Instead of buying a license for a game for $70 you subscribe to a rental service that gives you access to 500 games for $10/month.
Or, instead of buying a $500 console or a $800 PC you just buy a $60 controller and you stream those games running on “the cloud” (=someone else’s console) for $15/month
Problem is that the service is provided by Microsoft at a loss and when they’ll get enough critical mass, they’ll enshittify it.
The economic proposition is good, but I think it’s just to teach gamers that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
Sooo… Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They’ve got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
Games are a lot more expensive to make now. While the tooling has improved, the cost of labor has risen-sadly not enough to keep pace with the cost of living. The cost of a game to the consumer is also a lot cheaper than it was in even the 90’s. So you have a lead gen strategy in gamepass that forces them to recoup in other areas but they still aren’t able to recoup enough. Because of political monetary policies which gamers don’t really want to think about, currencies are worth less (USD lost 7% this year already-$100 bill is now worth $93) and the game prices haven’t adjusted to compensate. In short, games are hitting a similar wall to movies where in a world with Netflix, everything is going to end up looking like mediocre trash if it has to be basically free.
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but distribution is way cheaper and the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I’m honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…
C Suite / Upper Management doesn’t listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they’re being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
Game engines. Nobody is going to even try to reinvent that wheel. Unreal and Unity make a fuckton of cash whether a game does or not. Yeah I hear you, but but but they have income limits, studios release one good ish title, they’re expected to pay like it’ll always happen.
Stores. At least until recently there was not even a slight challenge against the stores control. Now with Apple versus Epic, everybody’s dying to funnel people into their own payment system, But honestly, stores are still making all the money, there’s still the primary method of advertising that works and they still hold all the cards for making sure you show up in their “searches”.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven’t already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it’s more than two guys in a garage, they’ve already all sold their sole adventure capital)
They really need to. I haven’t looked at them in quite a while now last time I looked I was hoping to move some Unity stuff over there, But it seem like anything other than Android was a significant hurdle.
Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I’m not falling for it twice.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don’t even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.
I’ll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.
So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn’t going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.
The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they’re in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn’t mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.
Sadly justwatch doesn’t work for me. It gives the choice between a part of the country that doesn’t offer services where I live, or another country - which doesn’t offer services where I live.
Justwatch reliably tells me “this isn’t available for streaming in your region”. Sonarr tells me it’s an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™
Edit: But like, no shade on Justwatch, it works as intended. It’s the streaming services who get worldwide licensing rights and then don’t bother targeting my little region.
Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.
MS may not have invented it (although I’d argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.
Microsoft is literally killing off game studios and dev jobs to fund AI. There’s absolutely no way that customers don’t get fucked when the end goal of game pass is met. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Plus, since SKG is a trending topic, you think they’ll think twice about killing games exclusively under GP or just dropping them? You’re not even paying for the games, just access. I got it a couple times when it was $1. After it went up I realised “oh cool so my entire library would be hostage for future price hikes”. Fuck that.
Stop Killing Games, in short it’s a campaign that’s pushing petitions to force developers to keep games playable when currently if a developer is done with it they will just shut servers and there can be o way to play the games any more, or provide code for someone else to be able to set up a way for them to still be played.
Exactly. Right now developers get good deals when adding their games to game pass and the game pass is pretty cheap, but after game passes become “the thing” and developers have to be in a game pass, it will get worse for developers and consumers.
The premise itself is flawed, of course Gamepass impact sales, that’s the whole point. The question is does it negatively affect profit? Well for AAA games it might, for AA and indies it might affect positively and those make up the bulk of the gamepass library. Matter of fact there’s barely any AAA games released on GP that aren’t Microsoft’s own games.
They need to bring back demos. It would help a ton if they did, but it seems so many companies and devs just completely skip the idea. I think some of it has to do with companies who kinda know their games aren’t going to be worth a fuck so they want people to buy at full price, so they’re not going to release a demo. Same with not releasing the game to reviewers early.
They could easily do so on a console or game streaming service, just give you like 2 hours and then switch it off.
