Subscriptions - Have they made the industry better?

[Luseth 2,160]

Just thinking about the slight uproar about changes to game pass over the past few weeks and the potential issues with subscriptions down the road.

 

Does anyone pay for anything other than the basic to get online gaming? If so do you think you get your money's worth?

 

I pay for the extra tier of PS plus and most months I do play something from there, when I am having a skint month it gives me something new to play at a time I can't afford it which is nice. However I can see pitfalls with these services, I mean why do we pay for an online service in the first place? We don't for pc gaming.

 

 

[J4MES OX4D 10,412]

Subscriptions are only good for short term value on consumable games but they are terrible in terms of ownership, plus the prices and tiers are so expensive and convoluted now, it's actually better to buy a game out right down the line in the sale. I get a headache just looking at the PS+/Now entitlement spreadsheet and the Microsoft Pass is becoming more unattractive by the month as they push people towards higher and more expensive tiers. You can spend £200 a year on a pass and ultimately not play £200's worth of games and come out of it at the end with nothing to show for it. I'd only say it's worth it if you wanted to jump into the likes of COD, play the campaign and hammer the MP for a month. 

 

Personally, I feel these passes are terrible for the industry anyway and shouldn't be encouraged. It's not even a successful model right now for mainline developers let alone third party ones and revenue cuts are only going to reduce further once Microsoft puts AAA games on their Game Pass. The average cut per install is about a dollar but if you have a pass with BO6 on it and 90% of people are playing that, then other games may be lucky to see 50 cents an install and that even goes for Microsoft's in-house developers who they've been throwing under the bus for years now. MS, Ubisoft and some others I think are trying to turn heads to ultimately revoke ownership and make things all digital, all streaming and all subscription. Fuck that. 

[cyberninja2601 1,116]

On 7/23/2024 at 4:32 AM, J4MES OX4D said:

Subscriptions are only good for short term value on consumable games but they are terrible in terms of ownership, plus the prices and tiers are so expensive and convoluted now, it's actually better to buy a game out right down the line in the sale. I get a headache just looking at the PS+/Now entitlement spreadsheet and the Microsoft Pass is becoming more unattractive by the month as they push people towards higher and more expensive tiers. You can spend £200 a year on a pass and ultimately not play £200's worth of games and come out of it at the end with nothing to show for it. I'd only say it's worth it if you wanted to jump into the likes of COD, play the campaign and hammer the MP for a month. 

 

Personally, I feel these passes are terrible for the industry anyway and shouldn't be encouraged. It's not even a successful model right now for mainline developers let alone third party ones and revenue cuts are only going to reduce further once Microsoft puts AAA games on their Game Pass. The average cut per install is about a dollar but if you have a pass with BO6 on it and 90% of people are playing that, then other games may be lucky to see 50 cents an install and that even goes for Microsoft's in-house developers who they've been throwing under the bus for years now. MS, Ubisoft and some others I think are trying to turn heads to ultimately revoke ownership and make things all digital, all streaming and all subscription. Fuck that. 

 

 

Your math is wrong. In order to play online you need to by a pass. The most basic PSN pass is $95/year (in Canada). The Extra is $154/year. So it's costing $60 more for the pass and not $200. You have to look at the incremental cost

 

I just have the very basic as I find that most of the games are old games that if I had wanted to play I would have probably bought when they were new. But value is pretty good if you just want to sample games and don't care about playing the latest

 

 

[Diddums 4,356]

My problem with subscriptions is that game devs can now get lazy as there's no competition. In ye olde' days you'd have to spend you had limited cash to spend on games so you had to choose, which made game devs fight for your money with all manner of fluff and extra features. 

Nowadays there's no incentive for them as it all goes in to the subscription service anyway. If they don't like your game they simply delete it and download another one, and they know this.

[J4MES OX4D 10,412]

23 hours ago, cyberninja2601 said:

Your math is wrong. In order to play online you need to by a pass. The most basic PSN pass is $95/year (in Canada). The Extra is $154/year. So it's costing $60 more for the pass and not $200. You have to look at the incremental cost

 

I just have the very basic as I find that most of the games are old games that if I had wanted to play I would have probably bought when they were new. But value is pretty good if you just want to sample games and don't care about playing the latest

 

I am giving that as an example - where users can pay up to $200 on the likes of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and not get a good return in titles for that value. The Pass has also been stale for about 8 months now and its growth has stalled once again. After a strong summer line up of games, they then put the price up with no real justification.  Users are also being pushed into higher tier passes on all platforms as the likes of Microsoft deliberately make the the lower-end is so unattractive, it's hardly worth considering these days. Any fringe titles I am remotely interested in, I'd rather buy in the sale - at least the developers will get paid a proper cut rather than an install fee. 

