Nathaniel Byrne . com

The following was printed as a letter in Edge magazine (#408, April 2025) under the title “Passing out”.

Much as I would like to make myself sound like a person of principle, the truth of the matter is that my Game Pass subscription expired. A year was offered by my broadband provider, so I took them up on the opportunity to give them even more money per month for a speed hike I didn’t really notice, and for Game Pass, which I used infrequently to play Forza Horizon 5, until I levelled up to the point I couldn’t get a podium place against the “drivatars”, and play Alien: Isolation until it got difficult.

Then I got a Steam Deck.

Microsoft publish a support page that nicely details how to set up Xbox Cloud Gaming in Microsoft Edge on the Steam Deck. It’s the work of less than hour and the only difficulty I had was trying to be too clever with the artwork images and use different ones to those recommended.

Cloud Gaming, in my use case, was excellent, and it worked near-flawlessly on the Deck and played some of my favourite games of the year on. Chief among them Citizen Sleeper, the excellent indy made one developer, Gareth Damian Martin, and hired artist, Guillaume Singelin. Based on Martin’s experience as a non-binary person trying to get by on gig economy jobs, they “wanted to tell a story at capitalism’s periphery, where so many of us have learned how to exist”. The irony of playing the game not as one that I had purchased, with some small fraction possibly of the price going to the developer, but instead as part of Microsoft’s subscription library, was not lost on me.

Having never outsold any of its rival, the purchasing spree that Microsoft Gaming has been on of late, and arguably since its formation, acquiring Bungie and making Halo the killer app of the original Xbox, is emblematic of their strategy that Phil Spencer has said “isn’t how many consoles you sell. The business is how many players are playing the games that they buy, how they play”. Put more honestly, how may players subscribe and generate that sweet, sweet recurring revenue, and how Microsoft Gaming can distance itself from the notoriously low- to no-margin business of console manufacturing, just as its parent company distanced itself from low-margin hardware manufacturing in the PC era to achieve market dominance. 

Microsoft’s acquisition of studios is endemic of much of the criticism the video game industry draws from a creative perspective. That gaming culture is riddled with racism and misogyny is a separate, far more serious issue. The layoffs at studios Microsoft has acquired, the closure of others, their mismanagement of releases makes rumours of a creeping toxic work environment all the more credible. As commenters have posited, MS might have paid for Activision, but Activision that took over MS Gaming.

Science fiction, in all its guises, like all fiction, is a mirror to the society and the time it is written in, like Invasion of The Body-Snatchers and the Red Scare, like Mad Max: The Road Warrior and fear of fuel scarcity, like Citizen Sleeper and the late stage capitalist nightmare that is the early part of this century.

My subscription to Game Pass ran out just as I really started to enjoy Citizen Sleeper, having had a bumpy journey getting into the game and having put it down more than once. Just as it opened up, I found I couldn’t play it anymore, not without renewing my Game Pass subscription. And having been playing Citizen Sleeper and reading the monthly updates in these very pages of all the shitty things said in the industry, all of it persuaded me not to renew my Game Pass subscription, for all the good that will do. I will instead purchase Citizen Sleeper from Steam (because obviously Valve have never done anything controversial), lose the three or more hours I put into it Game Pass, but hopefully contribute more to Gareth Damian Martin’s coffers. And I will do the same again later this month when the follow-up is released.

Header image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Fellow Traveller