[QuixoticQuibit]

This feels like an appropriate place to rant on something that’s been bothering me for a while.

It’s really disappointing to me to see every single form of entertainment becoming a subscription service. It’s also the same problem you see with various apps/software trying the SaaS model, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Are we going to have exclusive games requiring multiple subscriptions to enjoy the content you want? Will we move away from being able to purchase games to run them locally?

Moreover, if Games as a Service (GaaS) becomes the de facto way to release games, is it going to encourage longer titles with lots of grinding/farming to ensure people stay engaged for months at a time? Will it slowly kill off sub-20h, more story-focused experiences that can be completed in a fraction of one month’s subscription price?

Also, it really bothers me to see that almost every single one of the FAANGs feels the need hop on the bandwagon. First it was music streaming, then movies/TVs, and now it looks like gaming is next. You can argue that competition is good but really we just have exclusive content siloed across various services and priced in such a way that likely only the large tech companies can subside it with their other offerings (e.g., ad revenue or premium phone sales).

[dyingkneepad]

I feel the gaming industry is segmented in a few universes these days. There's the universe of high budget AAA games, where decisions made by corporate execs often ruin great ideas, or you get the same exact game re-released every 1 or 2 years under slightly different name. There's the world of mobile gaming, where every single game seems to be the same gacha experience that trains you to open the app every minute to get timer-based dopamine drops. There's the indie games, where great ideas are implemented on low budget. There is the retro game universe. And others.

I feel that streaming can't really take over all of these universes. Sure it may dominate some of the AAA titles I don't care about where latency is not an issue, but I can't see it taking over everything. And for it to become even remotely popular we'll probably also need some breakthroughs in terms of latency.

Some gaming communities even have a lot of power in terms of pushback for bad things. Look at the fighting game community (FGC) where they basically boycotted Street Fighter x Tekken, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite and other titles there were either doing crappy stuff.

We can resist crappy things pushed to us.

[impendia]

> There's the indie games, where great ideas are implemented on low budget.

+1 for this. The best game I recently played was Return of the Obra Dinn, which incredibly seems to have been an essentially one-man effort: Lucas Pope wrote the story, did all the programming, designed all the art, and composed all the music.

Big companies can push all the crap they want, but unless they find a way to stand between indie developers and their audiences, I think we can look forward to great innovative games for decades to come.

[nicoburns]

It's basically how the music world works too. There's big-budget pop artists that are occasionally good but usually crap. And then there's a ton of smaller artists of all mixtures of talent, but are often amazingly talented, and can be found at your local pub or music venue (or could be pre-covid).

[BelleOfTheBall]

I'm honestly most bothered by the fact that this is yet another slice of media that gets the "you rent it, you don't own it" treatment. I want to own my games, damn it, I don't want to rent it for a month. It's not about me feeling like I'm paying too much for games if I stay on a subscription for years just to play a game. It's about me wanting a hard (or digital) copy of a game I love because one day they might introduce an awful patch or licensing issues might push the game out of the service and, by proxy, my reach. I'm gonna keep supporting services like GOG and itchio that let me have games that I paid for because those seem optimal to me.

[canada_dry]

> "you rent it, you don't own it"

At least it's clear that you don't own it and if/when the service vanishes... have keep nothing.

Unlike many recent games/apps where they require being online to use... then when the service disappears - even though you own the product - you're screwed!! That pisses me off even more.

[Polylactic_acid]

This is the worst. Microsoft killed so many games when they shut down their Games for windows live DRM.

[gordaco]

I hate this as well. This is not just software: it's becoming increasingly difficult to acquire DRM-free digital goods (i.e. products that I can guarantee I will be able to use in 10-15 years), and in some cases, video in particular, I don't think that there has ever been a marketplace where I could legally buy DRM-free products (there are niche sites, of course, but I mean a generic store, like a bandcamp for movies). Music is an exception, fortunately. For now.

SaaS, and streaming in general, is very much anti-consumer, especially for those of us who value reliability over quantity. It's sad, but in most cases piracy really is the most pro-consumer option, even without considering the price (although in my case I usually just don't bother and go for other forms of entertainment).

