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voty2000 on 18 October 2010
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haxxiy said:
voty2000 said:

And no, it's not reasonable pricing structure.  Developers are already having trouble making money as it is and doing your structure would cripple the industry.  Say I buy 3 games a month, that's $180.  You want people to pay $50 a month, making companies lose $130 of profits.  This month I have played $240 worth of games.  That's $190 companies will lose, it would never work.  The only thing plausible is to have each publsiher have their own pricing system, so you'd buy an EA, Activision, MS, Sony, Nintendo, etc... monthly subscription and the cost would be ridiculus, especially if you don't play many games that month, like last month, I only beat 1 game.

3 games per month is well over the average. Let's say a console is actively used for gaming just during about three years. The average gamer would buy a game less than every three months.of use and that's using an end of generation attach rate of 10.

Companies would profit over the average gamer $1800 after three years in software alone. That's triple the ammount of an attach rate of less than $600. It would be much better to them. Of course I could see them agreeing in something like that only if profits are properly split by the popularity of the games.

But the gamers that only buy 1 game every three months won't pay a monthly subscriptions fee.  Instead of 1 $60 purchase they'd have to pay $50 per month which would be $150, it wouldn't be worth it, and to be able to play the game whenever they want, they would be forced to keep paying the monthly fee. 

The biggest problem is the distribution of money gained from the subscription service.  When a game like Modern Warfare 2 comes out, that game will demand a huge chunk of the subscription fees that month, so smaller companies will get hosed.   With a subscription fee each company will be fighting over a set amount of money(subscription fee) so if a month goes by with only a few decent sellers, everyone wins, but when a game like GTA 4 for NSMBWii, those games will take a huge chunk of the money and leave smaller companies fighting over the scraps.