Fortunately for everyone, all of the "stream games as a service" initiatives failed completely. Consumers aren't really interested due to obvious drawbacks, and vendors aren't interested in provisioning enough or good enough hardware to solve those drawbacks.
Imo if Gamepass is allowed to survive, it's end game is a tier, or maybe included at no extra cost with some limitations, a cloud gaming component.
Gamepass is the biggest threat in turning games into subscriptions, and unfortunately a growing subset of people will only play games on Gamepass. We've dodged Gamepass exclusives for now, but for how long?
Game pass doesn't seem terribly popular. Xbox in general isn't doing very well compared to the other consoles. I think they'll keep pushing for games as a service though. It's too tempting to keep all that control out of the hands of players.
It seems fairly popular right now. If you are the kind of person who wants to play many new releases it's a great deal.
But I think it's not particularly sticky: it's a great deal for as long as Microsoft invests into it getting many titles immediately. If they stop doing that, that same audience segment doesn't really have a use for it anymore.
That doesn't mean much. And 40 countries is actually a pretty large amount for this sort of thing. Companies like this are accustomed to (near-)first-world unit economics and market dynamics and they struggle at best to adapt to conditions outside of that bubble. They likely have metrics showing very few potential customers, for various reasons like low ownership of eligible hardware or low exposure to relevant advertising or high rates of piracy setting the price to compete with near zero, etc.
There are logistical challenges that have to be solved, and both upfront and ongoing costs that have to be paid, for every new country that needs to be served, and often these are unlikely to be recouped. If they foreseeably reach 90+% of their potential customer base and revenue (or think so anyway) from those 40 countries then not expanding beyond them is a practical decision that doesn't extrapolate to not caring within those 40.
I paid for GeForce Now for a while. But that one's different because you play the games you "own" on Steam and they just rent you the hardware to play them on.
Eventually I got a gaming video card and canceled - for now.