The next generation of consoles already seems to include two versions, one with support for discs and another one (cheaper, of course) which is digital only. I'm tempted to rant about how this is a ploy to incentivise people to eschew physical games and go digital only, but I would be fooling myself, since physical games are also DRM-riddled and they might just stop working if some software update so decides.

[dylz]

> Music is an exception, fortunately. For now.

Even then only if you're lucky

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,89818.0.html

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110809/04114515451/umg-w...

[neaden]

I find this odd because I think historically most people haven't purchased entertainment. Libraries have always been common for books, more people listen to a song on the radio then on a CD they own, people watched TV on broadcast or cable before Netflix, and most movies are watched in the theaters or rented then on a DVD they own. Games have been weird for being something you have to buy.

[iforgotpassword]

A book is just a book. It doesn't go away, you don't need a complicated setup to read it. If you like it, you can still buy it. Games could be rented too before blockbuster folded.

And while I'm pretty sure I can still stream a random French band with moderate success from today in thirty years, I'm not so sure if I can stream games released today then. As an enthusiast I can turn to emulation, retro systems, reverse engineering to get old games going if I own a copy. Music streaming is delivering a byte stream from storage. Game streaming is a whole different beast.

[Polylactic_acid]

The real difference is books are a single use item. You read it and then largely its useless. The same game can be played for years.

[samatman]

Not historically, surely? People didn't tend to rent chess boards.

Even something like billiards, players with enough wealth to have a room with a table would do so.

Personal libraries were a commonplace shortly after the printing press, as were broadsheets and then newspapers, all of which were purchased and owned. Music was impossible to 'own' before recording technology, but ownership of musical instruments, and the ability to use them, was quite widespread.

Same with TV: as soon as it became possible to record (and hence own) broadcasts, people flocked to VCRs, and had to win a court case to retain the right to do it.

My conclusion is that some people, maybe most, do wish to own the means of entertainment, and have historically purchased said means whenever they are able.

[Jare]

Historically, people in general have wanted to own some content, but been ok with a fungible form for most of the content they consume. But it was nice to know that for any piece of content, someone out there owned it and it would not be lost. Lending was also a rich social interaction.

The current concern is that the ability to own, lend, and retain access to any of it, is vanishing completely. And, specifically with server-enabled games, the ability to experience almost all of them is guaranteed to vanish in just a few years.

[obenn]

Records were exclusively owned. Theaters and DVD rentals were never subscriptions, they were rentals.

We had game rentals too. Either way, I would argue that the shift from rentals and subscriptions based around exchangeable physical goods, to an exclusively streamed experience is a big shift, and a big deal.

[ticviking]

The weird thing here is the purchase of the "idea of the rules" instead of a copy of the rules.

Most games and sports had traditional rules that were passed on in a folk tradition, and only around the 1800s were rules gathered and written down.

[DivisionSol]

It all boils down to $$$, of course.

1. You cannot touch the sacred cow $60 game price. You can go lower, you cannot go higher.

2. Reoccurring revenue & upsells/addons are every business' wet dreams. The game is done, sell it at $60 and shift 9/10ths of the team onto the next game. 1/10th of the team remains in bug-fix/content-churn mode to fulfill whatever season/battle pass scheme they're peddling. Release a new game with the same stuff ~2-4 years later.

3. Singleplayer games are dead because studios haven't figured out to get cheap secondary/ternary monetization out of them (for cheap.) A lot easier to make a digital hat than keep your design/narrative team making expansions.

To address the actual post: Amazon is hopping on because they have the technical capabilities... Unfortunately they don't have the game-industry/consumer-oriented know-how to make this a success. It's going to be a 'neat tech demo' but they'll never get a foothold because it's not solving an actual problem consumers are having at the moment.

[viraptor]

> 3. Singleplayer games are dead

That kind of became a meme last year (?) when EA exec mentioned it as a reason for scrapping a title... a few months before they released some top-earning single player games that pretty much proved it wrong.

There will always be single player games. We just got an explosion of multiplayer in the last decade because lots of people have networks which can support it, some new genres became popular (battle royale), and skins are good for monetization. But single and multi player can coexist just fine.

[bpicolo]

> You cannot touch the sacred cow $60 game price. You can go lower, you cannot go higher.

Several AAAs for the upcoming gens are going higher.

https://www.businessinsider.com/video-game-price-increase-60...

