What is your opinion on gaming subscription services?

[SvennoJ]

Conina said:

SvennoJ said:

Well. imo movies have declined in quality, I hardly watch new movies anymore.

The games that are getting bigger are the AAA blockbusters that are in no danger, they'll find a way to recoup costs, more dlc and mtx. The concern is for the more niche games, like the A game developers that all but disappeared with the advance of digital distribution.

Can you list these A game developers which were killed by digital distribution?

For many indie and A developers digital distribution was a godsend. For retail games they needed a publisher (to get their games on the limited shelves of retailers) who took most of the profits and often claimed the IPs.

Digital distribution allowed them to self-publish and cut out the middleman.

It also was quite hard to estimate how many reatil copies they should produce. If they manufactured much more than the demand, the production costs of the unsold games (cd/dvd, booklet, package, distribution costs to retailers and back...) cut severely into the profits they had from the sold games.

If they manufactured not enough, a second or third edition took much time... would the demand still be there when the new edition arrives at the retailers?

With digital distribution and theoretically unlimited licenses  they were much more flexibel.

I don't know the developers of the top of my head but games like PGR, Majin and the forsaken Kingdom, Rallisport Challenge, Blynx the time sweeper, SSX, Burnout. They weren't directly killed by digital distribution, they were killed by lowering the perception of value of 'A' games. Which was an indirect resulted of flooding the market with cheap digitally distributed games. Now people think $30 is a lot for a digital game.

Digital is a lot more flexible, but to get people on board and due to much more competitive environment, prices tanked, kind of like game subscriptions... A lot of smaller devs closed up shop, were shut down or went into indie games.