That’s my theory. They’ll pump out a few cookie cutter games on the existing IPs, but relatively little creativity is going to be allowed. It’s all for gamepass.

They’ve been touting Gamepass as the xbox seller for a long time now. Several years since they gave up on competing using exclusives if you ask me.

I’m starting to like the specs more than previous gens. At this rate, I might buy the 7 or 8 - 6 still seems like a downgrade from my current phone in some respects and I don’t NEED a new phone anytime soon.

They probably realized that they’re better off paying 3rd party devs to put their games on gamepass than developing their own games.

You’d need an operating system that uses it. It’s going to be at least as difficult as flashing a custom rom, but likely even more so, as there might not be a ready-made build. Definitely something to experiment with on a secondary phone. PostmarketOS is your best bet, here are others that support Plasma Mobile.

Yes. But it used to be free to watch remotely. It’s 99% your own hardware doing everything. Their services get used for discovery, not as proxies for the connection itself, AFAIK.

You already had to pay them to allow transcoding with your own GPU, etc.

Right now it’s still not too bad, but just watch, enshittification will affect paid users too. For one, I expect the lifetime pass to go away, and go away retroactively eventually.