I remember eating downvotes for even questioning the validity of this business model on Reddit. Like even anecdotally most people I know buy 1 maybe 2 games they play a year. very few people need...
I remember eating downvotes for even questioning the validity of this business model on Reddit. Like even anecdotally most people I know buy 1 maybe 2 games they play a year.
very few people need or can even take advantage of a game subscription service.
The article is saying the opposite of what you posited. The issue isn’t that game pass isn’t a good enough product for most people, it’s that it’s too good of a deal.
The article is saying the opposite of what you posited. The issue isn’t that game pass isn’t a good enough product for most people, it’s that it’s too good of a deal.
According to an anonymous Xbox employee via Bloomberg, the company lost $300 million in console and PC sales as a direct result of placing its latest mega-shooter on the service. Why would anyone pay $70 for a game that they could pay $15 to access alongside 400 others?
I think the article is using some "piracy" math to count the losses. There are almost certainly real losses to specific developers, but I don't know if the game pass reduced the total customer...
I think the article is using some "piracy" math to count the losses. There are almost certainly real losses to specific developers, but I don't know if the game pass reduced the total customer spend - it's just spread out over more games.
If someone buys a game for $70, they're going to play that game, and maybe only that game. If they've paid for the game pass, they might try out many other games that would have normally also cost $70, but they'd have never purchased normally.
For example, if a user played 10 different games in a month, each of the developers might get ~$1.50. Their calculated loss here is $68.50 per player per game, but spending $700 to play all those games was never an option. If the player continues to play all of these games in the next month, the loss shrinks a little, but it's unlikely that any game is going to capture a player's attention for the 47 months it takes to hit that $70 per game benchmark.
On average, this is probably fine. People will play games they otherwise would have never looked for, and those developers will get a cut. But this model tends to pay the big hitters less than they otherwise would have earned, and prop up the smaller games. That's probably a good thing overall, but buying game studios so you can stream the games and funnel profit away from yourself to the smaller studios doesn't seem like the winning move.
I'm 95% confident that your numbers and method of calculation are wrong. Microsoft almost certainly has sophisticated financial modeling for determining how much opportunity cost Game Pass would...
I'm 95% confident that your numbers and method of calculation are wrong. Microsoft almost certainly has sophisticated financial modeling for determining how much opportunity cost Game Pass would have cost. I am this confident because I work in a smaller gaming related company that does do stuff like this. We're not calculating with the "piracy math" as you call it; you'd be fired if you tried it.
You'd be surprised. Big companies sometimes have terrible data, and project managers are often hunting for any metrics that'll juice their story. I'm sure they've run numbers, but Game Pass isn't...
You'd be surprised. Big companies sometimes have terrible data, and project managers are often hunting for any metrics that'll juice their story. I'm sure they've run numbers, but Game Pass isn't new. They've had years to figure out it's a money loser.
I would be surprised because I work in the payments org at my company. The 5% doubt is in case the leaked quote was intentionally misleading, but internally there's no way the execs are using such...
I would be surprised because I work in the payments org at my company. The 5% doubt is in case the leaked quote was intentionally misleading, but internally there's no way the execs are using such simplistic calculations.
If it’s not a problem, would you mind sharing how you would do those calculations? No need to get into the nitty gritty, I would appreciate an overview as well
If it’s not a problem, would you mind sharing how you would do those calculations?
No need to get into the nitty gritty, I would appreciate an overview as well
I'm only a software engineer, but usually there's a lot of experimentation on users. Like, a lot. Through that and copious amounts of data gathering, Data Science is able to tease out user...
I'm only a software engineer, but usually there's a lot of experimentation on users. Like, a lot. Through that and copious amounts of data gathering, Data Science is able to tease out user behaviors and understand stuff like "adding an extra notification on a Friday leads to a 0.2% bookings increase if we do it once a quarter". For a company like Microsoft, they'll have had decades of experience running analysis like this.
That's pretty vague and I wouldn't know the specifics for Microsoft, but at a guess (total speculation), they probably look at factors like:
What was the average Game Pass subscriber purchasing prior to Game Pass being available in that market?
What amount of play time is each Game Pass subscriber putting into a game and how does that compare with users who purchased games?
What do purchasing habits look like if the game is withheld from Game Pass for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 1 year? Etc.
