Microsoft is to launch a radical'Netflix for games' service for $9.99 per month. The'Game Pass' service will offer 100 Xbox One and Backward Compatible Xbox 360 games to users. It will update its catalogue of games each month, and users will have the option to download games - although they must keep paying their subscription to play them. The'Game Pass' service will offer 100 Xbox One and Backward Compatible Xbox 360 games to users. It will update its catalogue of games each month.

It has revolutionised the way we watch TV shows and movies. But could a Netflix-style service have the same impact on the world of video gaming? One expert believes so and has argued that it could be vital to the future diversity of the industry. Traditionally vast amounts of money was spent on headline grabbing franchise games, as well as some smaller standalone titles, which would then be recuperated through sales. The focus was on engaging single-player story lines, akin to movies, with classics like Assassin's Creed, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider.

Something big has happened to the video game industry over the last five years – you may have noticed. All the old rules about consoles – the fact that they enjoyed five-to-eight-year life cycles, the fact that games "just worked" out of the box – they're all gone. An accelerating consumer electronics sector and the mass penetration of broadband internet have led us into a new era of chaotic innovation and fraught business model evolution. And somewhere in the middle of all this, people are making and playing games. How do those people keep up?

Earlier this month, Microsoft did something console manufacturers haven't done for many years. It announced key details of its forthcoming Project Scorpio console – an update to the Xbox One – via a set of exclusive features on the video game news site, Eurogamer. In the modern games industry the strict control of information, especially regarding hardware, has become something of a corporate obsession. To cede control of a major revelation – in this case the technical specifications of a forthcoming machine – was a fascinating, but intelligent move. It added a sense of impartiality and validity to all the specs and stats that came out of the reveal, lending the information some real authority that would have been missing from an official press release. It let gamers start processing the meaning of the machine for themselves.

Intelligence is generally considered an exclusively human attribute, but we're fast approaching an age where machines will be considered intelligent as well. If this is indeed the case, it's only natural that machines will also develop a genuine personality. Many of them, such as Siri from Apple and Amazon's Alexa and Echo, already have names and voices. There's also Watson from IBM, a "cognitive assistant" that can read 40 million medical documents in 15 seconds and "understand, reason, and learn." Named after IBM's founder, Watson may soon eclipse all of us in knowledge as it continues to learn.