I think Sony actually do that as part of one of the PSN tiers.
But I think the main driver behind no longer doing demos is that when they started analysing it, they found it mostly reduced sales. A lot of people were no longer interested enough to buy it after playing, at least not at full price. I gotta admit, back when demos were common on the front of magazines, there were very few that I actually purchased on the basis of the demo. The ones I did buy, I’d have probably got anyway, like Metal Gear Solid 2.
I mean from a consumer perspective no, but this isn’t something the consumer would even need to be concerned with. The conversation is from a business point of view.
AAA vs AA vs whatever else never had anything to do with business aside from marketing, and marketing doesn’t mean shit for the consumer if the game sucks. Just make a good game.
It describes the budget of the game. It’s always relative to the average budget in the industry but it is a business term.
I still don’t know why you keep bringing the consumer into this. The consumer doesn’t and should not care whether Gamepass hurts sales, only that it is a good deal for them. And it is. Whether sales are affected (obviously they are) is an industry conversation, but the real question is whether it boosts profitability or not.
Quality of games etc etc is all irrelevant in this specific conversation.
That’s the exact problem that we’re talking about.
Being so shortsighted for this quarters numbers, while also not giving a shit about the only thing that actually brings you money.
The consumer.
This is failing because business doesn’t take that into account, and down the line it absolutely plays a part. Let’s keep focusing on milking these 4 “AAA” franchises, and also buy up as many independent studios as we can just to shut them down, that surely won’t have an effect on the industry.
The consumer is the whole godamn point. You don’t get profit without them. They (we) smell this bullshit, and it doesn’t smell good.
It’s not a long term strategy and it never was supposed to be.
Edit: anytime I say you, I just mean companies, not you, I think thats obvious, but I just want to point out I’m not coming at you
That’s the thing, for the big publishers, the end user (consumer) is only part of the puzzle. Investors and business partners (such as licensees) are more important, and have been for years. They bring in the wealth.
End users are neither organized nor informed enough to have a seat at the table. The masses will gravitate towards their big properties and marketing will be shaped to that effect. Acquire said big properties if you don’t have them, and make sure all the potential investors know you did.
I disagree, because fundamentally Gamepass is a great deal for consumers. And it’s also a good deal for developers if they know how to use it strategically. Like if your game came out a year ago, and its sales are stalling you can go to Microsoft and ask for a big lump sum, put your game there and stop worrying about month to month sales while you develop the next thing. People like me get to play a game they wouldn’t have never bought otherwise and they get the money to develop the next thing.
It’s not the best deals for all consumers, but it is for many. For example I don’t give a rats ass about owning a “library” because I very very rarely replay games, I have very little time for gaming and the type of game I prefer tend to be on the longer side. Gamepass is great because in between those 50+ hour games I have a large selection of games to choose from and I get to play a bunch of games that I wouldn’t have played otherwise because I wasn’t willing to pay $50 or more for them, like for example Lies of P. Then there’s the exclusive AAA from Microsoft which I happen to enjoy like Doom, Halo, and Gears of War. It saves me a lot of money.
Will Gamepass die at some point? Maybe. Probably. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s no signs that it is dying right now, nor that it is harming the industry at all. In fact it has allowed games that otherwise not see the light of day to become viable.
Yeah I don’t know where exactly I was going with that, but you’re right in the sense that for industry itself it’s good because it’s profitable. it makes sense, although there have been issues with large corporations like Microsoft shit canning everyone at the first sign of a new sparkly thing. Game pass can be and is beneficial in a lot of cases, but what it takes to create something like game pass and it be profitable has its downsides for people that work in the industry, studios that have been bought and abandoned, and in turn the consumers.
I’m a bit very hammered, let me get back to you here in a little while. Spoiler, I did read some of your first paragraph and I’m pretty sure there’s a middle ground coming up.
Oooo, still not ready to respond, but I did read all of it. Hit me up if you’re trying to get your shit ran in that gears remaster, I’m pretty stoked about that all irony aside.