The most important thing is data. Where I work, whenever we make any design change or add a new feature, we run multiple variants in experimentation alongside a random one and log all of it for weeks. From there, we ask the Data Science peeps to do their analysis and look for insights across different user segments (new users, paying users, etc) and with enough data, we have a pretty good idea of what the opportunity cost of a new feature/design change is.
It doesn't have to be simplistic at all to happen. I'm certain that the kind of situations that lead to bad math like that would have plenty of complexity to occur; it'd just be found more in the...
It doesn't have to be simplistic at all to happen. I'm certain that the kind of situations that lead to bad math like that would have plenty of complexity to occur; it'd just be found more in the incentives and social structures more than the math itself.
Just one idea: The math is complicated and good, but the process of getting the resulting data to who needs to hear it gets that data ruined in the process. People play games of telephone, lose track of things, get interfered with by Goodhart's Law, etc. By the time the math gets to a decision-maker – much less us – it's been boiled down/tampered with to the point of near-uselessness.
It's worth noting that this analysis would apply more the larger a company is, too, as the data would have more hands in it and "farther to travel," so to speak.
Mistakes can happen in calculations, but what was suggested is so far beyond what I've experienced, I find it useless speculation to assume a company did that. It shuts down any interesting...
Mistakes can happen in calculations, but what was suggested is so far beyond what I've experienced, I find it useless speculation to assume a company did that. It shuts down any interesting discussion by reducing everything to "hurr durr, Big Company stupid therefore decision is completely invalid". Boring.
I never had Game Pass. But I thought the point was you don’t put the new big games on it? It’s like movie streaming. If you want to see the movie right away you need to pay more and watch in...
I never had Game Pass. But I thought the point was you don’t put the new big games on it? It’s like movie streaming. If you want to see the movie right away you need to pay more and watch in theaters. But if you wait a few months it’ll be covered by a monthly subscription.
I could see them doing something like giving you a $15 discount in a $70 game at launch as they factor in your Game Pass fee.
Honestly, even that sort of delay does harm. A lot of people wait to buy games because of varying reasons ranging from being too busy to waiting for launch bugs to be ironed out (which feels...
Honestly, even that sort of delay does harm. A lot of people wait to buy games because of varying reasons ranging from being too busy to waiting for launch bugs to be ironed out (which feels increasingly common) to just waiting for sales. There's a whole subreddit r/patientgamers for people who wait for at least twelve months:
Whether it's price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don't meet the system requirements, or just haven't had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
And on that note: games are generally more expensive than movie tickets, and movie theaters are also a generally more "social" activity. There are multiple movies I've only seen because friends invited me, and wouldn't have watched on streaming. Even watching the social aspect, it's a lot easier to impulsively spend $15-$25 on a movie ticket than to drop $30-$60+ on a single-player game you won't have time to play right away.
On top of all that, there's a big difference in the experience of a movie theater versus streaming at home, but no such difference with Game Pass. So there's even LESS incentive to buy a game at full price on day one when you know you can play it in a few months.
I've honestly never understood how Game Pass was profitable and worked from an economic standpoint... And I guess that's because it really wasn't.
I for one find it way, way easier to impulsively buy a game, which typically offers up ten or more hours of enjoyment, than I do to go to a movie. Particularly knowing that the movie will be on a...
I for one find it way, way easier to impulsively buy a game, which typically offers up ten or more hours of enjoyment, than I do to go to a movie. Particularly knowing that the movie will be on a streaming service that I subscribe to, sooner or later.
If you have enough time to fill that that's a compelling argument, that still makes traditional game sales overpriced compared to other forms of cheap entertainment (including the one you...
If you have enough time to fill that that's a compelling argument, that still makes traditional game sales overpriced compared to other forms of cheap entertainment (including the one you mentioned -- streaming TV), and should make a service like Gamepass basically guaranteed to get more money out of you than traditional game sales. Less to individual high profile studios, maybe, but more overall.
I'm pretty sure I've paid more for Game Pass than I got out of it. There have been some years where I got a good deal, but I usually don't play that many titles. At this point it's more of a...
I'm pretty sure I've paid more for Game Pass than I got out of it. There have been some years where I got a good deal, but I usually don't play that many titles. At this point it's more of a sunk-cost fallacy/convenience fee.
Yes, because the vast majority of people don't actually have the amounts of free time that the old "games are actually cheap on a dollars per hour basis!" saw requires to make sense, let alone for...
Yes, because the vast majority of people don't actually have the amounts of free time that the old "games are actually cheap on a dollars per hour basis!" saw requires to make sense, let alone for a monthly subscription to make sense compared to the amount of playtime locked up in the games you already own but still haven't finished.
