This I would disagree with - delivery mechanism change was going to digital, and later streaming - sub-models change monetization, not really delivery. Which is where my argument on influence on game-systems stems from. Fundamentally there's only a small delta to existing GaaS content, the primary KPIs are engagement and retention, thus primary design goals will be similar to that. And GaaS has demonstrably shifted design goals on content built for the model - not all the difference are glaring, and it's debatable whether it's overall for the better or worse, but impact is absolutely there.
My thing about this is, digital and streaming are still effectively the same thing: digital content. You can't stream content unless it's being digitally delivered, and digital delivery is a requirement for streaming. Which would make streaming dependent on digital, therefore wouldn't it be better to consider streaming the sub-model here?
We've already seen focus on GaaS well outside of subscription/streaming models, as well, so I don't know well that idea holds up. Games like Destiny, Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, Overwatch etc. would all fall under some description of GaaS, would they not? And all of those came before the advent of subscription services like GamePass. I think we can agree that services like GP work to the benefit of GaaS models, but I don't think it's accurate to say that GaaS as a model predicates its existence on subscription services. It can work with and without them.
The shift may be 'somewhat' more subtle here but it's definitely happened, there's been a fair bit of conversation of death of episodic content due to Netflix model (overblown, but still), and how 'made for Netflix' shows lead to degradation of content to facilitate continuous engagement (arcless episodes, binging storylines etc.).
Again it's debatable if this is really all for the worse (we also don't get episode timings built around commercial breaks anymore, and hard-cap for much shorter title/intros I very much appreciate) but content is changing/evolving with new mediums for sure.
It's still early days though - everyone's figuring out how to best optimize for the 'algorithm', and big players are still in 'acquisition' mode with loss-leading investments etc.
IMO the issue with many of Netflix's offerings is their pursuit of quantity over quality, which might be fueled by their (or was at least a long time their) debt-leading model. Their business approach might've facilitated a more extreme means of providing content in order to retain subscriptions and push for very aggressive growth, to show to investors that their money was leading somewhere.
GamePass doesn't have that same type of pressure. Microsoft seem more content with pacing out their growth under manageable terms, and while they still want to show that growth to investors of their own, at least in their case all of the funding is coming from in-house; they don't need to placate banks and such outside of the company structure because they aren't borrowing money from them to fund GP growth. Basically, there's more vertical integration for Microsoft and GamePass on the financials front than there has ever been for Netflix, and that has influenced the way the companies have funding their respective subscription offerings.
Small aside but, about the shorter intros, I think that technically started with Breaking Bad, which was produced for cable television. If I had to guess part of the motivation was to allot more time for the actual episode even while also needing to take into account commercial breaks, so shave a good minute or two off the intro and you're good to go. As a practice it just also happened to fit with the streaming model very well, so Netflix shows began to adopt it I suppose.
Altho it really does depend on the show; MOTU: Revelation and Cowboy Bebop (only using them as examples of this, not vouching for their quality because, well, they aren't terribly good shows) both have intros more in line with a cable television show despite being very recent shows on the service, for example. So there is always going to be a creative impetus to do things in ways trends based on a model may not suggest should be the case, and that will hold true with services like GamePass as well IMHO.
GP hasn't really justified existence of content built for it yet - and we are in acquisition/growth stage, not even operational profitability yet. Once service is actually self-sustaining and content performance (engagement and retention) becomes a factor for what gets built and added to it, things will shift.
And while Cloud will have its influence too - challenges there are even bigger before it can, but I won't pollute the thread with rants about that.
The thing is, Phil Spencer has said recently that GamePass is sustainable and doing for them what it needs to for now. I strongly doubt it's losing them money, and I also doubt it's costing them as much to run it as some like to think it is, given how much of the vertical stack Microsoft controls and owns WRT the hardware and software powering the service.
Meanwhile we are already seeing the results of content "for the service" doing well for it in the form of Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite, it's just that by and large these games still follow a lot of the game design choices prior entries did, and improving on them. I would say Halo is more of the cautionary tale of the two, or would've been, had the team not taken feedback into consideration and made some much-needed changes early on, but I'd also say Halo Infinite is one of the few games we'll see that appears affected by development trends to fit into a subscription streaming, GaaS model, and to be perfectly honest, some of its choices seem more influenced by going GaaS rather than being part of a subscription service, and like I was saying earlier, GaaS is independent of a subscription service model (even if GaaS contains its own sort of subscription, or potentially can, anyway).
