When Google Play Pass first launched, I was wide-eyed at the idea. One small price per year or per month for hundreds of apps and games. Normally you would have to spend cash on all those paid experiences, and you would still get ads and in-app purchases in your face. Play Pass tried to remove all that and give you a premium way to access, try and enjoy everything the store had to offer that had accumulated over the past ten years.
As you probably know, many of the games and applications on the Play Store are not something many people would take a chance on – at least not in troves. Mobile gaming, at least in the west, hasn’t become as popular as it has been abroad, and for that reason, Play Pass seemed necessary to help users dig up the real gems.
However, I forgot I was even paying for the service and have since canceled it. Well, that’s not quite right, because I didn’t exactly cancel it. Instead, I just turned off auto-renewal on my Play Store subscriptions tab so you won’t be charged when my year is up. As a reference point, I spent the $29.99 USD for the annual level last year.
That said, I wanted to take a moment to talk about why I ditched Play Pass and what Google can do to win me back. To be clear, I don’t trust any of my suggestions to the company and believe that their subscription model for Android apps and games will fade into obscurity before it has a chance to become something the masses really cling to and finds sufficient, lasting value of. Now that Play Games has reached 5 billion installs on Android, I think it’s worth someone reading this and taking the feedback seriously.
Which brings me to my first reason for canceling Play Pass – the value given from the start was an aggregated pool of apps and games the store had amassed over the past decade and a half. Many of the titles introduced as part of the subscription had little to no value for most users or were already a core part of the Android gaming experience. What I mean is that many of the things Google set up with Play Pass was of value to me years ago, so I bought them with my hard-earned money… years ago.
Almost everything else was pretty much fluff. Well, that’s not quite fair. There are plenty of titles that I’ve installed simply because they were free with my subscription that I wouldn’t have tried otherwise, so it certainly did the job in that regard. However, much of the content focused on children, families, and productivity. Google’s goal from the start was to provide something for everyone, but not enough for everyone in my opinion. Maybe it’s my fault I hoped it would continue to receive a series of great role-playing games, action-adventure titles and more.
That’s something else – out of 800 “apps and games,” there’s really virtually no way to tell how many games someone like me who is solely interested in the gaming aspect of the subscription service can enjoy. How many of those are apps, Google? Why isn’t there a comprehensive list anywhere except on Android Authority (thanks, guys!) It’s really hard to accept the company saying “Here’s a ton of value, enjoy it” while dumping it on your lap if you have no way have to browse through it and check if it is really valuable. Quantity doesn’t always mean quality, and it leads to misperceptions about value.
Oh, and why isn’t there a gamepad-supported section or indicator for games that work well with a controller? I know there’s a “Premium” section for games that run well on Chromebooks, but it’s both inaccurate and infrequently updated. How many of the titles in the “Premium” section of Google Play Pass work with a controller? How many of them work with a mouse and a keyboard?
With Chromebooks getting a special game mode and Play Games for PC launching in more regions, aren’t these things much more important than they used to be? I mean, I get that eastern markets are a lot more on board with microtransactions and automatic gameplay than we are in the west, but come on, Google, get it together. Now it’s not just Chromebook owners who want bigger screen games supported by popular peripherals, but also Windows users and fans of mobile game controllers!
As for apps, I really can’t remember the last time I visited the “apps” section of the Google Play Store for, well, anything. Anything I install on a new phone I find and tap the green install button because I know what experiences I like. For pretty much all of my “app” experiences, I google a website via the Chrome browser on my phone or call up the web apps and PWAs on my Chromebook. The death of non-gaming apps in favor of PWAs is a discussion for another time, but I do believe there will be a future where most traditional apps go the way of the western and no longer reside in the Play Store itself. to be seen.
If you’re taking a quick survey, let me know in the comments section as you browse the apps section of the Play Store and install new experiences often. Most of what Play Pass offers are third-party productivity apps, utility apps that outperform the free apps from bigger, better-known companies (which everyone already uses), and so on.
I’ve found value in creative apps for art and music, but then again, I already had ArtFlow, Infinite Painter, FL Studios Mobile, and so on. I’m not knocking on value here so much as saying that for me it’s stuff that I’ve already bought and enjoyed. If I want to resubscribe to Play Pass, I want Google to add new and lasting value to the service. Otherwise, it’s no different and no better than me paying for an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription – recurring payments for software that you can buy once and own forever. Does that make sense?
At the end of the day, it feels like Google is charging too much money to be so aimless and uncommunicative. Update the list of Play Pass titles sporadically, never tell users what’s on the horizon, and rake in the money from millions of unwitting people who cancel and forget their subscriptions. Maybe Google isn’t taking this too seriously, or maybe they’ve stretched themselves too thin, but either way, the user suffers while taking advantage, which is quite common.
With the popularity of cloud gaming booming, most users are looking to provide them with entertainment both at home and on the go. Android apps and games still get billions of installs, but I still believe that Google Play Pass should merge with Stadia, deliver a thousand games with that one subscription, and let gamers run Android games without installing one. or download. It already features touchscreen gameplay (tap and swipe), so this would work really well.
The bottom line is this: If Google wants users to commit to Play Pass, it needs to communicate better and entice them. It’s not a user’s job to do the hard work of finding value in a service, it’s a company’s job to present it on a scale in exchange for money. Until it does, sadly I have to say I’m done with Google Play Pass.
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