Personally I think any game longer than 10 hours or more expensive than $20 is probably doing something wrong. Most games really don't justify lengths longer than that except as a way of justifying prices higher than that, and it doesn't really work out if the game doesn't hold your attention for the full length.
That's true to an extent, but as it has gone on they've been adding more and more big titles as day one gamepass drops, and the way I play games means I'm rarely playing anything day 1 anyway, so...
That's true to an extent, but as it has gone on they've been adding more and more big titles as day one gamepass drops, and the way I play games means I'm rarely playing anything day 1 anyway, so it's really been mostly upside for me. If the price goes up much more or the start putting fewer games on it I'll probably dip, but for a while at least it's been quite nice.
The movie/TV streaming comparison is a good one because these services do open themselves up to typical streaming behaviours. Not everyone is necessarily going to keep a subscription running...
The movie/TV streaming comparison is a good one because these services do open themselves up to typical streaming behaviours. Not everyone is necessarily going to keep a subscription running year-round. I'm guessing a good portion just subscribe for a month or two, play through whatever single player games are on their mind and then cancel. I do it myself for EA games, happy to drop €6 and blitz through a Jedi game or something where I'm unlikely to replay it, or if I do get the itch, it will be at a much later time when it's going for €5-10 on sale.
Those are 2 distinct issues, that quote is in reference to COD being day one on it, but they were losing money/not getting subscribers before they had even acquired Activision. I was referring...
Those are 2 distinct issues, that quote is in reference to COD being day one on it, but they were losing money/not getting subscribers before they had even acquired Activision.
I was referring more specifically to this part of the article.
Xbox projected that by 2026, Game Pass would have 77 million subscribers - it currently has 30 million. When you consider that just two years ago, Microsoft reported having 34 million Game Pass subscribers, the picture becomes even bleaker.
I’m not sure how many Xbox consoles have been sold in the last two generations, but it seems that they haven’t managed to attract more than a 30 million of their potential audience to subscribe across two generations.
Most people would opt for the one-time payment for a game over a subscription since they don’t play many games anyway.
This is the part that always bothered me. It always seemed too good to be true. I never partook, mostly because I was expecting to get rug pulled at any time, but I had friends who did. The games...
This is the part that always bothered me. It always seemed too good to be true. I never partook, mostly because I was expecting to get rug pulled at any time, but I had friends who did. The games I was surprised they were able to get just casually as part of the pass was crazy. They had to be heavily subsidized by greater Microsoft just to justify this. As soon as they put in the newer, higher priced games, I knew they were screwed. Getting a new title at a heavily discounted price is not economical at all for the selling company.
I honestly don't see any sensible math outside of some internal economic shell game that's happening to justify putting new releases on game pass. For Call of Duty, I would have waited and brought on a CoD game that was older onto game pass to tap on to nostalgia for those who love the series. Then you could have dangled the shiny new one over them as well, because that's where all the cool gamers are, right?
If it was too good of a deal, then the subscriber count wouldn't have dropped from 34 million to 30 million in 2 years. I guess the point of the article is that game pass should be more like XBox...
If it was too good of a deal, then the subscriber count wouldn't have dropped from 34 million to 30 million in 2 years.
I guess the point of the article is that game pass should be more like XBox Live Arcade, which was mainly a platform for small and indie games and caters to a different kind of gamer. Providing AAA games caused Microsoft to raise the price too much, which cost them a lot of subscribers.
I used to have a 360 and I loved the live arcade stuff because it was small investments of time and money. I don't feel like putting the effort into AAA games anymore, and if I did, I would only want maybe one a years.
This is interesting because it's the right logic applied the wrong way around. The reason they lost subscribers is because of a significant price hike. It was too good of a deal until it wasn't.
If it was too good of a deal, then the subscriber count wouldn't have dropped from 34 million to 30 million in 2 years.
This is interesting because it's the right logic applied the wrong way around. The reason they lost subscribers is because of a significant price hike. It was too good of a deal until it wasn't.
I pretty much view Game Pass like a rental service. Take the new Halo game for example. I know I'm probably only ever going to play it once so why would I pay $50 to buy it when I can pay $15 for...
I pretty much view Game Pass like a rental service.
Take the new Halo game for example. I know I'm probably only ever going to play it once so why would I pay $50 to buy it when I can pay $15 for a month of access to it?
