There are two major knocks against Game Pass these days. The first is the new $30 price point for access to day-one releases. The second is the fact that you’re basically just renting and don’t actually own any of the games you play. The surprise departure of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl in November really drives that home.
Subscribers noticed a new notification this month that the post-apocalyptic immersive sim will be part of the batch of games leaving the Netflix-like service in the weeks ahead. The others include Football Manager 2024, Blacksmith Master, and Frostpunk. What caught some players by surprise is just how brief S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2‘s tour on Game Pass has been. The game only released a year ago and has still been receiving substantial updates to improve performance and fix bugs. Some people no doubt expected they had more time to go back and finish the grueling but rewarding shooter.
“I think it’s a really bad precedent that a game stays shorter in Game Pass than we had to wait for it to launch, beyond waiting MONTHS to become properly playable patch after patch,” one player wrote in a thread on X that gained traction over the weekend. “The game hits PS5 before it even leaves Game Pass.”
STALKER 2 got announced in 2020 at the Xbox Showcase in August.
STALKER 2 took 4 years to develop beyond announcement and officially dropped in November 2024.
STALKER 2 will leave Xbox Game Pass in November 2025.
I think it’s a really bad precedent that a game stays shorter in… https://t.co/TZg486uoeg
— Kloot (@ZakkenKloot) November 2, 2025
The sentiment was echoed on the Game Pass subreddit. “It’s really frustrating seeing Stalker 2 leave Gamepass,” a player there wrote. “Game is still a buggy mess, so for those who were waiting on this game to be patched, I guess we’re screwed. lol.” Others argued that no one is “screwed” because you can still go and buy the game at any time, but it does cut against some of the perceived value of Game Pass.
Payday 3 was a more egregious example of this day-one issue. The launch was a mess, lots of things were broken, and lots of fans went back to playing Payday 2 until the sequel improved. But the day-one Game Pass release only stayed on the service for a year. Anyone who bounced off during that early window only to come back closer to its departure might have felt like they were getting a raw deal.
This is the double-edged sword of the value proposition at the center of Game Pass. One the one hand it’s a massive buffet where power-users can super-sample tons of great games to their heart’s content, from blockbusters like Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to small indie games like Minami Lane. If you spend a lot of time playing lots of different games each week, you can actually get more than your money’s worth out of Game Pass.
Game Pass’ airline economy problem
But if you actually want to finish a lot of games, or play certain ones more deeply, it doesn’t always make a lot of sense. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a good example. It can take 40 hours just to beat, or around 70 hours if you finish all of the side content. There’s a lot of trial and error and un-directed exploration. It’s great for getting lost in, but not for trying to breeze through on your way to other parts of the Game Pass library. It’s a perfect candidate for that backlog game you forget about until it’s not longer on Game Pass. If you’re only playing a couple of games a month, you’re better off buying them outright than renting them for a limited time.
NYU business professor Joost van Dreunen recently called this Game Pass’ “airline economics in reverse” problem. “On Game Pass, every user effectively flies business class while paying economy prices, creating an inherently margin-thin model in which heavy users consume disproportionate resources without proportional revenue,” he wrote. Basically, anyone who did spend months finishing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 via Game Pass is just subsidizing the cost of the service for everyone who samples dozens of new games each year. The recent price hike is one way of rebalancing that math, Dreuen argues.
Put another way, Game Pass gets way too many day-one releases every year for any regular person to actually finish most of them. It’s a service for people who like to graze and keep trying new things, not people actually intent on clearing stuff from their backlogs. Anyone who leans closer to the completionist camp should be buying their games.
