Subscription game services

[civvver]

I'm not referring to your typical (but slowly dying off) mmorpg with $12 a month subscription fees but rather entire game subscription services like netflix for video games. I only really know of three of them, playstation now, origin access, and gamefly.

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow/
https://www.origin.com/en-us/store/origin-access
https://www.gamefly.com/#!/streaming

There's also humble bundle monthly, but that's not really a subscription service in this sense since you own the games. It's more buying a $12 monthly mystery bundle of games.

I just wonder if you guys think this might be the future of gaming, just like it took over tv. However the paradigm is totally different. A movie rental that costs $5 or $6 only lasts a couple hours so it makes a lot of sense to subscribe to unlimited movies for the price of a couple a month. And obviously the tv model with cable already has us paying monthly for content.

Games is different. Whether you buy new or used you can spend hundreds of hours on some games so a $60 purchase could last you several months or more. If I think about what I spend on pc games monthly it's probably right around $5 a month though, which is what origin's service costs. I look at some of the titles there like Dragon Age Inquisition and This War of Mine and think those will take me 3 or 4 months to finish, why would I subscribe for $5 a month when I can just buy for $15 or less on sale per game?

So i'm thinking for this to actually work the library has to be a lot bigger AND include brand spanking new releases, which will probably never happen, cus the publishers still need to make upfront money, and I'm not sure how distributors would handle paying a bunch of publishers and developers. Playstation and origin can do it cus they are streaming self published games I believe. I don't know how the gameplay streaming stuff works but the physical discs are just like rentals so they've already bought the games. Right now if you're on steam you get a cut of sales. If they went to a subscription model they'd almost have to pay a developer an up front fee to stream their game or a monthly royalty or something.

Anyway what are your thoughts and do you see gaming ever going to an all you can play subscription type of model? I'm not sure I'm that interested now but if the content and price points were ever spot on I could see myself purchasing something like that.

 

[Quintillus]

I'll start with the last point, about the subscription model and monthly royalties, etc. This is what Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, Deezer, etc. are dealing with now, and it's squeezing their margins. All the producers want higher royalties, but the providers don't want to raise prices too much too quickly, but are hard-pressed to make money.

Whereas Steam takes a 30% cut of the upfront purchase, and the dev/publisher gets the rest. After credit card fees, Steam has a built-in 25% margin. Why would they, or other established players like GOG, want to switch to a subscription model? They probably wouldn't; it could devour their margins.

So that leaves an upstart, like Gamefly. The have the chicken-and-egg problem of convincing the publishers they can get enough revenue to make it worth it (theoretically possible if they can increase the market enough or take a lower cut), while convincing the customers there's enough games to make it worth it. If I have a new game like Civ VI, I'm taking the 70% revenue on a million $60 sales over putting it on Gamefly, and if I'm a gamer I'm buying Civ VI. Their catalog has some good titles, but I don't see the latest big hits on it, and the selection is still way lower than Steam.

And Origin has the same problem Sony Music, etc. do - it's one publisher's catalog. It might make sense if you plan to binge on one of their games for a month, but even if the publisher were Paradox, I'm going to want to play some other publisher's games during any given month, and don't want to start racking up multiple subscriptions.

As a consumer, the sales are also good enough, and variety large enough in PC games, that I don't really see the need for it. Sure, if I could subscribe to everything on Steam for $10 a month, that'd be great. But I can get an awful lot of permanent games each year for that money if I shop sales, and the developers/publishers/Valve probably wouldn't make more from that model. I feel like it's also more amenable to mp3's/movies since (1) as you mentioned, price per time is higher on those if buying, and (2) everyone with a computer and a good Internet connection can play any mp3/movie they subscribe to - a huge market, whereas a lot of the games you could theoretically subscribe to still require a powerful GPU.