You still do. Because the Reddit community is toxic and lacks basic critical thinking skills. Game Pass is genuinely one of the dumbest business models a games publisher could ever have...
You still do. Because the Reddit community is toxic and lacks basic critical thinking skills.
Game Pass is genuinely one of the dumbest business models a games publisher could ever have introduced; aside from "release all our exclusives on our competitors' platforms and hope that sells Xboxes."
For the price of roughly two games a year, you get access to hundreds of titles including day-one releases of anything from Xbox Game Studios.
Even at $30 a month Game Pass Ultimate eas an absolute steal.
$30/month is $360/year which is considerably more than your "roughly two games a year". It's not worth $30 a month because there will be months where they add nothing but trash and games that were...
Even at $30 a month Game Pass Ultimate eas an absolute steal.
$30/month is $360/year which is considerably more than your "roughly two games a year". It's not worth $30 a month because there will be months where they add nothing but trash and games that were already F2P.
Personally I cancelled my sub when they raised the price of ultimate above $15.
It's harder to quantify based on the fact that Xbox Live Gold was mandatory to play online then got bundled with Game Pass Essentials. Game Pass PC may be a better point of comparison. $13.99 a...
It's harder to quantify based on the fact that Xbox Live Gold was mandatory to play online then got bundled with Game Pass Essentials.
Game Pass PC may be a better point of comparison. $13.99 a month or $167.88 a year. Divide that by the RRP of a mainline MS game ($69.99) and that's about 2.4 games a year.
The only thing even remotely making this a win for MS is the fact that Xbox Game Studios have released sweet fuck-all lately.
One of the hopes is that they can get subscription revenue out of old games. Nowadays, gamers mostly play last year's release. One time discounted sales don't generate much profit either.
One of the hopes is that they can get subscription revenue out of old games. Nowadays, gamers mostly play last year's release. One time discounted sales don't generate much profit either.
With this as the backdrop, it’s no wonder one man had an ambitious vision: what if you paid $9.99 a month for access to a whole cornucopia of games? After all, if it could work for film and television, why wouldn’t it work for video games? Back in 2017, former Xbox head Phil Spencer’s novel idea felt like it had arrived at just the right time. So how did Game Pass go from being Xbox’s innovative new spark to setting the company on fire?
The Activision-Blizzard acquisition began a series of cataclysmic financial consequences for Xbox. 2024’s Black Ops 6 is the highest-grossing game in Call of Duty’s 23-year history - but 82% of all sales came from PlayStation. While Xbox had the smaller share, Game Pass scuppered Microsoft’s chance to make a fortune in COD’s most financially successful year ever. According to an anonymous Xbox employee via Bloomberg, the company lost $300 million in console and PC sales as a direct result of placing its latest mega-shooter on the service. Why would anyone pay $70 for a game that they could pay $15 to access alongside 400 others?
I remember eating downvotes for even questioning the validity of this business model on Reddit. Like even anecdotally most people I know buy 1 maybe 2 games they play a year.
very few people need or can even take advantage of a game subscription service.
The article is saying the opposite of what you posited. The issue isn’t that game pass isn’t a good enough product for most people, it’s that it’s too good of a deal.
I think the article is using some "piracy" math to count the losses. There are almost certainly real losses to specific developers, but I don't know if the game pass reduced the total customer spend - it's just spread out over more games.
If someone buys a game for $70, they're going to play that game, and maybe only that game. If they've paid for the game pass, they might try out many other games that would have normally also cost $70, but they'd have never purchased normally.
For example, if a user played 10 different games in a month, each of the developers might get ~$1.50. Their calculated loss here is $68.50 per player per game, but spending $700 to play all those games was never an option. If the player continues to play all of these games in the next month, the loss shrinks a little, but it's unlikely that any game is going to capture a player's attention for the 47 months it takes to hit that $70 per game benchmark.
On average, this is probably fine. People will play games they otherwise would have never looked for, and those developers will get a cut. But this model tends to pay the big hitters less than they otherwise would have earned, and prop up the smaller games. That's probably a good thing overall, but buying game studios so you can stream the games and funnel profit away from yourself to the smaller studios doesn't seem like the winning move.
I'm 95% confident that your numbers and method of calculation are wrong. Microsoft almost certainly has sophisticated financial modeling for determining how much opportunity cost Game Pass would have cost. I am this confident because I work in a smaller gaming related company that does do stuff like this. We're not calculating with the "piracy math" as you call it; you'd be fired if you tried it.
