Last year, Microsoft announced a new Xbox Game Pass service for Xbox One users and devices running Windows 10. It was launched in the spring of 2017, but it still remains a bit incomprehensible to the Russian user.

And very in vain. Xbox Game Pass is a great option to rent hundreds of games for a nominal monthly subscription fee. But first things first.

What kind of Xbox Game Pass is this?

It will hardly come as a surprise to you that in order to play on Xbox One, you must first purchase the game. The price for one release can vary from a couple of hundred to four thousand rubles.

So Microsoft realized that it would be much more profitable for the user to subscribe to a whole arsenal of games for a fixed monthly fee.

In essence, Xbox Game Pass is a kind of streaming service for games. Instead of buying tracks from iTunes, many have chosen Apple Music, and for a hundred and fifty a month they get access to millions of songs.

The same is true for Xbox Game Pass. You pay once a month and get access to a large library of games right now.

And how much does a subscription cost?

The cost of a subscription to Xbox Game Pass is several times lower than the cost of a good shooter from a well-known developer.

For access to more than a hundred games, Microsoft asks for everything 599 rubles per month.

What's more, Xbox Game Pass users can count on a permanent 20% discount on non-subscription Xbox One games and add-ons. The only "but": Microsoft offers a discount only a month after the release of new games.

But anyone can try the service right now. First 14 days free.

And what games are on Xbox Game Pass?

The Microsoft Store censors estimate that there are over 1,300 games available for Xbox One right now. Of these, about 200 are exclusive to the console, and another 400 are already recognized as platform classics.

Of course, all of these games are not available with an Xbox Game Pass subscription. After all, this is not a premium service with access to all the new products on the day of release. New items arrive here with a slight delay.

For example, from the expected releases: the shooter Crackdown 3 will be available to subscribers immediately after the release. And play State of Decay 2, which was released a few days ago, right now. And even the unusual Sea of ​​Thieves is available for free with a subscription.

In addition, such large publishing houses have already entered into an agreement with Microsoft, such as:

2K, 505 Games, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Capcom, Deep Silver, Focus Home Interactive, SEGA, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Microsoft Studios

In short, there will always be something to play.

The catalog of games available to Xbox Game Pass subscribers is updated monthly. You can see the full catalog on the official Xbox website.

And do not forget to add support for Windows 10 to this variety with all the ensuing releases for the platform.

What about Xbox Live Gold then?

Yes, Microsoft has another platform - Xbox Live Gold. This is a kind of premium Xbox Live account with advanced features for gamers.

The main feature of the Xbox Live Gold status is that you can play with friends. That is, a full-fledged multiplayer mode is provided.

In addition, Xbox Live Gold subscribers have access to regular discounts on games and the ability to purchase releases with impressive discounts of up to 70%.

But with an Xbox Live Gold subscription, free games are available to you only occasionally and strictly for a certain time, and in Xbox Game Pass on a regular basis. And the range of Xbox Game Pass subscribers is much wider.

If you wish, you can get a full luxury by subscribing to both services.

Definitely worth a try

The world of console games is a costly affair. At least for a newbie who has bought an Xbox One, it is very difficult at first to get used to the fact that you have to pay for everything. Also 4000 rubles per game.

Subscribing to Xbox Game Pass allows you to approach the harsh reality of life a little softer. For a symbolic amount of 599 rubles a month, you can get access to hundreds of interesting games.

Agree, this is much more profitable than buying each game separately. In addition, it is unlikely that you will go through the same shooter for months or endlessly cut into a dynamic RPG. Diversity is priceless.

This product allows you to activate a subscription to Xbox Game Pass for one 1 month (30 calendar days). Only suitable for new accounts that have never purchased/activated Xbox Game Pass.

With Xbox Game Pass, you'll always have something to play. For a low monthly fee, you get unlimited access to over 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 games on Xbox One. Find and download the games you've been wanting to play for a long time, including legendary old editions in the highest quality, without streaming or connection issues. Enjoy games of all genres, such as action and adventure games, as well as family games, hard shooters and sports simulations. Do you like an Xbox One game in the catalog and would like to purchase it? Buy it and save 20% and get an additional 10% off any Xbox One game add-on in the catalog. Xbox Game Pass is access to a catalog with new games added every month. Subscription can be canceled at any time.

Peculiarities:

• Always something new! - Play games of various genres: action, adventure, family, shooters, sports, puzzles and more. New games are added every month, so there will always be plenty to choose from!
• Download and play full games!- Download directly to your console and play full games online or offline without any streaming or connection issues. Enjoy games as they were meant to - go on new adventures and re-explore familiar worlds.
• Discounts on Xbox One games- Do you want to buy the game you like for Xbox One? Interested in purchasing an expansion or season pass for a game in the Xbox Game Pass catalog? Take advantage of 20% off Xbox One games and 10% off all expansion packs (assuming the base game is in the catalog). Xbox 360 games do not count toward discounts.

