAME PASS! NOW!!!)

Rising prices, stagnant wages, layoffs, food prices going cuh-razy, and subscriptions bleeding people dry while preventing them from amassing value— I am so sick of hearing about this stuff. But corporations just keep going on the greedmaxxing warpath, trying to deprive the lower 50% of the economy out of the pittance they are clinging onto, while pushing the ‘middle class’ deeper into debt and financial instability. And while I do not normally discuss these price hikes in detail, because what is there to say, this latest one strikes me as both egregious and mundane.

The story here is that, barely over a year since the last reshuffling, Microsoft has revised the way Game Pass works, renaming tiers, and keeping quiet about the legacy tiers that were implemented last time. Because confusion is the point. It is a prime example of many of the worst things about software-as-a-service, something I have learned to loathe as a professional, and it is just straight up confusing. The new tiers are already listed in the header image above, but here’s what the old tiers looked like:

So… a few changes.

The ‘starter’ $10 Core plan will be transitioned over to the $10 Essential plan, where players will gain access to 50+ games on PC, console, and cloud. In addition to online console multiplayer, some Riot Games bonuses, and some extra Microsoft Rewards.

The ‘regular’ $15 Standard plan will be transitioned over to the $15 Premium plan, where players will gain access to 200+ games on PC, console, and cloud. In addition to online console multiplayer, some Riot Games bonuses, Microsoft published games within a year of launch (except Call of Duty) and some better Microsoft Rewards.

The PC Game Pass tier… received a stealthy price increase, curiously omitted from this announced rebrand, to $16.50 a month, up from $12.00 a month, with no new benefits, period. I find the fact they announced this price week during a Steam sale to be very funny. Well, it would be funny, if it weren’t so sad.

However, the big change is to their premiere Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier, which is undergoing a price hike from $20 to $30. In the world of subscription price increases, is an almost unheard of extreme. But this is not a price increase. Not really. It would be more accurate to describe this was the elimination of the Game Pass Ultimate tier, replacing it with a new bundled tier.

The nu-Ultimate will come with several distinct perks. It retains the promise of featuring every new game added to ‘Xbox Game Pass,’ stating that players will receive 75+ day one releases a year along with all Xbox published games. Its library is a vague 400+ games. It still offers game streaming, but promises higher quality streams. And comes with everything from lower tiers, along with THREE additional subscriptions.

Ubisoft+ Classics, a collection of 50-something Ubisoft games that includes the standard editions of most of their major titles from 2014 to 2022-ish. Pretty much any game in this collection can be grabbed for $15 or less on a sale, and if you wanted them, you would have had plenty of opportunities to get them by now, and at $8 a month, you really aren’t saving anything by buying it. …Unless you want to confirm that Skull & Bones (2024) is trite.

EA Play, a collection of 70-something EA games for PC and Xbox, including vintage titles that go for $5, three years of sports games, and a couple modern titles that they already made enough money on. Oh, and some trials of their latest games. But it’s EA! I JUST TALKED ABOUT WHY YOU SHOULD NOT GIVE THEM MONEY! And at $6 a month, this was never a subscription worth maintaining a subscription to.

Fortnite Crew, a bundle within a bundle that goes for $12 a month. It contains Fornite’s FOUR battle passes, 1,000 V-Bucks a month (technically a $9 value), and an outfit that I’m assuming is exclusive to this pass.

If one wants to be a class traitor, it is possible to present this bundle as a good deal. With it, you are getting everything in the $15 Game Pass Premium subscription. The $8 Ubisoft+ Classics. The $6 EA Play. And the $12 Fortnite Crew. That is at least a $41 value. And if it give players roughly one new $70 retail title a month, why, that must mean they are saving money! …Except they aren’t, and this whole subscription is stupid.

Game Pass Ultimate assumes that the player is a very specific type of person. Someone who wants to engage with all of these services, wants to play new Xbox games, loves Fortnite, likes Ubisoft, but not too much, likes EA, but not too much. This ideal customer… does not exist as far as I am concerned. In trying to create a higher value subscription service, in brokering deals to prop up their service, and the services of others, Microsoft has successfully created something that appeals to no one. Because it does not let them choose what they want!

“We know not everyone wants the same thing in their Xbox experience, so we’re evolving Game Pass to offer more flexibility, choice, and value to all players, whether you love day one releases, discovering hidden gems, or playing across multiple devices and screens and across Xbox consoles, Xbox on PC, and Xbox Cloud.”