I am tryina drink some water and rest a little bit but I promise I’ll get back to this thread. I appreciate you talking it out.
I like indie games for walking sim and story heavy games only. Outside of that, 99% of indie games feel like some pixel art bs retro rip off roguelike nostalgia cash grab. I hate garbage ware like meatboy, etc.
If AAA studios weren’t so shitty, I feel like half of the indie studios wouldn’t have a chance.
Your opinion is valid, but “AAA” studios have lit themselves on fire, and a shit ton of objectively great games have come out and absolutely dunked on them.
A great example of this is balatro. It’s none of what you described, it’s nowhere near your typical cash grab AAA and it’s just a good game that did extremely well.
Another example would be Hades, just a monster of a good game.
Blasphemous 1 & 2, unknown studio, fucking killed it.
Also if you prefer not AAA games for story, what actually is a AAA game?
For a healthy mega publisher/platform with a lot of fingers in the pot? It will increase overall profits and, theoretically, those profits can be redistributed. This is effectively what EA did in the late 00s/early 10s where Madden and The Sims meant games like Mirror’s Edge (or… The Sims) could be created.
The problem being that once a few of the tentpoles collapse? it ALL collapses
Also, this ignores the companies that aren’t part of that megapublisher who now are fighting “just play Halo or Call of Duty, it is free with gamepass”. At best it creates an environment where it doesn’t really matter how well a game sells so long as you sold N licenses to Humble and MS and Sony and so forth. Which effectively incentivizes “streamer bait” games.
Also: We have seen exactly this play out in music and film/TV.
But Gamepass is not even close to being a tentpole. Halo and Call of Duty being in Gamepass has not limited the ability of games like BG3 being huge successes. If anything it frees up people to buy these type of games because their yearly COD is included in their monthly fee and now they can budget to buy other types of games.
Baldurs Gate 3? The game part of one of the bigger franchises in all of gaming (D&D) that is the sequel to one of the most celebrated franchises in all of gaming (Baldurs Gate) that had been in Early Access for years AND which was developed by one of the three best CRPG developers in all of gaming (Larian).
Well, you heard them: just make more Baldurs Gates!
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all? Because that’s frankly hilarious. If anything like in music and movies (which is now also tv in a way), what’s more at risk are the big franchises. They’ve become unsustainable.
Gaming is going to look a lot more like the music industry looks now, with lots of indie companies doing great stuff and just a few huge artists making slop for the masses.
The “big franchises” that are how people find success in a gamepass world? Or do you still think that Dungeons and Dragons Presents Baldurs Gate 3 By Larian Studios is a tiny indie game?
Also: Maybe you should check out how the music industry is doing as countless artists talk about how hard it is to break out at all and one of the more popular bands on spotify (?) is literally AI slop?
Also
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all?
Tell me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs without telling me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs.
If you want to discuss this? Either be open to learning or educate yourself ahead of time. But if you are just going to insist on vibes and how everything is going to just work out? You are wasting everyone’s time.
If you go back 20, 30 years ago you would never be able to make a living as a musician in an indie project. Nowadays you have an amazing and frankly mind blowing amount of very talented artists making wonderful and unique music that also affords them a living. I love music man, so I know that it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music especially if you like stuff that breaks boundaries. There is more difficulty becoming huge, but again that’s how it works now. huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé etc are basically a dying breed. The AI slop thing is more about chillhop artists etc having difficulty because their music is not differentiated in any way and the people who listen to it are not actually looking at who the artists is 99% of the time. Artists will have to adapt and make music that is more unique now instead of hoping that they get on the queue of people who are not paying attention to what they are listening to.
The layoffs are proof of what I’m saying. Huge studios with thousands of employees are no longer sustainable, therefore they need to shed weight. The era of AAA 500million+ budget video games is coming to a close. More studios will close, more people will lose their jobs. From there a lot of smaller companies will spring up and that will be the gaming environment for the next 10 years or so.
