this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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.