Well, if that’s true, then why the hell does someone need to pay for a Fortnite battle pass just so they can play The Outer Worlds 2 on day one? They are not adding more choices or flexibility to players, they are just imposing these perks upon them because… because this was the endgame for streaming. At least it was when Apple and Disney started throwing their hats into the ring.

The bundling of subscription services took off in the past decade. Temporary deals, deals from internet providers, through credit cards, or even sanctioned bundles available to whomever. All promising reduced rates in exchange for more value. They may pair two subscriptions together for the price of 1.5 subscriptions, or even three for the price of two. This seems like a deal, but only if you want both services, and if this is just an option, there’s nothing remarkable about it. However, that stops being the case when you don’t have the ability to choose what subscriptions you do or do not want. And, after a point, these cease to be subscription services as they are colloquially understood. They become cable packages. (Yes, I know that millions have made this comparison before me, but let me vent.)

Cable packages, for those too young or too poor to remember, were ways to gain access to dozens if not hundreds of TV channels via a single monthly subscriptions, and in the analog world of entertainment, they were an amazing deal! No longer were you limited to Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and public access, you could watch anything! Classic movies, prestige dramas, vintage oldies thrown out of syndication, and entire networks dedicated to children’s entertainment. They even had anime! However, these cable subscriptions were also hated back in their day, because they were so expensive, full of channels people didn’t want, and became increasingly broken down into tiers. There could be a basic package, a package with Stars and HBO, a package with ESPN and other sports channels, and a super huge mondo package that contained everything.

This added to the monthly nut of tens of millions of Americans, and probably people in other places too, but that stopped when video streaming took off. You had everything you wanted, on demand, with no ads, for like $20 a month across two services. And then… well, you know what happened. Greedmaxxing happened, everybody and their mother launched a subscription service, and this has been as big of a part of online discourse as… the MCU. Nowadays, only old people have cable, and the average Millennial has like five subscription services. Which, when adding things up, is basically just a cable bill.

This greed pisses me off so, so much, and I can only hope this causes people to turn on Game Pass en masse. Not only for this elimination of a tier, the demand for more money with shit people don’t fookin’ want, but now their goals are clear. They want to turn Game Pass into a cable package and pivot to streaming. They want to become a streaming Pass for a collection of ‘quality’ games that you can bring everywhere. It’s a tempting idea, but one that has been tried before and failed. OnLive was Netflix for Games back when Netflix offered DVDs by mail, and they failed. Google Stadia had all the backing imaginable, could be played in a damn browser, and it failed. Microsoft has everything they could possibly want, a truly staggering library of titles, and some exceptional connections. …But why, in 2025, would people really want an Xbox streaming service?

There are so many barriers that threaten their plan, so let me go through some of them.

• The biggest games on the biggest gaming platform, mobile, are already free, so why would people want to pay for a subscription when the only price they need for the latest live service soup is 50 gigabytes. Who needs Game Pass on their phone when they have Fortnite, Roblox, and Genshin?
• Games streaming is still unreliable, depends on a very consistent internet connection, and generally feels worse, at least on American broadband. So in this world of 120 fps and 4K games, why would people opt into a worse looking and less responsive experience?
• Xbox’s Game Pass library primarily appeals to console players, but Game Pass is not available on PS5 or Switch 2.
  • Nintendo fans primarily care about Nintendo games and maybe a handful of Nintendo-scented indies, so they are hardly a viable market for Game Pass.
  • Sony fans have PlayStation Plus, which does most of what Game Pass does, but for FAR cheaper. Literally $200 cheaper a year if you get an annual plan!
• Microsoft’s first-party line-up are available for purchase elsewhere, allowing people to self-select and own games without committing to a new subscription. If you want five first-party Xbox games, you’re better off just buying them outright.
• Game Pass has a hugely limited appeal to PC players due to how different the typical ecosystem is.
  • PC live service players don’t need a general game subscription.
  • Steam users are damn hoarders who will buy games for $10 just to have them, just to own them.
  • Most widely popular games on PC are cheap titles that can be bought for less than a month of Game Pass Ultimate, and it’s easier to just buy the one thing you want.

