No. You're wrong. Look at people reacting at Halo Infinite battle pass, lack of skins, high price of skins. Look at Gears 5 complaints about lootboxes.
Those are just two examples out of a bevy of other 1P games that...don't have those specific issues? I mean, there are non-GaaS titles with crap pricing schemes as well and lack of content, should they serve as indictments on all games provided through the traditional delivery model?
Watch new games with new characters being high priced or excessively grindy to get. Nickel and diming you every step of the way.
There are games that have been doing this with no presence on subscription services so, again, how does a subscription service suddenly enable the existence of practices that have already been here? I know you can't answer this right now because, well, you're banned, but if you're reading this just think about it.
and why would they lose that 18%? I find it better paying $60 for a multiplayer game and having everything unlocked instead of having it free to play and each character costing $10. If you prefer the latter, good, because most people do, but it's not more "value" to have games like that on a service.
What's considered of more "value" depends on who's looking at it. But generally speaking, having access to a wide gamut of games at an affordable monthly price, especially when the vast majority of those games are pretty solid quality (we can look at MetaCritic scores for an objective proof of this), is generally going to be considered great value by the average person.
And again, you're predicating certain MTX practices on a thing that doesn't have to exist for those practices to be present. Bad MTX schemes, bad grinding loops etc. have been in gaming well before the advent of GamePass. The subscription service is just a delivery method for the content, it is not necessarily there to shape how the content is built. We can look at film/tv subscription services like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max etc. to see this. Some of those even still abide by the "one-episode-per-week" style formula of traditional television because, surprise!, it works better for long-term retention and mindshare.
Besides that, all of the same filming, storytelling, structure techniques established with film and television in traditional media are at play with content being made specifically for streaming services today. Otherwise, the vast majority of new shows on these services would be more akin to Twitch's sci-fi AI show where the story changes in real-time based on chat participation.
Which has its place as a type of show and storytelling, as well, but it's an extreme outlier in terms of storytelling content in a film/television framing fundamentally changed due to the delivery platform (content streaming, live streaming in Twitch's case) and one not being repeated by film/television sub services nor gaming subscription services, at least not yet. Even if/when such starts to happen (which probably won't be for some time; you'd need advanced algorithms, lots of varied pre-recorded & pre-made content/assets and advanced tech to seamlessly adjust/swap in content dynamically in real-time with very fine levels of granularity for a smooth experience), that won't suddenly be the death knell for quality or the medium some of you are afraid it'll be.
It'll just mean the birth of a new type of interactive content; you'll have some who dabble in making it and others who don't. Delivery platforms/systems like GamePass will still allow both because ultimately they're about appealing to a wide net of users and that includes serving various niches simultaneously.
They're selling better than third party single player games. They're totally fine.
Okay but most 3P aren't even making single-player games these days, especially story-driven, narrative-heavy action-adventure types of which Sony studios are known for regularly doing. Kind of a weird flex.
If by "the future" you mean a supplementary service that provides value to gamers and the service providers, then yes clearly. We're already here.
If by "the future" you mean becomes the single dominant distribution method for games, on the whole, no fucking chance. Unless you think every third party AAA publisher is going to give up making AAA because under said model they're no longer economic for anyone other than sub-service providers that reap the lion's share of revenues.
Agreed; although it could very well become the dominant method, it won't be the only one, and that's the important part. There'll be an audience for physical media, for non-subscription digital content and as long as that audience persists there will be companies to provide things for them.
However, percentage of the market matters, too. I'm sure there are still some people who prefer VHS tapes but they make up such a minuscule fraction of today's market that the big companies don't care to cater to them. At most they probably have to get tapes pressed through a specialty boutique type of shop and that drives up the costs for the client.
Gaming is a unique case, though, because the competitive scene in particular for things like FPS, MOBA, fighters etc. are not going to settle for streaming for a VERY long time. The latency just won't be competitive with beastly local hardware that can run the game natively. That could present a unique incentive to continue providing console hardware into the future for a segment of the gaming audience that wants them, not to mention hosting on the cloud server side benefiting from that hardware.
And if you still have consoles in the picture, even without physical media you would still have an obvious case for purchasable digital copies of games. Depending on how internet infrastructures pan out over the decade (and ISP data limits), there might still be a reason for physical media as well tho IMO it'll shift away from discs to something more like Switch-style cartridges (that's what I think the next consoles will use, and have those interface with decompression hardware for boosting bandwidth rates similar to the SSDs of current on consoles).
