Playstation Plus is what lead to my eventual move to PC Gaming. I didn't (and still don't) see the benefit of having to pay monthly just to play games that I want to play. At the time (ps3/4 era), most if not all the free games were all indy games and games I had no interest in playing. That meant that I was paying full price for games I wanted to play and I had to pay a monthly fee just to play online multiplayer (and internet of course). Moving to PC saved me something like 30$/month for something that gave me little to no value.
If the future of gaming is a subscription model, I'd rather just stop gaming.
As a counterpoint I got an Xbox Series X because the cost of building a decent gaming computer has become ridiculous.
Just the GPU would cost me as much as the whole console and as my desktop PC has an ancient motherboard, RAM, CPU etc. I'd have to replace everything.
The Game Pass has been a pretty good deal so far, but I agree that having to pay just for online multiplayer is ridiculous and of course they could jack up the Game Pass price tomorrow and I'd have little recourse.
Quick Resume and being able to play on the sofa is decent as well when I don't have much time.
The main thing I miss is all the smaller games like Valheim etc. especially since AAA games have become less appealing as they just seem like time-sinks aimed to optimise "engagement".
I've always been a PC gamer, on Linux mostly (Steam enables so much).
After enjoying a SNES mini for a while, I considered maybe it could simplify life by getting a dedicated modern console rather than use PC, for playing the latest games.
However, then reading about how modern consoles are online connected and let you wait while they auto-download updates, makes it look exactly like PC, so not adding any value. So PC gamer I stay :)
> For Xbox this coming generation is about "going beyond the console," as Ahmad says, "and really trying to reach as many people on mobile and PC" as possible.
You really don't see the benefit of paying USA $60 to rent 24 high quality games a year indefinitely? I mean really? thats almost a $1000 value.
I mean literally, you will get more games (and AAA ones too) for pennies. I have PS plus, and they throw games at you. It's a problem because it probably suppresses people's desire to buy new games; like why buy control at launch when chances are it hits plus later?
Counterpoint: I bought a Xbox Series S for 380$CAD and 3 years of Game Pass Ultimate for 240$, both before taxes.
I could have paid 400$ for a Switch and then buy 3 games at 80$ and play the same games all the time and I'd be bored in less than a year.
I used to love renting games as a child. My family wasn't well off and if it wasn't for renting games I would have missed many gems.
Now with Gamepass I have almost 300 great games to play, I finished 3 games already and I'm currently playing Hollow Knight. After that, I'll play FF7 original and then all the Kingdom Hearts.
I won't have to spend a penny on games for the next 34 months, legally.
I’m also enjoying Gamepass, especially when the alternate trend that’s been making buckets of money for the industry is microtransactions. Yes, I absolutely wish that the model of just making a really good game and selling it directly was the standard. But hey, we live in an economic system that demands unlimited revenue growth and out of all the options that preserve the creation of games that I like to play, subscriptions are by far the best option. If you don’t like it, take it up with capitalism.
Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable. Even the fact they have a data center near most population centers who would use Stadia isn't enough to combat it.
A little over a month ago I had thought about doing p2p resource sharing to reduce the amount travel time and latency and make game streaming an edge computing problem and I still think that might be the way to go.
P2P resource sharing in a local area. Start with PC gaming friends with the assumption that a lot of people have local friends when you want to game but not own a PC you boot up the system and it uses your friends GPU, when they play it'll bump you to another friend or in the case you don't have another friend that's where you fall back to a reduced server farm in a datacenter some where to handle that.
As people use the service you gradually expand who can resource share from friends to a general Geolocation based pool. Now you very rarely fall back to the datacenter. Problems like spot instance turnover in the cloud have forced people to solve the problem of gracefully transferring resources before spur of the moment shutdown and worst case I think you can run multiple copies that you could hard cut over to.
You'll need a pretty tight lower bound for the types of hardware that can join that network and be used as resources among other things.
Anyway I'm 100% certain I'm missing a bunch of problems and technicalities here but it seemed like a good enough idea where I still want to set this up in a small example using kube and a few friends' computers.
