Gamers in 3 years: Nooooo you can't force me to upgrade to the Ultra Deluxe tier if I don't want to watch ads every 20 minutes, also I'm already paying for 4 other game subscription services

  • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I approach this as someone who buys like 4 games a year max, always at discounts, and I also keep returning to the same titles for years and years. I look at the hundreds or even thousands of hours I've logged in some games and imagine many publishers would rather prefer that I would have paid for every single minute I spent in them.

    I foresee a depressing future where many games will only be available as part of subscription services and subject to the usual rights and publisher related legal bullshit that gets games delisted all the time, which will be even worse if there's a big jump to things becoming more cloud-based.

    When something becomes unlisted on Steam, those who bought it can still download the game, and if that fails, in most cases there's still piracy. I can still get cracked and pirated versions of AVP2 or No One Lives Forever despite legal fuckery having kept them off every digital storefront ever

    • marx_mentat [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I guess I'm someone who would have played way more games if I had the money. 4 new games a year was about where I was and is how I justified the initial purchase.

      Unless one of the games that you are playing is one that benefitted from paying it's bills with game pass instead of mtx, there probably isn't much that you are benefiting from or will benefit from a game pass service.

      Selling licenses directly is a huge source of revenue for both game publishers and video content publishers and I don't see why they would ever say no to being sent money in exchange for an executable. Do some TV shows not release blu rays? I honestly don't know because I only really see the big name ones because I don't really look at physical media anymore. I assume there are probably some shows that didn't get a physical media release right?

      Anyway, I feel like we would have already seen that in video content already. Hell, game pass itself sells individual licenses directly to users from within the app itself, and I don't know what would compel someone to ever switch that off.