The big 3rd parties are gonna be like
Jim Ryan
said about the new PS+:
“I’m going to play a little hard to get on that one, but I can tell you free that we have massive publisher participation in this program. We have all the big names present.We have big publishers, we have small indie publishers. We have over 200 partners working with us to put their content into PlayStation Plus, so the lineup is going to be really strong.”
According to the trials info leak all the full priced AAA games will have their time trial or demo there. A move like this pretty likely was discussed with the big third parties that will be affected before announcing it. So if they made it mandatory it's because they are on board.
Who are the big third parties?
The ones who release full priced AAA games on PS an aren't owned by Sony: Activision, Microsoft, EA, Take 2, Ubisoft, WB, Bandai Namco, Square Enix, Capcom, Square Enix, Koei Tecmo, the Embracer Group AAA publishers and devs, Sega etc.
Are people seriously fighting for "publishers rights to not give things for free" over a 2 hours trial?
They did it in 360 and having to manufacture demos as separate sku. Now it's going to be limited to high payers, won't require extra work and won't be required for medium sized and small games. If they did it for 360 I don't see why they would have any issue with it now.
I'd rather a no-questions-asked 2 hour return policy for everybody like Steam and Xbox, than demos held behind a paywall.
They should ban your account for abusing refunds. The dev loses 30% of the transaction with every refund: instead of paying back the 70% they got when the payment was made they return 100% (at least in the Apple App Store). And well, they exist -on PS too, it's mandated by law at least in EU- for justified cases, not to test products.
In addition to this, I don't see where the benefit is having to pay every single game you want to test and having to count yourself the 2 hours instead of paying a single fee for the sub having a counter controlled by the console.
Everything on GP is for sale. Any game can be on Xbox and not be on GP. They really haven't forced any changes. They are offering buyers the opportunity to move to a different model and that seems to have reinvigorated their hardware business. Right now GP offers the ultimate in flexibility, devs can completely ignore it if they wish. I can't see them ever forcing subscription only.
If anything, this move by Sony is much more forceful as it removes the decision making from the dev/publisher.
All games included in PS+ or PSNow are also in the PSN store and can be buyed.
Devs aren't forced to include their games in PS Plus/PS Now: as happens in GP and since before GP did it, the platform holder and the publisher agree a deal for some games to be included in the subscription. For some games they have a deal, for other games one of them doesn't want so the game isn't included.
There is nothing negative on offering a short time limited trial of the AAA games -which doesn't require any work or cost for the publishers- to higher payers, a small subset of the whole userbase, to encourage sales among them.
Sony is "forcing" them to get extra game sales from their best customers, they must be super worried about i. Guillemot and Kotick must be crying.
Going to assume that almost no developers will do this on launch. Would hurt their preorder sales, I would thing. I would love this feature. So many games that I want to try. Could make me not wait for sales on some games as well
I think it would only slightly (the player with access to this is a small subset of the total) negatively affect them AAA games that end being way worse than advertised to the point a player was decided to buy the game after watching a trailer but after playing it got so disappointed to the point that changes his mind. Something that applies for very little amount of AAA games.
I think for most games will have no impact or a slight improvements in sales due to discovering games thanks to this, or the games perceived way better than expected after playing them for a couple of hours. And these extra sales would come from high payers, meaning that if they love the game they also would buy more DLC than average or could repeat later with more games from the studio.