I’ve been gaming all my life, I turned 30 recently. And I think the last 5 years have been some of the best the industry has ever had, and it was all thanks to the indie scene and the AA scene. There has never been more variety at this level of quality ever before, that’s for sure. The only thing that may come close was the 90s when you basically had a similar scene to what we have now.
All of this to say that from the perspective of the consumer, gaming/music/movies and tv are fantastic right now. But it’s become much more atomized, you have lots of niche shows, music acts and videogames as opposed to what we had before were there were a lot of larger properties but they all were a little dumbed down because they had to appeal to a large demographic within its niche.
The people who most praise Gamepass are indie developers. All the time. The ones that complain the most are the AAA studio employees for a reason, it threatens their entire model.
Does it suck for the developers, yes, I feel for them. But this is the market shifting to reflect consumer behavior and preference.
Edit:
Btw it really shows you haven’t even looked at gamepass, because it hardly has any AAA games that are not MS properties. And the ones it’s has are quite old. So it’s not how people find success in Gamepass, at all.
I don’t have a game right now. I spent the weekend searching Gamepass and testing out some games I wouldn’t have bought blindly, trying to find my next obsession.
None have grabbed me yet. DOOM Middle Ages was starting to get fun but it kept crashing on me. Sorry developer’s, if your game doesn’t get my attention in the first ten minutes, you never deserved my money, but if I find the game on Gamepass and enjoy it, I tend to let others know.
With GP, I tend to dwell on older AA, indies games that I had my eyes on, but not committed enough to buy or good but too janky to spend money on. I found that I have more tolerance this way.
You don’t have to have an expensive PC, and even if you do, the amount you would save on software would far outweigh that cost in a year or less. And then every year after that, 6 bucks for 3 games dude
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What’s a gamepass?
Instead of buying a license for a game for $70 you subscribe to a rental service that gives you access to 500 games for $10/month.
Or, instead of buying a $500 console or a $800 PC you just buy a $60 controller and you stream those games running on “the cloud” (=someone else’s console) for $15/month
Problem is that the service is provided by Microsoft at a loss and when they’ll get enough critical mass, they’ll enshittify it.
The economic proposition is good, but I think it’s just to teach gamers that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
A pass for games.
Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.
Except now it’s just spyware
Sooo… Gamepass is one of the services that is driving up the price of the non-gamepass versions of those games, right? They’ve got to recoup costs somehow, and then the rest of the industry takes that as an opportunity to consider these inflated prices as the new baseline.
Games are a lot more expensive to make now. While the tooling has improved, the cost of labor has risen-sadly not enough to keep pace with the cost of living. The cost of a game to the consumer is also a lot cheaper than it was in even the 90’s. So you have a lead gen strategy in gamepass that forces them to recoup in other areas but they still aren’t able to recoup enough. Because of political monetary policies which gamers don’t really want to think about, currencies are worth less (USD lost 7% this year already-$100 bill is now worth $93) and the game prices haven’t adjusted to compensate. In short, games are hitting a similar wall to movies where in a world with Netflix, everything is going to end up looking like mediocre trash if it has to be basically free.
The market has also increased 1000-times over, while simultaneously removing physical barriers entirely. The development itself is more expensive, sure, but distribution is way cheaper and the potential gains have increased at a much quicker rate, especially for smaller games.
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
How many times have we already seen this?
One of the shit thing is that all the games that I’ve bought in the last 5 years all has come into game pass.
I canceled it when I canceled every other subscription except real debrid
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
lol, feel free to let me know when any actual consequences come from that
We haven’t seen antitrust with teeths for a while now.
Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple should have been broken up in a million little pieces a long time ago, but it won’t happen.
The only part of the gamepass that is monopolistic is the friends network it creates.
I think it was Netflix that went through a period of releasing movies in cinemas and putting it on streaming on day one.
It was such a resounding success that they no longer do that.
I guess MS has deep enough pockets to not realise their folly yet. PSN Premium/Extra isn’t as good value from a consumer point of view, but it also hasn’t killed their own console. What that cannibalises is the “wait for a sale” people, who would likely have paid £20 for a game a year or two down the line. I think that’s a more manageable than losing all the day one £65 sales.