Also, as a last minute addition made two days later, word broke that Microsoft is planning on introducing an ad-supported free version of Xbox Cloud streaming. Because I’m sure there is a HUGE market for that. I really have to wonder when/if people will become too poor for advertisements to be effective.

Microsoft has managed to keep attracting Game Pass subscribers, somehow, having reached 34 million subscribers last year. But I do not see them maintaining this momentum. The narrative of them increasing their subscription’s price by 50%, that ‘Game Pass costs $360 a year now’ has been widely reported. Their hardware sales are bound to be in free-fall after they upped the prices by $100 to $150 within the past year. They are trying to put out a $1,000 handhelds at the eve of a recession. As people look into cheaper options, as children are given phones and laptops instead of consoles, I simply do not see a future where they do much beyond dwindle in relevance. And… I want them to just become a third-party publisher who licenses their brand to tech manufacturers like Asus so they can call their shit an Xbox. In fact, I think that’s what Microsoft truly want.

Also, if they do leave the console scene, I won’t need to think about them as much as I, unfortunately, do. I don’t want to see them header menus, I don’t want to type out that a game is coming for Xbox. I just want them to fade away at this point.

So, please, stop buying Microsoft games and CANCEL YOUR DAMN GAME PASS!

Akumako: “You forgot to mention that they aided with the Israeli government’s systematic genocide of Palestinians.”

I brought it up the past two weeks, and they stopped providing those services. I don’t need to bring it up every time I criticize Microsoft, GOD!

Akumako: “Also, you’re at your soft word count.”

Really? Whew. What a week.

Akumako: “Bitch, it’s Wednesday!”

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Progress Report 2025-10-05

I cannot WAIT to be done with Hundred Line and get on with my life. Amazing game, but… FUCK, dude.

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2025-09-28: Had movie night with my transgirl posse. (When it’s four people, it’s officially a posse.) And focused on my Hundred Line review. What I wrote 5 months ago was a bit messy, and I had to revise, expand, or rework some things, making it tricky to track the word count. Let’s just say wrote 1,500 words and edited 7,500. ‘Cos the main review will be at least 9,000 words. Also, made some visual elements for the review. Flowchart, tier list, and top 25 list.

2025-09-29: Wrote maybe 1,300 words in revising and rewriting the EA acquisition segment. Afterwards, it was too late for me to resume work on Hundred Line. I spent too much time chatting with Missy Scrumptious. My boss kept me working a 9.5 hour day. Leave me alone! RARGH! Also started on some header images, including one that I KNEW would be too complicated, and I was RIGHT! Appreciate this header, you poopynuggets!

2025-09-30: Really unproductive day, and for no good reason. I was distracted by conversations on Discord between my friends and I, had to do travel planning stuff while telling my mother that I am mature enough to travel on my own, as I am 30-years-old. I can get on a plan, get on a bus, and get on a boat. I got like 5,000 words of Hundred Line proof reading done, and then decided to reformat things, approximate the playtime for reader purposes, that good stuff.

2025-10-01: Wrote 2,100 word bit on Xbox, after needing to research and rewrite some things based on their convoluted pricing tiers. Decided to edit this fish, because Wynaut? It’s basically done unless some fire bursts in my bedroom. Edited 4,000 words, got the post ret-2-go on NTF

2025-10-02: Had a 9.5 hour work day, which is expected given the time of year. Was a bit flighty with stuff after work, but managed to finish proofreading and editing the Hundred Line review, sans running Language Tool on this fat bitch. But I was bored, wanted to GAME, so I played that hot indie banger Mowing Game, Megabonk. It’s basic— if you said that this was whipped up by 6 people in 6 months, I’d believe you— but it is a compelling casual number-crunching action game that has more texture to its movement than Vampire Survivors, and a cute retro 3D look, even if I have some thoughts on how it handles textures and worbling. …Then I stayed up until 3 AM running the thing through Language Tool, copying it and reformatting it into WordPress, and adding image blocks. Yay~! Now I just gotta pick like 50 pictures.

2025-10-03: Grabbed the images for the Hundred Line review, but then I got roped up into a bunch of social engagements during the evening, including a VC with Skillet. Was bored, so I decided to try writing next week’s Rundown preamble, getting 1,500 words in. Because I wanted to accomplish SOMETHING more.

2025-10-04: Expanded the Rundown preamble for next week by another 1,200 words. Then wrote 700 words as a preamble for this month’s showcase. Read half of the subject matter.

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