[iamjake648]

> 3. Singleplayer games are dead

While they certainly aren't as common as they used to be, this is quite a stretch. Some of the Playstation's most popular exclusive titles have been single player games: Ghost of Tsushima, Last of Us 2, God of War, etc. Same thing for Nintendo: Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey.

[hellotomyrars]

1. $70 is going to be standardized for the next generation. Also $60 may have stayed the price of a AAA product but most big budget games have plenty of ways to let you spend more money, even outside of live services games

3. "Singleplayer games are dead" is a myth that people have been repeating as a mantra for over a decade now. Yet some of the biggest AAA releases are still purely singleplayer experiences. Singleplayer games aren't dead. They never died.

[dyingkneepad]

Regarding point 1, it is wrong. Every new game has the $60 version, but also has the ultimate/deluxe/premium/season-pass/whatever version that costs up to $90 or $120 that you can buy on day one and often will even give you extra content on day one. The $60 purchase is not the full product anymore.

[IdiocyInAction]

> 1. You cannot touch the sacred cow $60 game price. You can go lower, you cannot go higher.

I am merely 23 years old yet I still remember when I used to pay 50€ instead of 60€ for new games on Steam/Retail. And now it's going closer to 70€ for some games. For consoles, I've seen anything between 60€ and 90€. So, at least in Europe, this doesn't seem true.

> 2. Reoccurring revenue & upsells/addons are every business' wet dreams. The game is done, sell it at $60 and shift 9/10ths of the team onto the next game. 1/10th of the team remains in bug-fix/content-churn mode to fulfill whatever season/battle pass scheme they're peddling. Release a new game with the same stuff ~2-4 years later.

That's definitely true for the megabudget games like GTA. There still seems to be a sizeable niche that for pure single-player experiences though, for which I am glad. I find them to be far from dead; there are tons of upcoming SP games I am excited for and I see no reason for this trend to end anytime soon. There are also still expansions. I mean, there's a lot of AAA SP games on the market and coming out.

> 3. Singleplayer games are dead because studios haven't figured out to get cheap secondary/ternary monetization out of them (for cheap.) A lot easier to make a digital hat than keep your design/narrative team making expansions.

The problem with secondary/ternary monetization is that the market will probably saturate quite soon; most people aren't going to pump money into 5+ live service games at once.

[scoutt]

> encourage longer titles with lots of grinding/farming

This is a good point that worries me. Also is the anxiety that carries having too much choice, like when choosing what to see next on Netflix. Now if you pay 60USD for a game you are compelled to finish it. With thousands of games to choose from, and being able to instantaneously switch between them, then I guess it means videogames as we know them would be over. Probably split in seasons, becoming super addictive and shallow just to get you engaged.

[thebigspacefuck]

On the other hand, a Playstation 5 is $500 plus $50-$70 per game. A PC is even more expensive for the latest hardware. At $6/month it would take you 7 years before it costs you more renting than owning at which point there could be a PS6 and more games to buy.

For someone like me that rarely plays games, I'll probably sign up for a few months to play something that interests me then cancel it after I lose interest. I'll enjoy not having a console I hardly ever use sitting around collecting dust.

The fragmentation with movies/tv platforms has been awful, but Spotify has been amazing for music. I've probably listened to more music than I could ever afford otherwise. I don't think the price of movies has really changed either and you can still purchase them, so people are definitely making a choice to go with streaming over physical ownership. Go to any Goodwill and you will see shelves of discarded VHS and DVDs. I don't think people want to buy the VHS, then the DVD, then the BluRay, then the 4K BluRay and whatever 8K thing comes after anymore. Technology is changing so rapidly that's it better to pay a pittance each month now and wait for the next better thing just around the corner.

[cooldevguy]

Well there is already Sneakers-As-A-Service so it just feels natural that every company will try to screw consumers into that tactic since a lot of people joins it for "perveiced" convenience

https://www.on-running.com/en-us/cyclon

[purple-again]

Wow, tearing down all of the bullshit in that site deserves its own submission but for now I will just focus on one thing: $30.00 per month for running shoes. What?

You can get two pairs of shoes for that at Payless shoes. They will last at least 6 months. Is anyone out there paying $360/year for running shoes? If anyone is interested in this product I would LOVE to hear about your reasoning.

