I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you'd have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.
Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.
It’s not even about what we want, but what the stakeholders and decision-makers push for in order to rack in more profits.
The gaming industry was at its highest in terms of fun and variability and innovation when the industry was still figuring out best ways to make mad money, no matter how ethical or morally bankrupt - now they know they can use fear of missing out and predatory tactics to lure people into essentially gambling in a free-to-play online game, or pad out a singleplayer one with mechanics that contribute nothing to the gameplay, but manage to fool game journalists (the ones that weren’t already paid) into praising the game for its deep and branching loops, attracting more investor money or something.
A lot of people accuse us gamers of being a whiny crowd that cares too much and doesn’t like to have fun, but I guess yeah, we do care a little too much and that’s why so many of us try to actively influence the industry to go into a better direction when we vote with our wallets or write reviews or discuss games and practices in ways that can be hopefully seen by the industry’s decision-makers.
Not to say there isn’t just as many (if not more) gamers that don’t care enough and still pour money into games and practices that are ultimately making the industry worse, only to make the stakeholders and CEOs wealthier.
Honestly I don’t regret paying a subscription for WoW. Maybe it’s different now, but when I played it felt fair. You got reliable servers, frequent updates,somewhat reasonable balance changes, and seasonal events. You didn’t get any loot box bullshit, just playing the game regularly generally got you the rewards with minimal effort.
Sure expansions also cost extra, but that was $30 and about 1 every 2 years.
For a game that ate all your free time, it didn’t hit your wallet that hard.
“We need ideas to find a way to monetize our active playerbase!”
“We already are. They pay us money each month. In turn, we continue to make sure the game is fun and has stuff that keeps them interested.”
“Aha! Carry on.”
I used to hate subscription games with a passion, but seeing what followed, in-app purchases, lootboxes and FOMO-driven battlepasses, turns out subscriptions were the lesser evil.
Unfortunately it works the same way as with StarCitizen, you’re aware it’s a ripoff, but if you want to play this particular type of a game, pay up or leave.
With MMORPGs specifically, here are the options:
Free to Play. Enormous cash shop, often pay to win. Usually these games actually require the most money to play on high level, or waste your time by slowing down the grind and having an optional “premium” sub, which effectively makes it a sub MMO.
Buy to Play. Much less predatory, rarely pay to win, but often with huge cash shop. Get ready to see tons of cool cosmetics that are only available through micro transactions, and the base game often receives scrapes from the table. Still, some of these games like TESO effectively force you to pay a sub by introducing a mechanic (like bottomless reagent bag) that make the game without them miserable on high level.
Pay to play. Most obvious predator, nobody needs this much money to develop a game that already charges almost full price for base game and for all new DLCs, but also usually has the most tame cash shop. WoW for instance has a tiniest (comparing to games like TESO) cash shop with 20-ish mounts and pets nobody cares about.
This creates effectively a pick-your-Devil situation with these games. No good monetization, pick whatever feels least predatory for you
As much as I agree with his sentiment, this title is bullshit - he never wrote "gamers don't want subscriptions" but that they shouldn't want that due to where it might lead.
"Gamers" aren't some hivemind entity that wants a specific thing. Many people don't worry whether an idea pushed by the publishers will have a long term negative effect on the industry, they just want to have fun with their hobby.
Look at microtransactions - there's a lot of negative discussion about them and yet they bring huge amounts of money, who's to say if the same won't happen with subscription services? We might not like it but majority doesn't necessarily care.
Sorry for being pedantic about a title but third-parties changing someone's words is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
My point is that however you feel about microtransactions they are successful and that's why they're so common.
With subscription services you and me can think "I want to own it and play whenever" but a lot (not only casual) players see it as "I pay a few $ and get access to a huge library of games I can try out for the next month".
As I wrote initially, just because more dedicated audience doesn't like the direction industry is moving in doesn't mean majority will care enough to stop it.
The idea of the whale is a false narrative created by the companies who run these scams to justify their unethical business practices.
The vast majority of people who make up that demographic are people who really can’t afford to spend money like that, but do because the companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s brain chemistry to extract money from them. This mostly includes people who are biologically wired for poor impulse control and an inability to perceive how much money they’re actually spending. People like: gambling addicts, people with adhd or mental health issues, and children.
There are people with more money than sense buying this stuff, but for the most part, it’s gambling addicts and kids emptying their parents’ bank accounts for that dopamine fix.
Just another story they’ve spun to hide how scummy they truly are.
These days we are expected to be subscribed to tons of shit, including stuff that simply doesn't justify subscriptions. We know it's not a benefit to us, but to the companies that dish them out.
This too! So many genuinely good games at genuinely good prices. This is true even on Switch, where Nintendo is known to put AAA efforts into genres otherwise filled entirely with indie games (not to mention the Nintendo tax)
Just wanted to mention that just like with any other F2P games, there are gacha titles that are fun without paying anything. Not as many as the predatory kind but still.
I think the worst one I’ve seen recently was a note taking app on Android. Developer made a glorified PDF reader you could write on and wanted $10 to use the fucking app annually. I hope that dev ends up homeless and broken.
Jesus fucking Christ, why not charge a subscription for notepad.exe while you're at it.
The worst I've personally seen was a subscription for an Android launcher. No actual cloud services attached and no way to pay outright. They wanted for a subscription for an app that launches other apps.
That’s a big part of it. Right now, Microsoft tries to put a number of big titles in their subscription service, a bunch of filler titles they can buy from publishers for cheap, and maybe a few that sold more popularly than they expected.
If subscription gaming becomes the majority, Microsoft and other streaming providers get to pick the contenders and not much else gets seen. Games like Lethal Company won’t have a sudden boom in popularity because it wasn’t on Microsoft’s radar.
To be honest, I mainly bought the game to make a statement & show my support for what type of treatment & product I want as a customer. Nowadays everything just seems to want to milk me, games are quite often literally designed around it so that it becomes a core part of the games themselves. And I'm so damn over all of this bullshit.
A lot of us just want to have some fun after work and it is not fun when you feel served up like a buttered hot meal. I don’t want to feel like my games are consuming me.
I can see how Game Pass popularity could be bad for a number of studios, as he says in the article. But, I’ve never understood how Game Pass’s existence was anti-consumer.
We always get these baffling quotes like “Microsoft insists on renting you your games, and you will like it.” or “I’m not going to be forced to pay $17 a month just to play my games”. GP never gained popularity off Microsoft forcing people into it, people voluntarily signed up, even when MS continues to make their games available for direct purchase.
The previous quote from Ubisoft even seemed more like an investor excuse than a threat to gamers.
I was watching a YouTube series recently about situations like this… online games that were pretty decent and still had servers but only 3-4 people a week signed on. Pretty entertaining.
Yeah, it’s different because this game is apparently horrible. I’m sure not all the games he reviews are good, either… just that they’re theoretically viable and exist but hardly anybody plays them.
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