It all just leads back to what I've been saying: GP as a service isn't going to have some giant adverse influence on game design models as we know them, because almost anything you can pin t it (GaaS, DLC, MTX, lootboxes etc.) have already existed before GamePass even came about. Now it's arguable that a service like GamePass can act as a catalyst to stimulate more activity in some of those things, and that could potentially be adverse, but we have plenty of questionable publishers who have already been taking advantage of monetization models within the traditional model as we know it, and I'd place the blame moreso on them than a service like GP which is basically offering a delivery mechanism for the content itself.
And that's why I did specify cloud gaming as being something of more a direct influence on game design models going forward, though I don't understand your trepidation there. It's a technology like any other, can be used for good and bad. I think things like the NFT controversy of late might be giving some a bad impression on cloud technologies in gaming, but it's not really fair to damn cloud as a whole because of a few bad uses. In terms of positive influence on game design direction, cloud technologies IMO provide at least (in all honesty, I would say more) room for creative growth than things like faster SSD I/O but, like you said, this is going into a very different topic probably better saved for another discussion.
Yea I completely agree on that - market is too large and too diverse (and creative) to get unified under any single umbrella.
I think what people are mostly fearful of is the mainstream $ going somewhere else than they go today, and that's likely going to happen though. But chances are good, that the total number of $ investment will grow as well, so existing console gaming won't vanish outright either.
Trust me I know how they feel, and I think unfortunate side-effects of shifting delivery models and dev models in the past, like near-full disappearance of mid-tier games in the retail space, are still fresh on a lot of people's minds. I guess in a way it's similar to how 2D gaming fans felt during the 5th-gen when the vast majority of the market went 3D; that's a change brought about due to a shift in technology affecting content creation (that just also happened to mainly occur alongside a shift in delivery medium and a gradual, large drop-off in the delivery mechanism of arcades), but I think the fears are similar.
There are some flaws in MS's handling of physical media for example; the fact you still need to check-in online even when purchasing a single-player offline game from the store to download the game for example, renders the disc basically as a DRM key the way PC games used to do it back in the mid-00s', and I think is somewhat counter to their general sentiment on game preservation. Just letting those games work right off the bat without an online sign-in would be preferred.
All that said, we just have to get used to the fact that things are going to change, and we have to adapt towards them doing so. However, we can also look to the past and see that, in a lot of ways, these shifts were generally for the better. Before cable television took off a lot of shows that'd eventually go there, if they wanted distribution, had to rely on VHS tapes. However, that meant needing to cover costs for physical production of tapes, distribution of tapes, working within the reality that not everyone likely had VHS players, and even for those who did, not all of them probably purchased tapes. Which then created other logistical challenges like making sure you could get those tapes into rental stores, the concept of which was still new in the '80s for example.
That would all have impacts on what type of stories you could tell with just the VHS format, you'd need to keep episode count smaller (way smaller), and probably not focus on certain genres as hard. On the upside, you'd have more budget per episode to work with, leading to higher production values. The anime OVA market in Japan is a very good example of this, as it wasn't until Neon Genesis Evangelion that a lot of the type of stories (and budgets) reserved to OVA releases, finally found a home on cable broadcast channels. That opened up a lot of doors for longer-form shows with, on average, higher budgets than televised anime prior to shows like NGE. It allowed those shows to find a bigger audience and brought in a new form of funding through advertisers that generally trumped the funding OVA shows were able to secure (generally privately) in years prior.
Yeah, there were some drawbacks (television censors stuff, mainly), but overall it was the step the anime market needed to grow further into that decade and the '00s, and without it the industry wouldn't be where it is today (in terms of financial power, cultural relevance and some of the series that have come since. Tho I do personally miss some of the grittier OVA series from the '80s/early '90s, particularly the sci-fi ones). That's what I eventually see happening for gaming as subscription models and digital delivery grow in share over the years but, just like with the anime market, physical will never
FULLY go away. It'll always be there as an option in many instances, and it'll have to remain that way even just for true software preservation purposes, never mind the fact there's always going to be a segment of people who want physical media and would be willing to pay a premium for premium physical content.
Dr Bass
Dude...what are you trying to spin 
? Matt actually has access to the data, which is why he's making the claim. He's also observed this over the course of the past year or so. You are arguing against him when it makes no sense, we already have the data proving what things are with services like GamePass. It's time for you to decide whether you want to believe the facts in front of you, or deny them because they don't fit your idea of what you want to be.
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