[yazaddaruvala]

Also,

What is the real difference between Sneakers-As-A-Service and planned obsolescence?

If my Nike shoes only last 3 years (or go out of fashion) and I need to repay $120 to get another pair, is it any different than paying $3 per month?

[li4ick]

Add that to your aaS bullshit filter.

[IdiocyInAction]

I don't think games as a subscription service will necessarily work out as well as for movies and television. At least at the moment, buying games can be so cheap (if you wait 1-2 years after releases) and games are usually so long that it's probably quite hard to release a subscription service that beats just waiting for sales. Also, I'm not sure how much the third-party developers that are not owned by Amazon/MS et. al. will make of these services; if they decide not to put their games on the service (or after years when sales are already occuring), it would already be a blow to these services.

Also, at least for me, having a more expensive internet connection (needed for game streaming services) would actually cost me more than a high-end gaming machine and way more than a console.

[victords]

I'm partial to the subscription service model because most of my life I could barely afford a console or a gaming PC to play a lot of games, so it seems much more accessible.

But regarding the argument that we will have a bunch of different service which we would need to subscribe to: Is that really a downgrade?

We already have exclusives for consoles. There a number of games you can play only on Xbox. Then there are the games you can only play on PS4. And then there the PS3 games, which you will need yet another console because there is no backwards compatibility...

One way or another we already have this fragmentation today. Subscribing to multiple services actually seems cheaper for me.

[nightski]

Yea but other than streaming, we've been seeing exclusives slowly disappear over the past generation. They still exist but are becoming much less common.

The thing is that I've probably spent the same on games as I have on Netflix for the past 10 years. But now I have a Steam/GoG/etc.. library with over 1000 games I can take with me and maybe even share with my kids some day. I have nothing remaining but memories from Netflix.

[hombre_fatal]

Taking this to some sort of terminal conclusion ("all games will be rented and streamed") is going too far.

The current situation doesn't serve everyone either. You need a decent desktop computer or console, the space for it (desk, monitor, tv, peripherals), and an interest in even owning all that crap to play many modern games. And more to enjoy them at any decent fidelity. That's a crappy deal for whole segments of the population.

Imagine if we were going the opposite direction, from streamed games to locally-run games. You could ignore the upsides and just focus on the downsides all over again. Ugh, the greedy companies now want me to invest $60 just to play their ONE game, and put wear and tear on my own $1000 machine? Hell no, capitalism suxxx!

I built a desktop computer just to play Stellaris on anything more than the tiny galaxy. I bought $900 of parts that fit in a shoebox sized case I could carry onto a plane. A subscription service with a good CPU would have let me enjoy the game without all that. There's downsides, there's upsides.

[vel0city]

> Are we going to have exclusive games requiring multiple subscriptions to enjoy the content you want?

Well, we've been living in a world where to play certain games you had to make a several hundred dollar investment into a platform. Platform exclusives have been a thing for a long, long time. To an extent only having to pay a dozen or so dollars for a month of service to get access to some exclusive game sounds a lot better than having to shell out several hundred dollars for yet another console when I've already bought three.

[Axsuul]

With Google Stadia you can still purchase the game and play it forever.

[iamjake648]

"Forever" - so until Google kills it in a year or two.

[hombre_fatal]

Well, that's how console gaming and most e-shops work. You get to play until the hardware generation phases out.

[iamjake648]

Which is why so many in the gaming community prefer to buy physical games as opposed to digital downloads. At least with digital downloads you can quick download all of your purchases before a store closes down. With gaming streaming that shit's gone forever.

[ganoushoreilly]

The real problem with the Physical vs Digital divide these days is that a lot of content is cloud based. So even with standalone discs, there's a reliance on online services to succeed / gain content.

It's by design. MS made it clear 8 years ago that they wanted Digital and to move on from Physical media. It's an inevitability, the question is how can we migrate licenses from platforms. I like how movies are handled with MoviesAnywhere.

[_v7gu]

As long as you can access the games, you can get around the server closures. There are active online communities for PSP Monster Hunter and DS Pokemon games even though the online services shut down years ago.

[andoriyu]

Except while I have my PS3 with Resistance installed I can play Resistance as much as I want. Sony is not going to come to my house and take it away.