Note: You do not need to be an Xbox Live Gold member to use Xbox Game Pass. Xbox Live Gold is required to play multiplayer games with Xbox Game Pass. Xbox Game Pass is only available on Xbox One consoles. Activation is done through a user account.

*At launch, Xbox Game Pass will be valid in at least 30 countries where the Xbox console is sold. New regions will be added as the catalog expands. Countries where support is offered: Australia, Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Hungary, Germany, Hong Kong, Greece, Denmark, Israel, India, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, United United Arab Emirates, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, United Kingdom, USA, Turkey, Finland, France, Czech Republic, Chile, Switzerland, Sweden, South Africa.

Distribution of content by subscription is far from a new idea, the history of cable channels in the United States confirms this. At the turn of the 90s and 00s, HBO channel became a pioneer of the cable revolution on American television, showing that the viewer is ready to pay for quality and interesting content. Other channels followed suit. With the development of the conductive capacity of Internet networks, streaming services began to develop: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu are currently one of the largest players, whose profit allows not only to pay for the work of employees, servers and purchase films for online display, but also to produce on the proceeds money own films and series. In addition, there are services that make it possible to listen to music without limit (Apple Music, Spotify), read books or scientific articles.

Within a couple of years, Netflix was able to build momentum to release 20-30 series and shows a year.

However, in this case, we are primarily interested in Netflix - a company that initially (since 1997) provided the opportunity to rent DVDs and developed a site with recommendations for viewers. In 2007, they started working on an online cinema. Seven years later, in 2014, the number of its subscribers exceeded 50 million people, and its net profit reached $266 million. In the era of Big Data, social networks and universal Internetization, creating and studying a portrait of an ordinary user-consumer becomes extremely important. In addition to the fact that the algorithms themselves compile lists of recommendations personalized for each user from the information content already available in the catalogs of Internet sites, these sites begin to focus on the consumer in the process of creating new content. The strength of social networks is that people themselves are ready to fill them with content: they themselves are ready to tag films, write reviews, and express wishes regarding future work. Feedback allows creators to almost instantly identify what people liked (and what they didn’t like), and analysis of the behavior of tens of thousands of people even allows you to find out which episode of the series people mostly stop watching, or after which episode they will definitely watch the season to the end. And this data can really help when creating products in the future.

Thanks to online cinemas, the process of moving mid-budget cinema has also begun - Netflix can already release films for $ 60 million with Brad Pitt in the lead role. Epic fantasy (Game of Thrones) and other niche genres have long been released as TV shows, leaving theaters with only 200 million blockbusters.

The most striking example of this approach to content creation (full orientation to the needs of the viewer) can be considered a series. This is a good series, but still the main complaint against it was the lack of new ideas. He average good, sewn from pieces of other works and constantly gives out references to already existing films and series, instead of telling and showing something that the viewer has never seen. Such an approach only leads to the fact that the created products become almost mechanistically programmed for success, where each action of the character is calculated according to the formula of meeting the expectations of the audience. What becomes important is not so much the desire of the author to speak out, but the creation of such a product that would satisfy the viewer in most respects. Although this is a general problem of commercialization, which is only becoming more noticeable in the current realities. And the video game industry has already faced these challenges.

Unlike movies, music or TV shows, games are not static works; inside them, the player interacts with an artificially built environment that can be changed by developers at any time. The interactivity of games is not only in the interaction between the player and the game itself, but also in the fact that the developer, focusing on community feedback, is able to improve an existing project or use the experience gained when creating a new one. The idea of ​​Early Access is not new to the industry and has been actively used by indie developers for several years. Focus groups and closed tests have not disappeared anywhere (AAA projects still need them), but projects from no-name studios are quite actively developing with the assistance of the gaming community. Layers of Fear, Starbound, Rust - these are the projects that could not become what they are without passing the "public tests". But this approach also has a downside: what the players want does not always coincide with the desires and plans of the developers themselves. And since the process is interactive, there may be much more sincerely offended compared to traditional methods of creating content.

Draining the Steam redesign project.

Steam, the largest digital distribution service for games, is trying with might and main to become a platform that could help players decide on the choice of game. Tags, user reviews, curators are all small steps towards creating a system that can only recommend games that are interesting to a particular user. However, unlike Netflix, Valve has not yet started hiring freelancers to rate games and fill in tag columns. And they don’t have a subscription to play “all the indies of this world” either.

