Game pass is in essence a subscription model to demo games.

I’m not pro Game Pass either, but this is misrepresentative. Game Pass isn’t for demoing, it’s for the large number of people who just don’t return to games after playing them. They don’t care about owning their games, and they may not even care that much about choosing their games, so Game Pass gives them things to do and plenty of hot new things to jump into while everyone is talking about them, all without ever having to pony up for anything specific unless it’s the rare case of something they want to play more/again after it leaves Game Pass.

It’s like the old console market where one would buy a game, then trade it in for credit on the next game. You feed money in to have things to play, and then some more if you actually want to keep something and have to make up for its trade in on the next game. Especially since things are probably getting discounted by the time they leave Game Pass, so the sub+price-to-keep may still end up being comparable/better than the original buy price.

It’s just a different way of experiencing gaming, and Microsoft is obviously still trying to figure out exactly how much they can milk that market for that convenience. Quite a few smaller games can probably make more from Game Pass than they would from sales alone, because fewer people would buy the game than consider it added value on their Game Pass sub, and multiplayer games can jump-start their communities without going free.

Ouch, Stardeus is not going to be happy to see that news.

The app requires an existing login to use, right? I tried the app since the website’s email/password registration screen just returns “An unexpected error occurred” every time I try it, but didn’t see a new registration option for the app, just the login option.

How do we prevent this from happening to other instances?

We don’t, and we can’t. What we need is to stop acting like Actors/People/Groups are single points homed on a single instance. They should be a ring of mirrored instance entities, so the “source” Actor and content are still there when one instance drops out of the ring. Everything is already getting copied around, we’re just missing out on the biggest value of that: RAID for identities.

Ie, if I make my accounts on three sites, those should all be me, and it doesn’t matter to the fediverse which one I use at any given moment. Same for communities.

That’s real federation, not this ramshackle heap of points of failure where we just hope we don’t individually get bit too often by shutdowns, even though shutdowns are completely inevitable.