I thought that was during Covid.
I’m honestly surprised that movie theaters even exist still. Motion picture groups basically starve the theaters to the point where they can only survive off of concessions. The places are almost universally dirty and understaffed. Most of the mom and pop shops died off decades ago.
And as an industry they return less than the sp500 so not only is movie viewing horrible, movie making is a terrible investment .
According to Wikipedia, they started it in 2015 with Beasts of No Nation and stopped in 2018 with Roma.
Lots of others did it during covid though.
The last time I actually enjoyed a cinema was a tiny little place in Iceland that appeared to have two screens, a ticket stand and a snack stand, and had one old guy running between all of them like a novelty act. This is how a cinema should be, not some horrible 12 screen thing showing the same Marvel shite at 20 minute intervals.
We did see Die Hard 4 though, so it wasn’t all fun and games. Still it could have been worse. It could have been Die Hard 5…
Yet another example of:
C Suite / Upper Management doesn’t listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they’re being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
The goal is to lose money to capture the market and once it is done, to recoup their loss and bleed the market dry.
Yes, but if they can’t actually pull off the last part… uh… that doesn’t end well.
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
“But if you offer all these old games to play, why would anyone bother buying the new stuff?” - some corpo director
Honestly who cares. Stop buying AAA slop and support indies.
Only open-sourced, homebrewed, and single-person is what we need!
10 people or less.
Captain of Industry is a gem with a 4 person team Risk of Rain was 2, expanded to 3
That’s still at a human scale.
Hedon, Cultic, Zortch I think were all solo devs.
is there anyone making any money from video games at this point?
Mobile gacha shit
Studios get gobbled up, mass layoff, explode and reform month by month.
Game engines. Nobody is going to even try to reinvent that wheel. Unreal and Unity make a fuckton of cash whether a game does or not. Yeah I hear you, but but but they have income limits, studios release one good ish title, they’re expected to pay like it’ll always happen.
Stores. At least until recently there was not even a slight challenge against the stores control. Now with Apple versus Epic, everybody’s dying to funnel people into their own payment system, But honestly, stores are still making all the money, there’s still the primary method of advertising that works and they still hold all the cards for making sure you show up in their “searches”.
If you manage to bottle lightning the studio makes a fuck ton of money, assuming you haven’t already sold your soul to venture capital. (Hint, If it’s more than two guys in a garage, they’ve already all sold their sole adventure capital)
On 2) Godot has entered the chat.
They really need to. I haven’t looked at them in quite a while now last time I looked I was hoping to move some Unity stuff over there, But it seem like anything other than Android was a significant hurdle.
Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I’m not falling for it twice.
Netflix used to be too good to be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don’t even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.
I’ll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.
So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn’t going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.
The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they’re in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn’t mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.
justwatch is pretty reliable and can save you tens of hours on your search apparently
So does sailing the high seas
Sadly justwatch doesn’t work for me. It gives the choice between a part of the country that doesn’t offer services where I live, or another country - which doesn’t offer services where I live.
Justwatch reliably tells me “this isn’t available for streaming in your region”. Sonarr tells me it’s an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™
Edit: But like, no shade on Justwatch, it works as intended. It’s the streaming services who get worldwide licensing rights and then don’t bother targeting my little region.
I love JustWatch. Gets you the exact info you’re looking for pronto.
Can confirm, I never stopped pirating for 20+ years.
May as well enjoy it while it lasts. Like Moviepass.
Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
MS is making money from Gamepass
Have they paid off the 70 billion? If they are making money, why are they firing people and cancelling projects?
Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.
MS may not have invented it (although I’d argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
We call it the Walmart model
I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
Game pass might be the best deal in gaming, but you are selling your soul to the devil for it. It will ultimately harm gaming, especially developers long term. We should reject game pass.