On the other hand, it cannot be said that the industry is far from the global process of transition to a subscription system: back in 2010, Sony and in 2013 Microsoft launched their own services that allowed users to play multiplayer and receive once a month several "free » games. However, these services differ in small details: after purchasing the game, it will be possible to play it on Sony consoles only with the Internet and an activated subscription, on the Xbox 360 it can be done without them, and all Xbox One games will “burn out” when the subscription is canceled. The third major player in the console market, Nintendo, is also thinking about introducing such a subscription, but its option seems to be the most “unfriendly” - after a month the game will simply “burn out”. But they have not yet launched their service for Switch, so by the time it leaves beta in September 2017, the game activation process may change significantly.

The Gaikai service was announced along with OnLive in 2009. Unlike OnLive, which competed for the end user alongside Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, Gaikai provided a platform for game makers to try demos of the latest titles for free. In 2012, the sale of the service for $380 million to Sony was announced, and PlayStation Now was made on its basis.

Also, a year before the announcement of PS + at the international exhibition Game Developers Conference 2009, the OnLive cloud service was announced, which made it possible to rent games and play them from any platform, as long as there was a good Internet connection and a keyboard-mouse / gamepad. A little later, OnLive went bankrupt, and other enthusiasts took their place. In 2015, Sony launched the PlayStation Now service in the United States, which allowed you to play PS3 games on your PC. In 2016, Remote Play appeared on PS4, allowing you to stream games from the console to your PC.

EA was the first to offer a fundamentally new approach to players, launching the EA Access service in 2014, which allowed subscribers on PC and Xbox One (console players to play multiplayer will have to buy Gold) to play full versions of games, as well as participate in beta tests and Feel the trial versions up to the official release. And at the moment, the service can be considered successful, so it is not surprising that Microsoft went the same way the other day with Xbox Game Pass, a service that will give Xbox One and Windows 10 users the opportunity to play more than a hundred games (most of the announced ones were released before 2015 or in 2015). Despite all the advantages, the main disadvantage of these subscriptions is already visible - they are tied to a specific publisher, the choice of games is very limited, and users do not have a clear and simple platform for feedback. And it's far from a fact that these services will allow developers and publishers to get something that employees from the marketing research department could not find out before.

Ultimately, it is not entirely clear whether the gaming industry can change so much that thousands of games begin to be distributed by subscription, and developers can focus on data obtained from such library services. It is possible that Valve has its own tools for analyzing Steam profiles (but there is SteamSpy and Steam Database) and the behavior of players in individual games, but it is not noticeable that they share it in official press releases, and it is not the fact that they are seriously engaged in analyzing the available information - their plans (which we know for sure) are still limited only by the redesign of Steam in order to set up the work of what is already there. And whether someone will do something similar in the near future is still unknown. The music and film industries have already reached the point of giving the user all the content they have for a moderate monthly fee, it's up to game development.

I hope that Microsoft will be able to change the industry, and one day I will see a subscription to games from Ubisoft on my PS4.

Xbox Live has long become, one might say, "native and close" for all owners of the Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles. The service provides a lot of advantages: free games every month and the opportunity to play online with a friend or chat with a relative living on another continent.

Yes, the "golden" Gold-subscription costs money, but at the same time it has a lot of advantages. We will tell you about them. And we'll show you!

The main feature of Xbox Live Gold is, without a doubt, a library of free games that is updated every month. So, in November, all subscribers received an action Super Dungeon Bros., detective story Murdered: Soul Suspect and shooter in the style of action movies of the eighties Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon(one more game, classic quest Monkey Island: Special Edition, distributed free of charge from 1 to 16 November). The last two were released on the Xbox 360, but thanks to the backwards compatibility feature, they can also be played on the Xbox One. And this is true for all Xbox 360 subscription games - all of them will be available on a modern Microsoft console, as more and more projects receive backward compatibility support every day.

By the way, in December, "gold" subscribers will get an action game for free Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition, horror Outlast, adventure game Outland and race Burnout Paradise .

At the same time, free games remain with the subscriber forever. Even if the subscription is terminated, and a new one will be issued only after some time, the player will be able to continue the investigation without any problems in the same Murdered: Soul Suspect. In addition, free games can be deleted and then downloaded again from Xbox Live - when the "gold" subscription is active.

A monthly subscription to Xbox Live Gold costs 599 rubles, so the savings are obvious. See for yourself!

When it's free and no cheese!

Super Dungeon Bros. - a cooperative action game in which four players have to go into the dungeons of Rockheim, fight hordes of evil undead, loot all sorts of good things and find out an ancient legend.