I could see this happening for quite a lot of games, sure. But... I'm skeptical just because the experience for some games would be so, so much worse. Anything requiring fine input goes straight out of the window, such as a tactical FPS like CS:GO, or VALORANT. MOBAs, maybe, except when you get to a high level where it, once again, requires precise inputs. Hell, even CoD, FIFA require it when laying against other players. Fortnite gets quite difficult when you consider the prevalence of building in that game - lord knows I struggled with accuracy even on a good machine. I guess Destiny 2 has demonstrated some aspects working, but AFAIK, quite a bit of the game is PvE.
I can't think of an analogous comparison for this in other media, to try and make a comparison to. Either something groundbreaking needs to happen (and doesn't physics prevent this?) or if the transition truly happens, these types of games will require a fundamental change in how they work.
Another thing - if VR ever actually gets any traction, I can't imagine cloud streaming working here.
Considering none of you want to pay full price for anything ever, get used to it. I don't see people complaining about how Netflix isn't making DVDs and Blu-ray for their content, or buying physical games even any more. You all want the moon; you want digital content forever at rock bottom prices.
The subscription services exist because people didn't want to pay for games. The games as service model exists because trying to make what you want just leads to piracy and enough lost sales to make it not worth releasing the content. GTA V for example probably learned its lesson from the piracy of chinatown wars on portables; its GAAS forever.
This is the world you made, I guess.
I mean, even with advertising on the net; no one wanted to pay subscriptions, and people here wanted content to be free. So the people moved to a model that would get them paid, and it was much worse than if we all just subscribed to physical magazines. Monetization models are often in reaction to the audience's willingness to pay; what we are finding out is that the old model of "buying physical product and not pirating it" actually was the best way to balance value and demands from the customer.
Sadly, I believe that this is correct. Look at what happened to music and movies.
The only question is if the tech, and especially people's internet connections will get there. Personally, I much prefer being able to 'own' games and run them on my local hardware. But I think the convenience of not having to download/install/update anything, just hitting "Play" and go will outweigh the disadvantages for most people.
Which is sad, because I think this will make the overall experience worse for everyone, for the sake of just convenience. Everything will be stuck again in walled gardens like Netflix, Spotify & Co are now.
As soon as subscription is the dominant way, consumers will be squeezed hard. The same thing will happen that happened with for example the cable television: initially paying for it made sense because it did away with commercials and offered a more diverse selection. Now? You pay and also there are commercials, and the selection is quantity over quality.
Better than the alternative IMO: Buying to own a bunch of games on Steam every time they go on sale and never even bother to play them because you have a huge backlog of games to work through.
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I completely agree. It’s ridiculous that for housing and cars (the most important assets), leasing and renting is quite common but it’s suddenly taboo when it comes to something almost just as important like my video games. Also less wasteful for the environment to rent and play from a central supercomputer than have to buy my own computer and buy games.
So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.
With subscriptions, control is higher for publishers, so the only thing they need to do is making it a better deal than owning a game. As an important milestone, digital distribution paved the way so now people don't expect actual ownership over games, it's enough to be able to pay and then download and run.
Along this system, I think an indie scene will remain that distributes games as traditional downloadable software. As long as we'll have computers able to do generic computation of course.
I don’t know. I know many people just want to play all the new AAA games and then move on. For those subscription services seem perfect.
Me? I buy Albums and listen to them a lot. I don’t use Spotify. I buy games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker (1283h), Slay the Spire (1011h), Stellaris (762h). I sink a lot of time into those games I actually love. I might buy games that I don’t enjoy enough, but in the end for me it still wouldn’t be worth it to buy a subscription like gamepass.
But I think there are a lot of people who want that.
What we're sold: a low monthly price to enjoy all the content we could ever want.
What we get: rapid balkanisation of service offerings.
Disney+, Netflix, Peacock, Discovery+, HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube Premium, Prime Video, Crackle.
Soon: Xbox Game Pass, PS Game Pass, Steam Game Pass, Ubisoft Game Pass, Take Two Game Pass, Activision Game Pass.
It's worse than bundles! Not to mention publishers just giving up on live service games and switching off servers. Games are art, and art should not be ephemeral.
I'll be able to fire up SimCity for DOS in 50 years. I won't be able to fire up SimCity (2013) in 5 years, let alone 50.
This industry is rapidly hollowing out. Microtransactions permeate every single AAA release, everything is "always online", paywalls for content and disastrous releases.
Counterpoint: Most people get WAY more value out of their Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max subs than they ever did paying Comcast $200 a month. And at a fraction of the cost!