You'd be surprised. Big companies sometimes have terrible data, and project managers are often hunting for any metrics that'll juice their story. I'm sure they've run numbers, but Game Pass isn't new. They've had years to figure out it's a money loser.
I would be surprised because I work in the payments org at my company. The 5% doubt is in case the leaked quote was intentionally misleading, but internally there's no way the execs are using such simplistic calculations.
If it’s not a problem, would you mind sharing how you would do those calculations?
No need to get into the nitty gritty, I would appreciate an overview as well
I'm only a software engineer, but usually there's a lot of experimentation on users. Like, a lot. Through that and copious amounts of data gathering, Data Science is able to tease out user behaviors and understand stuff like "adding an extra notification on a Friday leads to a 0.2% bookings increase if we do it once a quarter". For a company like Microsoft, they'll have had decades of experience running analysis like this.
That's pretty vague and I wouldn't know the specifics for Microsoft, but at a guess (total speculation), they probably look at factors like:
What was the average Game Pass subscriber purchasing prior to Game Pass being available in that market?
What amount of play time is each Game Pass subscriber putting into a game and how does that compare with users who purchased games?
What do purchasing habits look like if the game is withheld from Game Pass for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 1 year? Etc.
The most important thing is data. Where I work, whenever we make any design change or add a new feature, we run multiple variants in experimentation alongside a random one and log all of it for weeks. From there, we ask the Data Science peeps to do their analysis and look for insights across different user segments (new users, paying users, etc) and with enough data, we have a pretty good idea of what the opportunity cost of a new feature/design change is.
It doesn't have to be simplistic at all to happen. I'm certain that the kind of situations that lead to bad math like that would have plenty of complexity to occur; it'd just be found more in the incentives and social structures more than the math itself.
Just one idea: The math is complicated and good, but the process of getting the resulting data to who needs to hear it gets that data ruined in the process. People play games of telephone, lose track of things, get interfered with by Goodhart's Law, etc. By the time the math gets to a decision-maker – much less us – it's been boiled down/tampered with to the point of near-uselessness.
It's worth noting that this analysis would apply more the larger a company is, too, as the data would have more hands in it and "farther to travel," so to speak.
Mistakes can happen in calculations, but what was suggested is so far beyond what I've experienced, I find it useless speculation to assume a company did that. It shuts down any interesting discussion by reducing everything to "hurr durr, Big Company stupid therefore decision is completely invalid". Boring.
I never had Game Pass. But I thought the point was you don’t put the new big games on it? It’s like movie streaming. If you want to see the movie right away you need to pay more and watch in theaters. But if you wait a few months it’ll be covered by a monthly subscription.
I could see them doing something like giving you a $15 discount in a $70 game at launch as they factor in your Game Pass fee.
Honestly, even that sort of delay does harm. A lot of people wait to buy games because of varying reasons ranging from being too busy to waiting for launch bugs to be ironed out (which feels increasingly common) to just waiting for sales. There's a whole subreddit r/patientgamers for people who wait for at least twelve months:
And on that note: games are generally more expensive than movie tickets, and movie theaters are also a generally more "social" activity. There are multiple movies I've only seen because friends invited me, and wouldn't have watched on streaming. Even watching the social aspect, it's a lot easier to impulsively spend $15-$25 on a movie ticket than to drop $30-$60+ on a single-player game you won't have time to play right away.
On top of all that, there's a big difference in the experience of a movie theater versus streaming at home, but no such difference with Game Pass. So there's even LESS incentive to buy a game at full price on day one when you know you can play it in a few months.
I've honestly never understood how Game Pass was profitable and worked from an economic standpoint... And I guess that's because it really wasn't.
I for one find it way, way easier to impulsively buy a game, which typically offers up ten or more hours of enjoyment, than I do to go to a movie. Particularly knowing that the movie will be on a streaming service that I subscribe to, sooner or later.
If you have enough time to fill that that's a compelling argument, that still makes traditional game sales overpriced compared to other forms of cheap entertainment (including the one you mentioned -- streaming TV), and should make a service like Gamepass basically guaranteed to get more money out of you than traditional game sales. Less to individual high profile studios, maybe, but more overall.
I'm pretty sure I've paid more for Game Pass than I got out of it. There have been some years where I got a good deal, but I usually don't play that many titles. At this point it's more of a sunk-cost fallacy/convenience fee.
