[NickHoff]

> What beats Steam will not be a better Steam. It will be something else...

Right. It will probably still have to be better than Steam though.

Like a game streaming service in which all the games are available to play. Pay $20 per month, play any game whenever you want. The economics might even work out. They could pay each publisher $x for each hour that each person plays their game. More money for small studios since more people will be trying their game for a few hours, still lots of money for the big guys.

From the players perspective it would be like buying a AAA game every 3 months. Expensive, but you get all the other games too and you don't need an expensive gaming rig.

Or another idea - no monthly subscription fee, but you pay $X/hr for each game. Big games cost $0.10 per hour, free-to-play costs $0.005 per hour. Make the numbers work out so that publishers get the same overall revenue, but players like the flexibility. You could even limit your monthly spend. Cloud pricing for games?

[solardev]

Those cloud subscriptions are pretty common now, in case you weren't aware... not ALL games though, but decently big libraries. EA, Ubi, Microsoft all have their own subscriptions, and most of their titles can be streamed or downloaded (on GeForce Now, Stadia, Luna, xCloud or whatever it's called now).

Sadly, like the fragmented streaming video ecosystem, every publisher wants their cut and there's probably not a future where they're all integrated under one roof. Sad, really, because that would be so much easier for players.

[jabbany]

Right! That's the problem with streaming services today: it's not a better experience for many people/use cases when it comes to consuming games. It only really works for someone who (1) plays mostly popular AAA titles as soon as they come out, (2) who plays _a lot_ of games relatively regularly, and (3) is OK with losing access to older games eventually. Clearly these people exist but I don't think there are that many of them...

I'm a very casual consumer of games (I play a mix of big popular titles as well as small niche indie titles) and Steam is an amazing experience for me compared to all the alternatives. I can get games during discount events and play them when I have time, knowing that the games in my library will be there available for me to download even years into the future on whatever PC device I happen to have then should I want to re-experience them. Having a monthly streaming service makes no sense to this kind of use case where (1) games are diverse (2) usage is bursty not regular (3) on-demand access to old titles is desired.

I think one way to get more people onto streaming, is to, like mentioned above, (1) make available a new pay-per-use $/hr model as an alternative to subscription, (2) keep the roster constant, do not cycle games out every month, cycle them out every decade if you have to, and (3) use actual compute pricing for the actual type of compute used: games that need a high-performance GPU? charge cloud GPU prices, indie titles that can run on a potato? aim for just CPU instance prices.

Of course this is never going to happen. The industry is hungry for that sweet, sweet, MRR. Nobody* is selling perpetual licenses anymore. It's all about showing that you have perpetual faucets of revenue these days.