Maybe you’re thinking of Xbox All-access, which allowed users to buy Xbox + Game Pass Ultimate and pay them all over one year (or three, can’t remember).
They’re kind of working on one device that is basically smaller than an Apple TV and will connect to your TV and is thought to be strictly for streaming games and nothing more. Essentially would be this since you have no storage or resources for locally stored game playing.
This small device was seen on a shelf in a live stream a few years ago and there were some other rumors surrounding it.
Buy Xbox and then either subscribe to gamepass ultimate or buy the game and then subscribe to gamepass core (just renamed XBL gold) to play online. Its still dumb that you have to pay to play online but you still have the option to outright buy any MS published games.
Now those online services are supported by digital sales, like on PC storefronts. Digital makes up the majority of console purchases now too, but they still continue to charge for online, so it’s no wonder PC market share grew in the interim.
Well, it just says they’re including it with Game Pass. So you have the option of not actually purchasing the game for $70 (every year!) but you still get to play. There’s a lot of good games for both Xbox and PC so it’s a decent value proposition for a lot of people.
I don’t buy AAA games, so it’s kind of nice to have the option to play some of them without a big upfront investment. The real stars are the smaller and indie games.
It’s not for everyone, but for the cost of a Netflix subscription I can play a shitload of games on my PC and my kids get a huge library on the console.
This is why I like GamePass. There's a bunch of games on there that I probably wouldn't play otherwise. And yeah, they're not all great, but I've found some that I really enjoy.
They’re playing less AAA games, yes. People are thinking much harder about the $60+ price tag as AAA studios repeatedly fail to live up to their promises. I feel like Nintendo is the only AAA company that doesn’t have a losing record for the past ~5 years
According to EA, people want more large open worlds, multiplayer, and existing IPs so they want to do double down on that. This is from the company who released immortal of averum and wild hearts which barely ran at launch and then they wonder why people don’t like any of their new IPs
And according to Ubisoft, people want always-on live-service AAAAAAA $99 deluxe edition games stuffed absolutely full of microtransactions, loot boxes, daily exclusive rewards, kermel level root kits DRM, Ubisoft connect exclusive, nightmare shitfests that you don’t really own anyway.
Been saying it since last year. The companies are so terrified of a recession that they’re going to cause one. The funny thing is that this time the market is actually trending up again. This time they just want their bonuses.
What we all have to keep this laser centered in our minds when we talk about this is that for the ruling class, recessions are an essential part of the process of increasing their chokehold on society.
Capitalists want everything to periodically catastrophically collapse and go up in flames, without it the easily exploitable field of workers would grow into a mature forest with unions and other mechanisms that gradually grew in power to ensure the fruits of worker’s labor were distributed in a remotely fair way.
Make no mistake, they WANT a recession and honestly I think they are probably confused they haven’t been able to instigate the early arrival of one yet.
A lot of those executives own real estate and need to keep those numbers up. I wonder how long before we pay people to sit in offices just so they can inflate their value.
It’s not about office space. They built a new office which somehow doesn’t have enough capacity for everyone but it’s still mandatory two days a week. It’s just micromanagement at this point.
Remember kids, almost all freemium games make their money through manipulating your animal impulses to make you spend money on essentially nothing which you wouldn’t rationally want to spend. Disarming this particular skinner box seems like a positive direction.
I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life
I’m alright with the games that give you daily rewards but they don’t have to be consecutive days. It still benefits people who log in everyday, but you at least aren’t entirely missing out
When I saw the title, I was concerned.
Upon reading the article, I was really happy to see this.
Now that I actually think about it though, I DO play a gacha game and it would simply be impossible to exist if not for the gacha business style it utilizes. I’m very happy that so many people sink real money into it, as I simply am unable to do so myself.
I’m very happy that so many people sink real money into it, as I simply am unable to do so myself.
I get what you’re saying, but it does also create incentives to develop for whales.
Like, okay. Take Fallout 76. They – unlike with previous games in the series – do not have large, commercial DLC packages that come out. Rather, they have small, free, seasonal releases of content. Howard has committed Bethesda not to doing any commercial DLC for the game.
I was happy with that “large commercial DLC” model, and purchased them. But, okay, as it stands, I get a game that someone else is mostly paying for, right?
They sell a “premium” subscription for $12/mo, which provides some relatively-minor benefits.
And they sell various cosmetic items that people can place in their camp that one could hypothetically spend a pretty much unlimited amount on.
My problem is that financially, this constrains them to have basically no incentive to do anything other than develop new cosmetic items and sell to people who really want to buy them. And in the past, Bethesda has made some excellent large, commercial expansions for games in the series, like Far Harbor for Fallout 4.
This isn’t to argue in favor of or against the law in China, but to point out that the “someone else will pay for the game” model has some problems with it – if you aren’t paying anything, and someone else’s wallet is covering all the costs, it means that the game developer is entirely-incentivized to do development to appeal to whoever is paying for the thing, not you.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it’s a match based game), cities are lively (if it’s a MMORPG), etc.
If the developer can’t appeal to those too, then you’re left with a ghost town of a game that can’t appeal to the whales either.
Also, the “whales” are by and large not unharmed rich people - it’s mostly poor people who are at risk for gambling addiction, such as many with adhd, depression, etc. The people who are targeted successfully by this model usually suffer for it.
China wants to remove the adverse affects of gambling/addiction from it’s populace, not the world. This is just another facet like their social media restrictions.
She says the company abused its dominant position by requiring digital games and add-ons to be bought and sold only via the PlayStation Store, which charges a 30% commission to developers and publishers.
Maybe Nintendo has a similar practice with their Nintendo shop that they could be sued over, but regardless they’re still allowed to price their own games however they want.
Ultimately, I suspect the entire model for digital game delivery on consoles will have to change as a result of this case. Not that those changes would be bad, of course (indeed, they’re sorely needed), but they will occur as a result of console manufacturers having to open up their consoles to…sideloading (not sure this is the word, but it’s all I’ve got right now)?
Platform lock-in sucks, and it would be nice if a ruling on one of these became legal precedent so that console players also got a choice on their digital purchases.
The best thing about steam is you can buy keys from other sites
The worst thing about those sites is in most cases it results in the developer being ripped off because the keys are either stolen or purchased using stolen credit cards.
Countless devs have said they would rather people pirate their games than buy keys from those sites
This is true for a small category of sites I won’t name, but there’s also lots of sites that have a direct business relationship with the publisher. Ex: greenmangaming, gamersgate.
reuters.com
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