Summary
- PC Game Pass offers a great price & variety of games, ideal for those who play sparingly.
- Game Pass games are often not up-to-date compared to other platforms, lacking features like DLSS.
- Modding PC Game Pass games can be a hassle, especially with secondary launcher integration issues.
PC Game Pass promises to offer hundreds of PC games to you for just a few dollars a month, and when it works as intended it’s all good. However, in my experience, it rarely works as intended, which means I’m paying a subscription not to play games. More time in the oven is needed here.
PC Game Pass Has a Great Price and Game Selection
A PC Game Pass subscription will set you back $11.99 per month as of this writing, and thanks to regional pricing where I live, it’s a touch under $7 for me. Either way, there’s a huge selection of games for such a small amount of money. For someone like me who tends to play a game once and then never play it again, it’s the perfect service. Even if I did want to play a game again one day, it’s better for me financially to buy it on sale a few years down the line, instead of buying it full price at launch.
So, when it comes to the core value proposition of PC Game Pass, I have zero complaints. It’s a great service on paper, the problems come from the technical implementation.
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Games Are Often Not the Latest Version
The first annoying thing about Game Pass games on PC is that they’re often a patch or two behind the Steam version, for example. So it might happen that a game will launch on both services, but the Steam version is more polished and has support for features like DLSS, but the Game Pass version doesn’t yet.
It makes no sense to me that the different platforms shouldn’t all have the same latest version of a game, but whatever the reason might be, it means that the Game Pass version often looks and tuns worse than on other digital storefronts.
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Modding Is a Pain
With the introduction of Advanced Installation and Management, it’s possible to install games into unprotected folders, access the game files, and then apply mods. If you haven’t used PC Game Pass and its Xbox app in a while, you’ll now find that every game defaults to asking where you want to install it. A great change for those of use with multiple drives!
However, even with this more mod-friendly approach, it’s not always as straightforward to mod Game Pass games compared to other storefronts, and it’s not always clear why. That said, if you’re at the point where you’re modding a game for non-technical, purely gameplay reasons, you’re probably playing it so much it’s worth buying, or alternatively the game is so boring in its vanilla form that you should move on to something else.
The thing is, the Game Pass version is the Microsoft Store version, which, in my opinion, is only worth buying if you want to use the “Play Anywhere” feature some games have where a single purchase counts on PC and Xbox. Even the Game Pass discount for buying the Windows Store version of the game isn’t worth the hassles that come with those games compared to the same title on Steam or GoG.
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Secondary Launcher Integration Can Be Wonky
Included in my PC Game Pass subscription is the lowest tier of the EA game subscription as well as Blizzard and Ubisoft games. This means that the Xbox app needs to interact with those game launchers.
Most of the time this works more or less, but far more often than I like there’s some sort of issue between these different launchers and either the Xbox app won’t recognize installed games from them, or they won’t recognize my subscription.
I suspect that keeping all these launchers working well with each other is a challenge, but honestly, I now tend to avoid Game Pass titles that rely on external launchers, because it’s a roll of the dice and I end up wasting time I could have been playing something else fiddling with updates and restarting my PC instead.
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Sometimes Things Are Just Broken for No Reason
The last straw for me before I wrote this was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a reportedly amazing game from a blockbuster movie franchise, but I wouldn’t know because it refuses to start. It just opens the splash screen that tells me the game is launching, and then stays there forever.
This only happens with this one game, it doesn’t happen on my Windows PC handheld (which can’t run the game well), and it seems to happen to quite a few people looking around online. There doesn’t appear to be a fix for this issue. Every time the game gets an update, I redownload it, and try again to no avail.
While this latest failure to launch is the most annoying yet, stuff like this happens all the time with the PC Xbox app. It’s definitely much better now compared to when I first tried it, but every other PC game launcher seems to have it more together than the Xbox app and Windows Store, which boggles my mind because these apps should be perfectly integrated with Windows. I want to keep using PC Game Pass, but even after all these updates and years, it still doesn’t feel fully baked.
