i think what it means is shit like no $1 promos or giving a free month for turning on auto-renew or other tricks they let people get away with to get gamepass for super cheap. Starfield cost $100 for early access, or months earlier you could get 3 years of game pass for also $100. even the gamepass twitter account was memeing about doing stuff like buying 3 month gamepasses and doing the auto-renew trick to get 4 months for the price of 3, meaning they knew and allowed the various loopholes. Telling people on official social media pages how to get a 25% discount is not good for business.
Having said that i remember one youtuber whining about how bad microsoft is doing all these studios by forcing them into AAA gaming titles that because of their high budgets and expected ROI are very samey. Why not scale down these studios and just churn out smaller Indie-esque titles instead, instead of one game every 5 years, why not make them produce a new game every year but its more niche and xbox360 sized instead. games like New Vegas or the Arkham games were made in less than two years and are still loved to this day, but also couldn't be made today because of the expectations and cost of modern gaming. If the heads over at microsoft realized this startegy i'd be amazed. especially when they squandered rare the last 20 years. but with how many studios they've brought up to just let sit around like rocksteady. you'd think even having them make some bullshit so they can have something that isnt a port on the gamepass would be an obvious move. Why pay millions for the latest games when you have all these devs at home?
