SvennoJ said:
JWeinCom said:
No, but judging people who can't is sitting on a high horse (think they mixed the metaphors a bit).
My dad has season football tickets to the Jets. So I get to be a true Jets fan, or at least he does. Not everyone can afford that. To say they aren't true fans or supporters is kind of elitist.
As for how dumping money into a subscription helps, the same way for any other service. People aren't putting their games on Gamepass/PSNow for free. Microsoft/Sony are paying them. It is possible that they have incentives based on number of downloads/playtime. But regardless, Microsoft knows how many downloads they have, and likely have a rough idea of how much the game is played, information which I can almost guarantee would be shared with publishers. So, if tons of people are playing Nier Automata on Gamepass, Microsoft will want Replicant on their service, and Square would be in a position to bargain for a higher price.
This isn't like... some strange and new thing. This is a similar business model as Cable TV. If Microsoft knows why people are signing up for Gamepass, the folks responsible can get more money. Don't know the exact details, but if you can't see how a dev can possibly benefit from Gamepass/PSNow, that's either a failure of imagination, or a dogmatic attempt to justify disliking something that you dislike for completely different reasons.
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I'm just looking at parallels with the music, movie and tv industry. Spotify doesn't reward artists based on how much their music is streamed. Plus there have been complaints from indie developers that they don't get a fair share from games with gold / ps+ either. Just as with music, it's great for the popular guys, the ones MS/Sony will want to keep. The rest don't really have any leg to stand on when people have plenty to play through subscription services.
My own experience with TV and movies has only declined since streaming became popular. It seems every show I like gets cancelled sooner rather than later, I guess my tastes are bad lol. Or gets poached by a competing service ugh. Extras for movies are declining since they aren't on streaming services anyway.
The other thing is, MS is subsidizing the subscription service atm, who knows what the developer reward scheme will be once the users are locked in. It's a walled garden inside a walled garden. There's always PC anyway, just sucks that collecting physical games is pretty much gone from PC.
And that's what I meant with 'true gamer' (term sucks I agree). It's not the amount you pay, but to me collecting is part of it. And collecting digital / subscription services, nah. The second hand market was great for collecting games, sad to see it going away. Tbh I jumped on buying Returnal because of it having a physical edition. If it was only available digitally I would never have bought it before getting the hardware to run it on. I've bought a lot of physical editions of games I already had digitally, after they finally released a physical edition.
To sum up, to me, game subscription services are a continuation of the erosion of ownership, furthering the decline of physical games and continuation of the move to episodic content, dlc, mtx.
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Hate to break it to you, but however you're buying games, the deck is stacked against small developers. Retail is way worse in that regard than subscription services, because you have to physically manufacture them, ship them out, and convince retailers to stock them. And if you're making a smaller kind of game that you can't charge full price for, your margins become razor thin once those costs come into play. There is a reason that most indie games do not have a physical version at all, and if they do, it usually only comes after the digital version has launched successfully. And there's a reason why indie games really weren't even a thing until gaming went digital. So, if that's your argument for why subscription services are a bad thing, then it's not very strong.
If the term true gamer sucks, then why not use the term collector, since that's what we're talking about. And like with Runa, if you like collecting games then, yeah, you probably shouldn't get gamepass. But that's just personal preference. If subscription services become the predominate form of gaming and physical games go byebye, then that just means not enough people care about collecting. That's just the way the world works. A lot of things I like aren't made anymore because they just weren't popular enough to be profitable. That's a bad thing for you, but not necessarily a bad thing for the industry.
