Ditching Game Pass Made Me Appreciate Gaming Again

I recently sold my Xbox Series X and invested in a new PC, re-opening the pearly gates of my dusty Steam backlog. It has completely rejuvenated my love of gaming, and it’s not because of the sparkly new platform, but thanks to a move away from subscription services.

I used to love Game Pass. The idea of paying an affordable amount to access an entire library, including brand-new, day one releases, was amazing. Gaming had never been so accessible, especially to a student making next-to-nothing, but that core philosophy is being watered down with each passing year.

Microsoft clearly regrets the day one promise, now leaving those games to the most expensive tier — it won’t even commit to whether they’ll arrive on cheaper tiers down the line. PS Plus on the other hand has completely avoided day one releases for its first-party blockbusters since… day one. Subscription services are increasingly unreliable, becoming more expensive for a fraction of the value. It’s a big reason why I dropped them altogether. But what surprised me after letting them go was the realisation of how much they had changed my habits.

With a subscription service, I race to finish whatever game I’m playing. I’m forking out for the catalogue on a month-by-month basis, so I want to get as much as possible out of my money. That means barreling through classics I’ve always wanted to try, beating the newest releases on the week of launch, and even avoiding games I’d bought outright. Putting time into something not on the subscription service makes paying for that subscription service feel like a waste of money, locking me into a library I don’t even own.

I’ve heard subscription services described as ‘fast food gaming’, but I never really understood that sentiment until I finally stepped back to eat a more fulfilling meal. The monthly fee means racing to consume every game you possibly can, winning against the system by stretching 20 bucks into ten times its value. That means never digging beneath the surface and truly engaging with anything — I don’t have many strong memories of the Game Pass titles I’ve played, because I was so quick to move on from them to the next shiny toy.

In the past, hitting the credits didn’t mean I was finished. I’d sweep the side quests, find collectibles, and maybe enjoy a couple of replays. But when you’re paying for an entire library, spending so much time on one game feels like you’re not making the most of the whole package. Wiping away the cobwebs of my Steam backlog has been a completely different experience — there’s no time pressure, my library will still be here in a decade. Some of these games I did buy a decade ago. So, I can take my sweet time.

I know the games of my childhood like the back of my hand, because I played them inside and out. If I closed my eyes right now, I could describe in detail the layout of each Half-Life 2 level with ease. Likewise, I have such a fondness for Dark Souls’ lore because I wasn’t afraid to slow down, read the item descriptions, and soak in the environment, learning about this world’s history through its architecture. There wasn’t a rush to play the next thing, just the game in front of me there and then.

I can’t see myself going back to Game Pass or PS Plus. The subtle ways in which they can shift your behaviour and approach to games snowballs until you’re just consuming for the sake of consuming. Without that time pressure, I’ve been slowly chipping away at We Love Katamari, replaying levels over and over to try and beat my high score while hunting down all of its secrets, and I’ve poured tens of hours into Frostpunk, finding new and awful ways to keep my dwindling civilisation on the brink.

I’m not only enjoying games more, I’m forming stronger memories again, becoming more familiar with the ways in which they tick, and even putting a dent in the backlog I’ve left to fester for so long. You can’t truly appreciate a game from hurrying through it in a weekend, but subscription services entice us to try everything they have to offer, so that’s exactly what happens. Cancelling those subscriptions is like seeing clearly again, and with the prices skyrocketing as they move away from the core ethos of affordability that made them so popular to begin with, it really wasn’t that hard to say goodbye.