If you thought this was too good a deal to be true, I guess Microsoft agreed. A short excerpt:
"You can no longer claim a trial of Xbox Game Pass for £1/$1, just days ahead of Starfield, the year’s biggest Microsoft launch.
“The option has been removed from Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass sign-up website (thanks, XGP). Now, you must simply pay the full amount for your first month.”
You could spend all of your free time for one month playing Starfield and have finished it for $17. You could functionally “rent” 17 games for $1 each to get a feel for each of them, one of them being Starfield, to decide which ones you want to stick with. You could beat two smaller games each month and spend the rest of your time playing Starfield, and four months later still come out ahead of the $70 Starfield would have cost you. There are lots of ways that math works out for you to come out ahead.
Baldur’s Gate 3 came out less than a month ago, and I already know at least two people on my friends list who’ve beaten it, plus several others who put over 60 hours into it in the past two weeks, according to Steam. There are plenty of people who could get through Starfield in one month for $17.