Microsoft is literally killing off game studios and dev jobs to fund AI. There’s absolutely no way that customers don’t get fucked when the end goal of game pass is met. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Plus, since SKG is a trending topic, you think they’ll think twice about killing games exclusively under GP or just dropping them? You’re not even paying for the games, just access. I got it a couple times when it was $1. After it went up I realised “oh cool so my entire library would be hostage for future price hikes”. Fuck that.
What is SKG?
Stop Killing Games, in short it’s a campaign that’s pushing petitions to force developers to keep games playable when currently if a developer is done with it they will just shut servers and there can be o way to play the games any more, or provide code for someone else to be able to set up a way for them to still be played.
Thanks. I wasn’t familiar with the abbreviation and of course Google offered no insights.
Stop Killing Games
Gamepass is going to continue betting worse until we end up with the mess that are streaming services right now.
I sincerely hope it fails.
Exactly. Right now developers get good deals when adding their games to game pass and the game pass is pretty cheap, but after game passes become “the thing” and developers have to be in a game pass, it will get worse for developers and consumers.
It has plateaued some time ago now. That’s not failure, but it’s not about to become Netflix either.
The premise itself is flawed, of course Gamepass impact sales, that’s the whole point. The question is does it negatively affect profit? Well for AAA games it might, for AA and indies it might affect positively and those make up the bulk of the gamepass library. Matter of fact there’s barely any AAA games released on GP that aren’t Microsoft’s own games.
AAA and AA haven’t meant shit in this industry for a long long time. It’s not even almost something I look for when looking for something new to play.
Oh that looks fun, but the budget just isn’t high enough for me, next.
This is such a terrible take.
Of course AAA and AA mean something in the gaming industry! I’m hardly going to power my controller with a fucking 9V am I?
Not with attitude
You wanna elaborate on that perfect analogy?
He means battery sizes.
Rip
They need to bring back demos. It would help a ton if they did, but it seems so many companies and devs just completely skip the idea. I think some of it has to do with companies who kinda know their games aren’t going to be worth a fuck so they want people to buy at full price, so they’re not going to release a demo. Same with not releasing the game to reviewers early.
They could easily do so on a console or game streaming service, just give you like 2 hours and then switch it off.
I think Sony actually do that as part of one of the PSN tiers.
But I think the main driver behind no longer doing demos is that when they started analysing it, they found it mostly reduced sales. A lot of people were no longer interested enough to buy it after playing, at least not at full price. I gotta admit, back when demos were common on the front of magazines, there were very few that I actually purchased on the basis of the demo. The ones I did buy, I’d have probably got anyway, like Metal Gear Solid 2.
I mean from a consumer perspective no, but this isn’t something the consumer would even need to be concerned with. The conversation is from a business point of view.
AAA vs AA vs whatever else never had anything to do with business aside from marketing, and marketing doesn’t mean shit for the consumer if the game sucks. Just make a good game.
Make the game, and the people will come.
It describes the budget of the game. It’s always relative to the average budget in the industry but it is a business term.
I still don’t know why you keep bringing the consumer into this. The consumer doesn’t and should not care whether Gamepass hurts sales, only that it is a good deal for them. And it is. Whether sales are affected (obviously they are) is an industry conversation, but the real question is whether it boosts profitability or not.
Quality of games etc etc is all irrelevant in this specific conversation.
That’s the exact problem that we’re talking about.
Being so shortsighted for this quarters numbers, while also not giving a shit about the only thing that actually brings you money.
The consumer.
This is failing because business doesn’t take that into account, and down the line it absolutely plays a part. Let’s keep focusing on milking these 4 “AAA” franchises, and also buy up as many independent studios as we can just to shut them down, that surely won’t have an effect on the industry.
The consumer is the whole godamn point. You don’t get profit without them. They (we) smell this bullshit, and it doesn’t smell good.
It’s not a long term strategy and it never was supposed to be.
Edit: anytime I say you, I just mean companies, not you, I think thats obvious, but I just want to point out I’m not coming at you
That’s the thing, for the big publishers, the end user (consumer) is only part of the puzzle. Investors and business partners (such as licensees) are more important, and have been for years. They bring in the wealth.