Murdered: Soul Suspect is dedicated to the adventures of a detective who was killed by an unknown person at the beginning of the game. To unravel the mystery of his death and find the killer, the protagonist returns from the other world.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon seems to take players to the 1980s. The environment is appropriate: a mysterious island where a mad scientist sets up mysterious experiments, dinosaurs and cyborg soldiers. All the videos in the game seem to be recorded on a VHS tape, and the music of that era sounds in the background.

Monkey Island: Special Edition - reissue of the classic quest from LucasArts. A naive hero, hilarious jokes and a fascinating story about the search for pirate wealth - that's what Monkey Island is all about.

And there is nothing to say about the savings from buying an annual subscription.

In addition, "gold" subscribers get exclusive discounts. Now, for example, those who subscribe to Xbox Live Gold can buy some of the best games for much less than usual, Elite: Dangerous, Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition, Dead Island Definitive Collection, Virginia and others. Such discounts for subscribers are updated every week, and even during sales (for example, at the height of Black Friday), “gold” subscribers buy various bonuses and additional discounts.

As you can see, even a three-month "gold" subscription at a price of 1399 rubles will justify itself in less than a month. A subscription for the whole year will cost 3,599 rubles, but it will also pay off in a couple of months - thanks to free games and rather big discounts on games outside of sales.

But the benefits of a paid subscription don't end there. It, as we have already noted, allows you to play with friends over the network. By the way, rare shareware games (like World of Tanks) do not require a subscription, but for all other cases it is needed. BUT Microsoft does everything to make it comfortable to play online. The Xbox One, for example, has a unique reputation system based on the characteristics of the players. In other words, you can protect yourself from cheaters and boors.

And Xbox Live Gold makes it much easier to find a team and communicate. Subscribers can assemble their squad in a couple of minutes, and then go, for example, to conquer space in a recent Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or arrange friendly races in Forza Horizon 3.

* * *

The bottom line is that the savings are clear: with an Xbox Live Gold subscription for a month, you get four free games and many exceptional discounts. And don't forget about the opportunity to play online with friends, without any cheaters and unpleasant personalities!

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Top Paid MMORPGs

Five hundred years have passed since the original EverQuest. The gods began to trade in robberies, they also allow more shameful things. A rift occurred throughout the territory of Norrath - the map began to change because of this. Many cities were destroyed, forests, mountains, rivers also suffered.

Destiny is a new space shooter that tells the story of the world after the apocalypse. The player needs to customize his own hero and go to complete various missions. You will find excellent graphics, a chic atmosphere and a sea of ​​​​adrenaline.

The events of this game develop simultaneously with the narration of the famous novel "The Lord of the Rings". It all starts from the moment Frodo leaves the Shire. In general, the epic plot is a clear advantage of the project. During the game, many famous characters are sure to meet.

The events of this game take place in a world where a terrifying zombie apocalypse has come. A terrible epidemic began on the planet - because of it, most of the population died. Who is responsible for such a disaster? Of course, Zombies - because of them all the troubles happen!

A very popular game in the world, the number of users is in the millions. Location: fantasy world, after the events of Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, according to the plot, four years have passed. Players are waiting for tasks, travel, unique experience.

The game includes a whole series of interesting quests: missions can be completed in different ways, therefore, the game fate of the character is predetermined by the player's actions. Careful study of the game world also gives certain bonuses.

Rust is a multiplayer survival-action video game developed by British company Facepunch Studios. Based on the Unity 3D engine. The creators of Rust were inspired primarily by games like Day Z and Minecraft, which is why there is crafting, hunting and resource extraction here.

This fantasy world is inhabited by five races at once: the norns are mighty giants, the charms are graceful and dexterous. There are also plant people and asura dwarfs - very arrogant and cunning. There are also ordinary people - without them, in such projects, nowhere. There are no violent wars between races - they all oppose the same destructive force.

A characteristic feature of this project is cubic graphics. The game world is completely open. Some users may think that such a technique reduces the overall quality of the game, but it takes only a few hours to spend in the Minecraft universe, and this impression will completely change.

Ultima Online is a classic MMORPG that is the ancestor of all online role-playing games. However, the game is still popular. You will find a varied gameplay, nice graphics, massive battles, craft and character leveling system.

Dreaming of open space? Then the game EVE Online will definitely appeal to you! Where can you get rich quick, gain recognition and fame at the level of the entire galaxy? Of course, in outer space! Also here you can find true friends and associates!

The popular role-playing project Warhammer Online will take you to the world of Warhammer! The player will be able to create a unique character and go to explore the game world. Fight bots and real players, upgrade your hero and take part in boss raids.

Colorful, bright online game Wander will offer you a distraction from the endless battles and take a journey through the vast game world! Together with your friends, you have to walk around the island, look for new character forms and enjoy beautiful views of nature.