

Maybe I’m too old, but I never understood the appeal of game passes, you can’t play hundreds of games at the same time unless you have nothing else to do in your life, and most of them are garbage anyway.
Only reasonable subscription model to me is MMOs, because those require a complex infrastructure to run, but non-MMO games? No thank you, I’ll just turn to indies that still sell games without any live-service bullshit.
Steam does demo fests with tons of new games to try completely free, that’s my goto when I want to try something new, true that not all games offer a demo but that’s devs loss imo, if they believe in their games they shouldn’t be afraid of releasing a demo.
I too usually wait for discounts (got Mass Effect legendary edition at 10$ xD), especially on GOG, only exception are games like BG3 or Expedition 33, for those I’m happy to pay full price the moment they release.