End users are neither organized nor informed enough to have a seat at the table. The masses will gravitate towards their big properties and marketing will be shaped to that effect. Acquire said big properties if you don’t have them, and make sure all the potential investors know you did.
I disagree, because fundamentally Gamepass is a great deal for consumers. And it’s also a good deal for developers if they know how to use it strategically. Like if your game came out a year ago, and its sales are stalling you can go to Microsoft and ask for a big lump sum, put your game there and stop worrying about month to month sales while you develop the next thing. People like me get to play a game they wouldn’t have never bought otherwise and they get the money to develop the next thing.
It’s not the best deals for all consumers, but it is for many. For example I don’t give a rats ass about owning a “library” because I very very rarely replay games, I have very little time for gaming and the type of game I prefer tend to be on the longer side. Gamepass is great because in between those 50+ hour games I have a large selection of games to choose from and I get to play a bunch of games that I wouldn’t have played otherwise because I wasn’t willing to pay $50 or more for them, like for example Lies of P. Then there’s the exclusive AAA from Microsoft which I happen to enjoy like Doom, Halo, and Gears of War. It saves me a lot of money.
Will Gamepass die at some point? Maybe. Probably. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s no signs that it is dying right now, nor that it is harming the industry at all. In fact it has allowed games that otherwise not see the light of day to become viable.
Yeah I don’t know where exactly I was going with that, but you’re right in the sense that for industry itself it’s good because it’s profitable. it makes sense, although there have been issues with large corporations like Microsoft shit canning everyone at the first sign of a new sparkly thing. Game pass can be and is beneficial in a lot of cases, but what it takes to create something like game pass and it be profitable has its downsides for people that work in the industry, studios that have been bought and abandoned, and in turn the consumers.
I’m a bit very hammered, let me get back to you here in a little while. Spoiler, I did read some of your first paragraph and I’m pretty sure there’s a middle ground coming up.
Oooo, still not ready to respond, but I did read all of it. Hit me up if you’re trying to get your shit ran in that gears remaster, I’m pretty stoked about that all irony aside.
I am tryina drink some water and rest a little bit but I promise I’ll get back to this thread. I appreciate you talking it out.
I like indie games for walking sim and story heavy games only. Outside of that, 99% of indie games feel like some pixel art bs retro rip off roguelike nostalgia cash grab. I hate garbage ware like meatboy, etc.
If AAA studios weren’t so shitty, I feel like half of the indie studios wouldn’t have a chance.
Your opinion is valid, but “AAA” studios have lit themselves on fire, and a shit ton of objectively great games have come out and absolutely dunked on them.
A great example of this is balatro. It’s none of what you described, it’s nowhere near your typical cash grab AAA and it’s just a good game that did extremely well.
Another example would be Hades, just a monster of a good game.
Blasphemous 1 & 2, unknown studio, fucking killed it.
Also if you prefer not AAA games for story, what actually is a AAA game?
For a healthy mega publisher/platform with a lot of fingers in the pot? It will increase overall profits and, theoretically, those profits can be redistributed. This is effectively what EA did in the late 00s/early 10s where Madden and The Sims meant games like Mirror’s Edge (or… The Sims) could be created.
The problem being that once a few of the tentpoles collapse? it ALL collapses
Also, this ignores the companies that aren’t part of that megapublisher who now are fighting “just play Halo or Call of Duty, it is free with gamepass”. At best it creates an environment where it doesn’t really matter how well a game sells so long as you sold N licenses to Humble and MS and Sony and so forth. Which effectively incentivizes “streamer bait” games.
Also: We have seen exactly this play out in music and film/TV.
But Gamepass is not even close to being a tentpole. Halo and Call of Duty being in Gamepass has not limited the ability of games like BG3 being huge successes. If anything it frees up people to buy these type of games because their yearly COD is included in their monthly fee and now they can budget to buy other types of games.