Just wait until all software becomes a streamed H.265 video stream. That's certainly the future once latency allows for it. No piracy, infinite subscriptions, total control. But if you don't like it, don't buy it. That's life.
> This industry is rapidly hollowing out. Microtransactions permeate every single AAA release, everything is "always online", paywalls for content and disastrous releases.
That's not true. there are good games that dont come with BS exploit gamers for every cent.
Hades, Disco Elysium, Valheim are my most recent games i played last year that are without microtransactions.
i think subscription is here to stay and solves the “new game are expensive but i want to play them” problem. on the other end of the spectrum you have all these game stores selling old games on heavy discount sales or epic store giving away a free game each week and this solves the i want to own, even if i’m years later, cheaply solution. i think there’s room for both
Remember the VR hype? It's most certainly the same marketing experts saying game subscription services are going to be a big thing one day.
I see it this way. PlayStation to XBox, is like Apple to Android. On one side you pay for a product, on the other side you are the product. Sony runs the infrastructure, and provides bandwidth. You get two games for free every month (if you haven't bought them already) and you won't get into a Netflix situation where, when you have time to pick up a game it suddenly isn't available any more as part of the subscription.
This all might take a generation of kids who grow up with subscription services to ve successful, until they eventually find out it hasn't always veen this eay and then post on HN hoe grrat it would be to own your stuff again.
Have a look at https://www.gog.com/. I only buy new games from them. You can download the whole package to store offline and play in a few years without needing to "login" or being online
[+] [-] mrpotato|5 years ago|reply
If the future of gaming is a subscription model, I'd rather just stop gaming.
[+] [-] alexgmcm|5 years ago|reply
Just the GPU would cost me as much as the whole console and as my desktop PC has an ancient motherboard, RAM, CPU etc. I'd have to replace everything.
The Game Pass has been a pretty good deal so far, but I agree that having to pay just for online multiplayer is ridiculous and of course they could jack up the Game Pass price tomorrow and I'd have little recourse.
Quick Resume and being able to play on the sofa is decent as well when I don't have much time.
The main thing I miss is all the smaller games like Valheim etc. especially since AAA games have become less appealing as they just seem like time-sinks aimed to optimise "engagement".
[+] [-] Aardwolf|5 years ago|reply
After enjoying a SNES mini for a while, I considered maybe it could simplify life by getting a dedicated modern console rather than use PC, for playing the latest games.
However, then reading about how modern consoles are online connected and let you wait while they auto-download updates, makes it look exactly like PC, so not adding any value. So PC gamer I stay :)
[+] [-] eafkuor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
> For Xbox this coming generation is about "going beyond the console," as Ahmad says, "and really trying to reach as many people on mobile and PC" as possible.
ugh
[+] [-] Noos|5 years ago|reply
I mean literally, you will get more games (and AAA ones too) for pennies. I have PS plus, and they throw games at you. It's a problem because it probably suppresses people's desire to buy new games; like why buy control at launch when chances are it hits plus later?
[+] [-] 0-_-0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simlevesque|5 years ago|reply
I could have paid 400$ for a Switch and then buy 3 games at 80$ and play the same games all the time and I'd be bored in less than a year.
I used to love renting games as a child. My family wasn't well off and if it wasn't for renting games I would have missed many gems.
Now with Gamepass I have almost 300 great games to play, I finished 3 games already and I'm currently playing Hollow Knight. After that, I'll play FF7 original and then all the Kingdom Hearts.
I won't have to spend a penny on games for the next 34 months, legally.
[+] [-] jdgoesmarching|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bancakes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grimm1|5 years ago|reply
A little over a month ago I had thought about doing p2p resource sharing to reduce the amount travel time and latency and make game streaming an edge computing problem and I still think that might be the way to go.
P2P resource sharing in a local area. Start with PC gaming friends with the assumption that a lot of people have local friends when you want to game but not own a PC you boot up the system and it uses your friends GPU, when they play it'll bump you to another friend or in the case you don't have another friend that's where you fall back to a reduced server farm in a datacenter some where to handle that.
As people use the service you gradually expand who can resource share from friends to a general Geolocation based pool. Now you very rarely fall back to the datacenter. Problems like spot instance turnover in the cloud have forced people to solve the problem of gracefully transferring resources before spur of the moment shutdown and worst case I think you can run multiple copies that you could hard cut over to.