So there is always going to be the option of at least digital purchases outside of subscription streaming (emphasis on streaming in particular; subscriptions alone can still allow for digital downloads to run natively, which is basically what GamePass does if you're not using xCloud), and probably physical media for another generation, but cloud streaming definitely has its place in the industry as well and will continue to.
You should ask you friend why would they stop, he’s the one claiming people would always chose “more bang for buck” when it’s obviously not true.
As for why replay a game… are you serious? Apart from replayability factors like Souls game offer, some (lots actually) like to replay the games at higher difficulties, try new builds, redo the challenges, rexperience the story. I mean, is this a serious question? People replay games all the time.
Most people don't replay games, it's just the hardcore fans of a game who do.
There is little evidence that Game Pass is the future... it's why MS is spending billions to force feed it down our throats. MS is creating a demand for subscription services and using Netflix as the model.
Every company creates a demand for a product to some extent. A lot of console gamers weren't necessarily clamoring for CDs before the PS1 came around. In fact, add-ons like the Sega/Mega CD and overpriced ventures like the 3DO probably made most console games more apprehensive to the medium. A lot of them'd of been okay with cartridges going forward, but companies like Sony helped drive a demand for CDs in the console gaming space...and they spent hundreds of millions to do so.
No company makes a product successful without spending tons of money on it, so this is a non-issue.
Notice how Spotify or Netflix grew from the ground up? They solved a problem in their specific industries... Sending people discs through the mail vs sending movies directly to their TV or instead of people having to download gigs of music illegally, provide them with a service to get their music easily.
Spotify and Netflix weren't the first attempts at those things, and used tons of cash to push their services forward regardless. There were already in-between solutions to the film side due to chains like Blockbuster & Hollywood Video. Also going by this logic, if you think the Netflix model was a good one then why did Spotify skip sending music CDs and vinyl records to people through the mail, and jumped straight to digital delivery?
Also worth noting is that Netflix eventually adopted a digital distribution model, but built that off of Xbox Live's digital service for film and television content they offered during the 360 generation.
Gaming has never really needed a subscription service on this level.
What's fundamentally different from GamePass versus, say, PS Now (which came first) other than the ability to download the games to play natively on console, and having 1P games there Day 1? Neither of which are too vastly different from what PS Now does (in terms of certain infrastructure you'd need to provide it).
If you think about it, GamePass is basically a digital Blockbuster Video, except you're paying a single monthly fee to "rent" whatever game or games you want, for either native or cloud play (you choose), no time limits on your "rental period", and you can still purchase the games there while getting a slight discount. Would you go back to the '90s and argue that gaming "never really needed" rental stores like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video?
Because that's actually what certain game publishers tried arguing. Why? Because they wanted to bolster up game sales, but it wasn't all for reasons based on "the pursuit of art". Some of those companies just wanted to shield crappy games from being exposed through a rental so that a sucker could plop down the cash to buy it. Never mind a LOT of kids back then, relied on game renting to play as many games as they did.
But screw those kids, am I right? Screw the customer, yeah? Those kids should've just quit school and joined a car factory plant, damn cheapstakes.
Games are played different than movies or music. There are some people who only play 2-3 games a year. Very few people consume the volume of games on the level of consuming music or TV. The idea that MS will be coming out with a AAA game every month is laughably wasteful. There will be so many games that go unplayed.
Uh, no they won't? You don't seem to realize that by this logic, most games on PlayStation go unplayed, because no gamer plays EVERY SINGLE GAME released on the platform.
The point of having that range of available games on the service is to cater to various niches. Gamer A probably won't play Game # 37, but Gamer C probably will. It's the same as it works on console with people buying their games traditionally. There is no one singular game that serves every gamer on the face of the planet, hence why companies make multiple titles.
There's no reason to bring comparisons to film and music in this, because in a lot of ways the same thing applies to them as well: no one watches every single movie or tv show that ever comes out.
Ask yourself this: Why aren't consumers the ones pushing this? Why did it take a trillion dollar tech company to dump nearly $100 billion on acquisitions, $1 subscriptions and dumping full $60 games to make this happen?
1: There ARE consumers who want a subscription service. Just look at the oodles of people begging for Sony to make a GamePass competitor in Spartacus
2: The "$1 subs" are a conversion of fixed 2-year XBL Gold subs to GPU subs.