Google be like "we decided to close it down, bye"

[IdiocyInAction]

Google is particularly well known for killing off their less profitable services though.

[Judgmentality]

This is roughly equivalent to DRM - you can play it so long as the service is available, but after that you lose it forever and are not getting a refund. So you aren't actually purchasing the game, you're renting the ability to use it so long as Stadia is operational.

[r00fus]

s/purchase/perpetually license/

[mbesto]

> It’s really disappointing to me to see every single form of entertainment becoming a subscription service. It’s also the same problem you see with various apps/software trying the SaaS model, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Disappointing in what sense?

It's basic economics. Companies that have shifted towards subscriptions (Adobe, Autodesk, Amazon, Ultimate Software, Disney pre-COVID, etc.) have significantly higher valuations when they shift their services to subscriptions for obvious reasons.

[nightski]

I'm not too worried about it personally, the only tech company I think that has a competitive offering in this space is Microsoft (with Game Pass and potentially xCloud). All others are doomed to fail.

[fartcannon]

You're not worried that Microsoft has the only competitive offering?

Shouldn't that kind of terrify you? Microsoft is not known to be a good corporate citizen when they have a monopoly.

[nightski]

No because I'm betting on the concept not being successful enough to become the dominant distribution method. I think it will have a successful niche, but not much more. I know that I never plan on using it, I already own over a thousand games and have barely played 10% of them. TBH I'm probably good for most of the rest of my life haha.

[rayhendricks]

Well if you play borderlands 3 or another AAA title inside stadia and purchase you are already paying for game + gaming service + DLC...

[dzhiurgis]

I wouldn’t mind if subscription was something like 10 cents per hour played, not 30 bucks a month plus one off $50 fee.

[sneak]

I think that a bigger concern than subscription software (although, that’s a big concern) is that consolidation and the long game for control of the market is centralizing almost all of these major services into the hands of organizations that are large military vendors, fully integrated members of the military-industrial complex.

Microsoft is about as far up in there as anyone could get with the possible exceptions of Lockheed or Boeing, and they now own GitHub, NPM, LinkedIn, and others. Go into the concentration camps down in Texas and they’re running Exchange on Windows, happily provided by Microsoft. One day they’ll be regarded as IBM is today for so eagerly participating in the holocaust. (Or, hopefully, moreso, as IBM seems to have recovered and is even branding things Watson after their founder who met personally with Hitler.)

Amazon, operators of Twitch and now Luna (and of course AWS) actually built and maintain a custom, airgapped, on-prem AWS region for the CIA, on CIA property, to hold their spying data (and presumably drone videos and the like). They run a whole special AWS internet-connected region just for the US government, too, with the associated dictated-by-federal-regulation racist hiring policies for staff that can enter the building.

I see zillions of people happily using Twitch, and I wonder what percentage of them know that they’re giving money and brand awareness to an organization that helps the US military conduct mass murder by drone, or run a global network of torture prisons where anyone the CIA likes can be held forever without trial.

I’m super angry about the subscriptionization of software, to be sure, and I’ll cosign your rant. I’m making a point of switching to Davinci Resolve (Blackmagic) from Premiere because they specifically reject Adobe’s bullshit “pay for this FOREVER” model and let you buy it outright up front.

I’m far more worried, though, about what happens when a majority of people are necessarily furnishing their data wholesale to companies who will happily provide all of their user data to their largest customer, the US military, on demand, without oversight. I think that’s a far bigger danger to a society that already appears in many respects to have become a military dictatorship.

I sure hope I’m wrong about where all of this is headed, because it looks really, really bad.

Apologies for jumping on board the rant thread.

[tmpz22]

Two major points:

* Many subscription services have managed to return good value to consumers, for example Netflix. Other services are more contentious but I would argue are also good value: Amazon Prime, Spotify, and Costco.

* I've never worked at a large tech enterprise company but I believe the following statement to be true: Large companies are risk averse and can only focus on a handful of board-approved moonshots at a time. Seeing another large company do it serves as a carpool lane for it being approved. Employees at company #2 are incentivized to work on (and be bullish towards) those cloned projects because they offer the most opportunity for quick advancement.

I personally find it hilarious that the "smartest minds" at "the best companies" are still doing little more then a grown-up game of monkey-see monkey-do.