Baldurs Gate 3? The game part of one of the bigger franchises in all of gaming (D&D) that is the sequel to one of the most celebrated franchises in all of gaming (Baldurs Gate) that had been in Early Access for years AND which was developed by one of the three best CRPG developers in all of gaming (Larian).
Well, you heard them: just make more Baldurs Gates!
Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all? Because that’s frankly hilarious. If anything like in music and movies (which is now also tv in a way), what’s more at risk are the big franchises. They’ve become unsustainable.
Gaming is going to look a lot more like the music industry looks now, with lots of indie companies doing great stuff and just a few huge artists making slop for the masses.
The “big franchises” that are how people find success in a gamepass world? Or do you still think that Dungeons and Dragons Presents Baldurs Gate 3 By Larian Studios is a tiny indie game?
Also: Maybe you should check out how the music industry is doing as countless artists talk about how hard it is to break out at all and one of the more popular bands on spotify (?) is literally AI slop?
Also
Tell me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs without telling me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs.
If you want to discuss this? Either be open to learning or educate yourself ahead of time. But if you are just going to insist on vibes and how everything is going to just work out? You are wasting everyone’s time.
If you go back 20, 30 years ago you would never be able to make a living as a musician in an indie project. Nowadays you have an amazing and frankly mind blowing amount of very talented artists making wonderful and unique music that also affords them a living. I love music man, so I know that it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music especially if you like stuff that breaks boundaries. There is more difficulty becoming huge, but again that’s how it works now. huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé etc are basically a dying breed. The AI slop thing is more about chillhop artists etc having difficulty because their music is not differentiated in any way and the people who listen to it are not actually looking at who the artists is 99% of the time. Artists will have to adapt and make music that is more unique now instead of hoping that they get on the queue of people who are not paying attention to what they are listening to.
The layoffs are proof of what I’m saying. Huge studios with thousands of employees are no longer sustainable, therefore they need to shed weight. The era of AAA 500million+ budget video games is coming to a close. More studios will close, more people will lose their jobs. From there a lot of smaller companies will spring up and that will be the gaming environment for the next 10 years or so.
I’ve been gaming all my life, I turned 30 recently. And I think the last 5 years have been some of the best the industry has ever had, and it was all thanks to the indie scene and the AA scene. There has never been more variety at this level of quality ever before, that’s for sure. The only thing that may come close was the 90s when you basically had a similar scene to what we have now.
All of this to say that from the perspective of the consumer, gaming/music/movies and tv are fantastic right now. But it’s become much more atomized, you have lots of niche shows, music acts and videogames as opposed to what we had before were there were a lot of larger properties but they all were a little dumbed down because they had to appeal to a large demographic within its niche.
The people who most praise Gamepass are indie developers. All the time. The ones that complain the most are the AAA studio employees for a reason, it threatens their entire model.
Does it suck for the developers, yes, I feel for them. But this is the market shifting to reflect consumer behavior and preference.
Edit: Btw it really shows you haven’t even looked at gamepass, because it hardly has any AAA games that are not MS properties. And the ones it’s has are quite old. So it’s not how people find success in Gamepass, at all.
I don’t have a game right now. I spent the weekend searching Gamepass and testing out some games I wouldn’t have bought blindly, trying to find my next obsession.
None have grabbed me yet. DOOM Middle Ages was starting to get fun but it kept crashing on me. Sorry developer’s, if your game doesn’t get my attention in the first ten minutes, you never deserved my money, but if I find the game on Gamepass and enjoy it, I tend to let others know.
With GP, I tend to dwell on older AA, indies games that I had my eyes on, but not committed enough to buy or good but too janky to spend money on. I found that I have more tolerance this way.
Spend like 6 bucks on 3 games in the steam most purchased and you’ll be fine for awhile
But then I’d have to buy a gaming PC.
That’s the solution homie, not the problem.
You don’t have to have an expensive PC, and even if you do, the amount you would save on software would far outweigh that cost in a year or less. And then every year after that, 6 bucks for 3 games dude
Steam deck is a great option too