Sales or economics is not the only thing a developer may care about. Some people want control over their work and will be upset from people pirating their game even if it doesn't mean they lose a sale. Similarly many artists do not want you to repost their art or use their art as your profile picture.

Sure, but the specific thing the person I was replying to said the developer was complaining about was not getting paid.

Ok, but should we care if those developers/artists get what they want? Some companies would also really like to take games they have sold you away from you so they can sell you the next installment. Some developers don't want certain groups of people they dislike to enjoy their game. Not all things that developers are want are reasonable.

Limiting sales to the “right” people is a totally different proposition than revoking sales after the fact. Both are dumb, but one is within a copyright owner’s rights, and the other is not.

What does "control over their work" mean if it's not about losing a sale?

Developers exerting control over a copy that's already in someone's hands has never been a good thing. Too many games have had content ripped out years later because the developer had a change of heart, or was contractually obligated to remove it due to some licensing agreement (unbeknownst to their customers, of course). Both of these scenarios are immoral (arguably illegal) and don't deserve support.

For example an artist may create a character and they don't want that character to be used in relation to politics. Such an action may not affect sales but it would be annoying to happen to the artist especially if the politics didn't match their own. Similarly if it was promoting a religion that was not your own that could be uncomfortable.

> It's certainly more than 0%, though.

Is it? You also need to account to sales that only happened because someone learned of the game via a pirated copy.

compare what nintendo sells to other publishers on PC...

The problem with game pass is that it takes the Spotify model to games. In practice, it doesn't seem to scale well - Microsoft has seemingly hit a market cap of ~35 million users because of a lot of existing aversion to subscription services in games, which isn't enough customers to actually amortize the cost of development, even at an indie scale.

Indie developers in particular don't like Game Pass because it apparently pays Spotify-tier rates, which is pretty bad. Spotify gets away with it because it took a deal with all big music labels for more favorable payouts, but your average indie band on Spotify makes absolutely zilch from your Spotify subscription, even if you listen to them 24/7 every year. Indie bands typically compensate with concerts and brand merchandise, but that isn't an option for games - secondary income sources are typically reviled (microtransactions in paid games) or don't sell to expectations (merchandise). The Spotify model only "works" because they shifted the music industry to rely primarily on those "side" sources (and even then there's a lot of disgruntled musicians who are unhappy with the Spotify model devaluing their craft).

It's true that Game Pass subscriber growth has slowed, but I don't think 35 million is any kind of permanent cap. There are 910 million PC gamers in the world today, and this is growing by approximately 35 million per year. This is, of course, in addition to Xbox owners. As more people become PC gamers each year, more people discover and subscribe to Game Pass. Ditto for existing gamers who discover Game Pass, or decide to finally try it and stick. Tastes and expectations are changing, and just as we accepted subscriptions for music, I think subscriptions for gaming are becoming more normal.

I've gotten tremendous value out of GamePass. I very rarely replay games, so all the games that swing by long enough on GamePass for me to play through and enjoy (and that I would otherwise never have bought) have made the subscription model work really well.

It has also reduced my game "clutter" in a way I very much appreciate.