If you’re a Game Pass fan, September 2024 hasn’t been the best. We’ve seen the introduction of the new “Standard” tier, effectively raising the price of Day One games for new subscribers significantly, and for everyone else to a lesser extent (though still a bitter pill to swallow coming hot on the heels of prior rises).
We’ve also….just not had many games come to the service this month. Here’s the list so far:
– Star Trucker
– Train Sim World 5: Standard Edition
– Expeditions: A MudRunner Game
– Age of Mythology: Retold Standard Edition
– Riders Republic
– Overwatch 2
With these recently confirmed as still to come:
– Wargroove 2 – September 19th
– Frostpunk 2 (PC only) – September 20th
– Ara: History Untold (PC only) – September 24th
Given Overwatch 2 is free to play, it’s a bit of a stretch to include that in Game Pass, but technically it is. Of the others, Age of Mythology is a relatively big hitter, being a first party Xbox/PC exclusive (what’s that?!), and Ara is similar (OK, second party, and only on PC for now), however the others are a very mixed bag. Fortunately Frostpunk 2 seems to be reviewing very well, but again, it’s a city builder and PC-only, so we’re in a situation where all the high-scoring Game Pass games are in the same genre (or at least genre-adjacent). If you don’t like god games or city-builders, you may be struggling to find anything to add to your backlog. It seems like weird planning on Microsoft’s part, though I’m sure they’d rather have the “Day 1” moniker and deal with a glut of similar games in one month.
Age of Mythology is reviewing well (currently at 83 on Metacritic), and we’ve mentioned Frostpunk 2 (85 Metacritic) already, but the rest all come in under the current Game Pass average of a 78 (excluding Overwatch 2). None are full price on console (Frostpunk 2 and Ara are PC only anyway), but at least there are some Day 1s in there (Star Trucker, Train Sim, Age of Mythology, Frostpunk 2 & Ara).
The question is whether this sort of month is something we should get used to now. It’s commonplace for subscription services to start off at an extremely high quality, then slowly taper that off while simultaneously increasing fees. We’re definitely seeing the latter, but it’s probably too early to say if the former is the case. This is probably more a situation where Microsoft is aware there are a number of high-profile, first party releases coming imminently and ideally want these (their own games) to fill out Game Pass, as opposed to having to pay other publishers to do it for them.
Either way, we’ll be keeping an eye on the value proposition as time passes and will be sure to post updates as we go. In the mean time, we’re off to play Age of Mythology.