As for streaming, to remove that GPU requirement, I personally wouldn't be interested due to the latency. For $200 I can get a nice GPU that lasts me 4 years, and CPUs last even longer than that these days, so I'm happy to do that over streaming. Could it appeal to those without a good GPU? Possibly, but lag-sensitive games will always have issues unless you can get servers all over the place, which is a huge upfront cost. And while I can handle a 60 millisecond ping in an FPS game, the actual rate at which the screen responds to my input is still well below 60 milliseconds - 33 if I'm at 30 FPS, and 16 if I'm at 60 FPS. You could get new players interested, but the ones who got serious would likely switch to locally-powered graphics.

So I'm not that interested in it now, and I think the model has challenges. Thanks to Steam and its sales (and Humble Bundle), the PC gaming market also isn't stuck in the high upfront price model that audio CDs, cable TV, and DVDs were that made those markets so ripe for online subscription upstarts. Console gaming is more towards the audio CD model in price structure, but not as much as it used to be. Still, I think if subscriptions do hit it big in gaming, it would be on console(s) first, both due to the higher average price/lack of competing storefronts, and possibility of Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft being able to create a true all-title package for their console should they determine that it would make business sense.

Sony also is already getting into the subscription TV package with PlayStation Vue, which is actually a pretty compelling cable TV replacement. It would be rather neat if they had, say, a $25-month add-on to Vue that gave you all PS4 games while subscribed, downloaded locally to your console, and using its local GPU. Would I pay that for all-Steam access? I'd have to tally up and see if I spend close to that per year (probably not), and with my current backlog, definitely not right away. But if I bought a PS4 next week and didn't have any games for it, $25/month would not be bad. $25 and the $30-ish for Vue combined, probably not, but if I already had PS Vue on Roku and then bought a PS4... possibly.

The $25 a month figure is just out of the sky, but it seems like a figure that would be high enough to not destroy the buy-whole-game model instantly, while being low enough it could have some appeal. I have a hard time seeing MS/Sony/Nintendo releasing a whole-catalog collection for $10/month.

 

[civvver]

Origin games don't stream, you download the full games. I wasn't suggesting you stream games directly, although apparently game fly does do this.

But yes, all the hurdles you listed were a lot of the same ones I thought of too. It doesn't really seem viable right now.

 

[sophie]

I was a member of gamefly way the hell back when the service first came out in the mid-2000s. The concept was super cool. The problem was that the service's inventory at the time was way too small. Any even remotely recent release had a months' long wait, so most of the time with the service was spent playing more obscure games that weren't engaging for more than a couple hours. Considering the service is still around over a decade later, I imagine they got better about that.

I notice that Redbox has started offering game rentals as well. The problem for me is that any new game for my PS4 requires an install and updates that can take ages. I just bought Rock Band 4 last week, and had to spend 9 hours (yes, literally 9 hours) installing the game and update patches before I even got to play the damn thing. The thought of doing that for any game I might bring home, especially for one that I'm going to be returning in a week or less, makes me not really want to rent games.

I've also played a bit on PS Now. Pretty much because it's the only way to play PS3 games on the console. It's not too bad, assuming you have an excellent internet connection, no data caps, and nobody else in the house is using any data whatsoever. Yeah, you're really better off just buying the console and games off amazon, or else waiting for the inevitable remaster release for the ps4.

 

[civvver]

how's your internet connection? I used to loathe steam when I had slow internet. I moved into my first place in 2006 when cable wasn't really the standard yet so I got dsl and it was only 1.5 mbps. I'm not even sure if cable was available in my area then. It was fine for playing world of warcraft which is what I did primarily. Then civ5 came out in 2010 and it was the first steam product I owned and actually what led me to steam. But it took forever to install. I still played a lot of wow back then, civ5, dragon age origins and not much else, but in 2012 I bought skyrim during steam summer sale and again waited like 10 hours for it to download, that's when I realized my internet was garbage and got cable at 25 mbps. It was like seeing the internet for the first time. The difference was night and day. And since then I've moved, got xfinity and a dual band 5ghz router and my downloads are up to 90 mbps now. It's insane, it's quicker to download a game than to drive to any store and buy it now.

So yes, at one point I was very against digital delivery, but I couldn't live without it now.