Yes, because the vast majority of people don't actually have the amounts of free time that the old "games are actually cheap on a dollars per hour basis!" saw requires to make sense, let alone for a monthly subscription to make sense compared to the amount of playtime locked up in the games you already own but still haven't finished.
Personally I think any game longer than 10 hours or more expensive than $20 is probably doing something wrong. Most games really don't justify lengths longer than that except as a way of justifying prices higher than that, and it doesn't really work out if the game doesn't hold your attention for the full length.
That's true to an extent, but as it has gone on they've been adding more and more big titles as day one gamepass drops, and the way I play games means I'm rarely playing anything day 1 anyway, so it's really been mostly upside for me. If the price goes up much more or the start putting fewer games on it I'll probably dip, but for a while at least it's been quite nice.
The movie/TV streaming comparison is a good one because these services do open themselves up to typical streaming behaviours. Not everyone is necessarily going to keep a subscription running year-round. I'm guessing a good portion just subscribe for a month or two, play through whatever single player games are on their mind and then cancel. I do it myself for EA games, happy to drop €6 and blitz through a Jedi game or something where I'm unlikely to replay it, or if I do get the itch, it will be at a much later time when it's going for €5-10 on sale.
Those are 2 distinct issues, that quote is in reference to COD being day one on it, but they were losing money/not getting subscribers before they had even acquired Activision.
I was referring more specifically to this part of the article.
I’m not sure how many Xbox consoles have been sold in the last two generations, but it seems that they haven’t managed to attract more than a 30 million of their potential audience to subscribe across two generations.
Most people would opt for the one-time payment for a game over a subscription since they don’t play many games anyway.
This is the part that always bothered me. It always seemed too good to be true. I never partook, mostly because I was expecting to get rug pulled at any time, but I had friends who did. The games I was surprised they were able to get just casually as part of the pass was crazy. They had to be heavily subsidized by greater Microsoft just to justify this. As soon as they put in the newer, higher priced games, I knew they were screwed. Getting a new title at a heavily discounted price is not economical at all for the selling company.
I honestly don't see any sensible math outside of some internal economic shell game that's happening to justify putting new releases on game pass. For Call of Duty, I would have waited and brought on a CoD game that was older onto game pass to tap on to nostalgia for those who love the series. Then you could have dangled the shiny new one over them as well, because that's where all the cool gamers are, right?
If it was too good of a deal, then the subscriber count wouldn't have dropped from 34 million to 30 million in 2 years.
I guess the point of the article is that game pass should be more like XBox Live Arcade, which was mainly a platform for small and indie games and caters to a different kind of gamer. Providing AAA games caused Microsoft to raise the price too much, which cost them a lot of subscribers.
I used to have a 360 and I loved the live arcade stuff because it was small investments of time and money. I don't feel like putting the effort into AAA games anymore, and if I did, I would only want maybe one a years.
This is interesting because it's the right logic applied the wrong way around. The reason they lost subscribers is because of a significant price hike. It was too good of a deal until it wasn't.
I pretty much view Game Pass like a rental service.
Take the new Halo game for example. I know I'm probably only ever going to play it once so why would I pay $50 to buy it when I can pay $15 for a month of access to it?
You still do. Because the Reddit community is toxic and lacks basic critical thinking skills.
Game Pass is genuinely one of the dumbest business models a games publisher could ever have introduced; aside from "release all our exclusives on our competitors' platforms and hope that sells Xboxes."
For the price of roughly two games a year, you get access to hundreds of titles including day-one releases of anything from Xbox Game Studios.
Even at $30 a month Game Pass Ultimate eas an absolute steal.
$30/month is $360/year which is considerably more than your "roughly two games a year". It's not worth $30 a month because there will be months where they add nothing but trash and games that were already F2P.
Personally I cancelled my sub when they raised the price of ultimate above $15.
It's harder to quantify based on the fact that Xbox Live Gold was mandatory to play online then got bundled with Game Pass Essentials.
Game Pass PC may be a better point of comparison. $13.99 a month or $167.88 a year. Divide that by the RRP of a mainline MS game ($69.99) and that's about 2.4 games a year.
The only thing even remotely making this a win for MS is the fact that Xbox Game Studios have released sweet fuck-all lately.
One of the hopes is that they can get subscription revenue out of old games. Nowadays, gamers mostly play last year's release. One time discounted sales don't generate much profit either.