1. Creating the Netflix of gaming with Game Pass.

Microsoft

For $10/month, Xbox Game Pass offers access to over 100 games. That includes every first-party game that Microsoft makes, loads of indies, and — as of very recently — some heavy-hitters from third-party publishers like Bethesda Softworks.

Instead of streaming the games, a la Netflix, you download each game to your Xbox console. As long as you're paying for Game Pass, you keep all the games you download.

Best of all, any new Xbox One games that come out from Microsoft are included with Game Pass.

When "Forza Horizon 4" arrives this fall, you could drop $10 on a Game Pass subscription to download and play the game — a whopping $50 savings over the normal $60 price of a new game. Microsoft's betting that you'll like the arrangement so much that you'll keep paying for the service every month, like Netflix.

"We're finding people in Game Pass actually play more games," Xbox leader Phil Spencer told me in an interview last week at E3, the annual video game trade show in Los Angeles. "And they're trying some franchises where, if they had to buy the franchise — even if they're $30, $60, whatever the amount might be — it's way easier for them to be invested at $10/month."

In the long term, Spencer said the goal for Game Pass is offer a safe platform for potentially risky, creative games.

"I want it to be a place where creators feel like they can take risks in things that they wanna do, and know that they have an audience of people who are already invested in the service, such that the marginal cost for them to click on the next icon and give it a try is very, very low."

The comparison to Netflix becomes apt once more. Netflix funds lots of creative, bizarre stuff because it can afford to fail — with millions of paying subscribers, Netflix has a sturdy financial foundation from which to experiment. It also has a large platform to surface content that otherwise might get lost in a digital storefront.