You'll need a pretty tight lower bound for the types of hardware that can join that network and be used as resources among other things.
Anyway I'm 100% certain I'm missing a bunch of problems and technicalities here but it seemed like a good enough idea where I still want to set this up in a small example using kube and a few friends' computers.
[+] [-] pityJuke|5 years ago|reply
I can't think of an analogous comparison for this in other media, to try and make a comparison to. Either something groundbreaking needs to happen (and doesn't physics prevent this?) or if the transition truly happens, these types of games will require a fundamental change in how they work.
Another thing - if VR ever actually gets any traction, I can't imagine cloud streaming working here.
[+] [-] Noos|5 years ago|reply
The subscription services exist because people didn't want to pay for games. The games as service model exists because trying to make what you want just leads to piracy and enough lost sales to make it not worth releasing the content. GTA V for example probably learned its lesson from the piracy of chinatown wars on portables; its GAAS forever.
This is the world you made, I guess.
I mean, even with advertising on the net; no one wanted to pay subscriptions, and people here wanted content to be free. So the people moved to a model that would get them paid, and it was much worse than if we all just subscribed to physical magazines. Monetization models are often in reaction to the audience's willingness to pay; what we are finding out is that the old model of "buying physical product and not pirating it" actually was the best way to balance value and demands from the customer.
[+] [-] cloogshicer|5 years ago|reply
The only question is if the tech, and especially people's internet connections will get there. Personally, I much prefer being able to 'own' games and run them on my local hardware. But I think the convenience of not having to download/install/update anything, just hitting "Play" and go will outweigh the disadvantages for most people.
Which is sad, because I think this will make the overall experience worse for everyone, for the sake of just convenience. Everything will be stuck again in walled gardens like Netflix, Spotify & Co are now.
[+] [-] npteljes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antihero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xwdv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donaldo|5 years ago|reply
So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.
[+] [-] npteljes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|5 years ago|reply
Me? I buy Albums and listen to them a lot. I don’t use Spotify. I buy games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker (1283h), Slay the Spire (1011h), Stellaris (762h). I sink a lot of time into those games I actually love. I might buy games that I don’t enjoy enough, but in the end for me it still wouldn’t be worth it to buy a subscription like gamepass.
But I think there are a lot of people who want that.
[+] [-] 0xy|5 years ago|reply
What we're sold: a low monthly price to enjoy all the content we could ever want.
What we get: rapid balkanisation of service offerings.
Disney+, Netflix, Peacock, Discovery+, HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube Premium, Prime Video, Crackle.
Soon: Xbox Game Pass, PS Game Pass, Steam Game Pass, Ubisoft Game Pass, Take Two Game Pass, Activision Game Pass.
It's worse than bundles! Not to mention publishers just giving up on live service games and switching off servers. Games are art, and art should not be ephemeral.
I'll be able to fire up SimCity for DOS in 50 years. I won't be able to fire up SimCity (2013) in 5 years, let alone 50.
This industry is rapidly hollowing out. Microtransactions permeate every single AAA release, everything is "always online", paywalls for content and disastrous releases.
[+] [-] krageon|5 years ago|reply
I think this is a little too unilateral for my tastes, but I do agree that it shouldn't be almost exclusively ephemeral. Culture is worth preserving.
[+] [-] jboog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawg-|5 years ago|reply
Why not?
[+] [-] smattiso|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me_me_me|5 years ago|reply
That's not true. there are good games that dont come with BS exploit gamers for every cent.
Hades, Disco Elysium, Valheim are my most recent games i played last year that are without microtransactions.
Also FUCK EA for destroying SimCity
[+] [-] foolfoolz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] de6u99er|5 years ago|reply
I see it this way. PlayStation to XBox, is like Apple to Android. On one side you pay for a product, on the other side you are the product. Sony runs the infrastructure, and provides bandwidth. You get two games for free every month (if you haven't bought them already) and you won't get into a Netflix situation where, when you have time to pick up a game it suddenly isn't available any more as part of the subscription.
This all might take a generation of kids who grow up with subscription services to ve successful, until they eventually find out it hasn't always veen this eay and then post on HN hoe grrat it would be to own your stuff again.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] trixrabbit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ioulian|5 years ago|reply