You're viewing a single thread.
Alright, I was only gently pointing it out because what he actually said is still a pretty bad take, but at this point it's just annoying.
No, he didn't say that.
He said that gaming subscriptions won't take off UNTIL gamers get used to not owning their games. Wihch... yeah, it checks out.
The all-subscription future already sucks, can we at least limit our outrage to the actual problem? I swear, I have no idea why gaming industry people ever talk to anybody. Nothing good ever comes of it.
Yup. This shit is getting old. Context people. Context.
The problem is gamers don't care about context. They just care about circlejerking each other to seem cool. It's why most of the comments in relation to this are some variation of "people still buy Ubisoft games".
It's not about being right it's about looking cool.
In fairness, the headlines written around this were generally atrocious, save a few (shout out to IGN and the original reporter, which may or may not have been techradar). Sure, in most of those you could read a more complete quote inside, but... staying at the headline isn't just a gamer thing. Clickbait is dangerous for a reason.
And also in fairness, the point he's making is still not great. I mean, he's the guy in charge of their subscription service, so I wouldn't expect him to be too negative on the idea, but he's still saying that it's a future that will come. Not that all models will coexist, but that a Netflix future for gaming is coming.
But yeah, gamers can be hostile without justification and often default to treating every relationship with the people making the games as an antagonistic or competitive one, which is a bummer. In that context, letting this guy talk was clearly a mistake.
As a 35 year old guy with a full time career and a wife, my gaming time is pretty limited. I no longer want a game to be 100 hours long because that will take me like a year to get through. I want other things. So for me, subscription gaming weirdly makes sense. I've heard the xbox version is great but I'm doing the playstation one. I've tried a bunch of older games that I didn't get around to when they were newer like Celeste and AC black flag. I've tried some newer ones here and there too. For the cost of like 2 new games per year, I'm trying like 30, and I don't feel the pressure of "I paid $60 on this" to make myself finish a game if I'm not that interested. I got like 2/3 through Ghost of Tsushima and then realized that I wasn't really having fun anymore so I just stopped and moved on to another game. I'm not playing the most current shit, and not a whole lot of AAA stuff, but other than Spider-Man 2 idk if I'm really missing out on anything. Especially because every game ships broken as fuck and takes a few months and an open letter apology to be worth a damn anyway.
Not defending corporate greed at all here, I'm just saying that right now, for me, at current price and service, I fucks with it. I'm sure it isn't such a good value for people who play all the time and are constantly just waiting for new games to come onto the catalog, but I'm more worried about games not being there long enough for me to get my fill lol.
Oh, it makes sense. I think there's a place for subscription services, absolutely.
I don't think a transition to subscription as the default model for gaming makes sense, though. Which was the point of the question and the implicit goal in the answer. And even if it did make practical sense (if people "got used to it") it'd be bad for the art form and the industry on the aggregate.
Agreed. I'm just kinda surprised that I'm cool with something that sounds so terrible on paper. Ultimately, if it does become the norm, I'd expect another renaissance of indie titles, but probably PC only at first at least. If the only way to play games becomes subscription bundles which would obviously come with a paywall for devs to get access to customers, it gatekeeps smaller devs out. Until these same execs see that lost revenue and create an indie tier subscription with fewer hurdles to get your game in it, so that's totally gonna be like 80% shovelware.
So basically, it's pretty okay right now but it's gonna be a bloated, greedy, saturated shitshow soon just like streaming services are. Wonderful.