 

Also having to pay to play online using external content services is absolutely insane in itself. £60 for a basic PSN is ridiculous. All platforms on PC are free to play online and that's how it should be for console. 

 

23 hours ago, Diddums said:

My problem with subscriptions is that game devs can now get lazy as there's no competition. In ye olde' days you'd have to spend you had limited cash to spend on games so you had to choose, which made game devs fight for your money with all manner of fluff and extra features. 

Nowadays there's no incentive for them as it all goes in to the subscription service anyway. If they don't like your game they simply delete it and download another one, and they know this.

I actually think it's the other way around. If I were a developer who worked on a game for 3 years and found out that the publisher wanted it on a pass dwarfed by AAA games and a diminished install cut of the revenue, I'd feel really demoralised especially as the games 'success' could not be measured. The game could sell 1m copies at £10 a pop but instead the publisher accepted 75p an install rate and only 100,000 people played the game. 

 

Old established games don't really matter as it's just a tiny extra bit of revenue but when new in-house games go on and they bomb, then it's fatal and Microsoft already butchered 4 studios last year who's games were successful enough. Ones that don't perform in the future will just get culled especially if they are turning the Pass more premium with AAA games and slashing revenue potential for fringe titles. 

 

Developers who's games go onto such passes certainly aren't sitting comfortably and many wont have a chance to make another game after that if their already income-squeezed product doesn't get monumental traction. 

[Luseth 2,160]

So I am giving this thread a nudge because spotify are increasing their price again, this is happening a lot with a lot of the streaming services at the moment, regular price increases and I don't think it will be long before we are being asked to pay £20 a month for music streaming.

 

At what point does it begin to become unviable for the average person? I could afford a number of subscriptions however I am at the point now where I am regining them back in because if I enjoy and rely on them too much now then in 10 years time it may be a whole lot more difficult to draw myself back when prices are higher.

 

So how many subscriptions do people have? Do you limit them to games or do you have games, music, multiple tv subscriptions too?

[phil bottle 10,194]

I don't watch enough TV to justify a subscription, so I don't subscribe any more, I used to do Netflix, Amazon, Disney and NowTV.

I may do Disney Plus just for a month at some point over the winter just to binge watch the Alien series and possibly Andor. Plus Amazon for the next instalment of Fallout.

BBC iPlayer stays as i do pay the licence fee lol.

Anyway, I've a mate who pirates everything and he'll download stuff for me if I ask him to, i'm too lazy 🫠

 

Music-wise I'm probably going to drop Spotify, I get most music from YouTube lately, plus i found out recently the Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests heavily in military AI and don't really want to support that kind of shit behaviour.

 

Game-wise I'll stick with GamePass until the fee goes up, as I do use it but won't really miss it if I stop. 

 

[J4MES OX4D 10,412]

3 hours ago, Luseth said:

At what point does it begin to become unviable for the average person? I could afford a number of subscriptions however I am at the point now where I am regining them back in because if I enjoy and rely on them too much now then in 10 years time it may be a whole lot more difficult to draw myself back when prices are higher.

 

So how many subscriptions do people have? Do you limit them to games or do you have games, music, multiple tv subscriptions too?

Subscriptions are unviable for both the consumer and the content publisher in most cases. I have zero and if I see something I want to watch, play or listen to, I will buy it outright if it's worth the money and that way everyone gets paid a fair price. The likes of Spotify have bloated in the music industry so much so, talent is becoming buried and some artists barely get paid £90 for 50,000 plays. Even top artists have reportedly only seen about $1500 after deductions whilst reaching 1m listens to a song. We already know what a shambles Microsoft have made of their Game Pass in killing most of their in-house developers and reducing income to laughable levels, all in the aim of trying to take a slice out of Sony. TV is probably the most attractive form of subscription but that's riddled with bloat between services and content. You can spend more time trying to find something to watch than actually watching. 

 

The Xbox subscription will cost $360 for a year next month and if people are also paying $150 for music and another $150-300 on TV and retail subscriptions then it tots up to huge levels of expenditure for consumable products you don't own and wont be able to revisit. I can't support streaming as a concept or the damage it does to the 'small people' aka developers and musicians who don't have much of a choice but to go down this route and see income potential crumbling to laughably low levels. The likes of Microsoft and Spotify will never reveal the income dividends which says it all.