Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry. One aspect of this was that if you stopped paying you lost access to the game.
The industry has been looking for the next way to level up this subscription model on gaming. Battle Passes, Xbox Live, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, Stadia, Game Fly, and a ton of other ideas. Sony is now using the stick to directly attack ownership instead of the carrot to entice subscriptions. We'll see how this plays in the PS6, but I think they are overplaying their position, especially with how underwhelming the PS5 has been received by gamers.
I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles. It's becoming a larger and larger player in the non-mobile gaming market, and it's too big to be treated like a second class citizen anymore. The open platform prevents anyone from acting as a gatekeeper between game developers and players.
For me personally, I began losing interest in consoles the first time I had to install a console game to a hard drive. The plug and play magic just fell apart.
People still don't own their games with Steam, the main PC platform. I don't think its going under anytime soon and currently its reasonably customer friendly but as we have seen these big tech companies can turn on their customer base at any moment. GOG is about the only way to actually own the games since no DRM is applied and you can download the entire package and keep it and don't require their launcher.
PC already went digital no ownership for most people unfortunately.
I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.
We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.
Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?
I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.
Thats easy to do (on paper). Dont let copyright owners revoke/expire their licenses (or if its revokable mark and price it clearly). Once a product containing it is purchased, its owned till product ceases to exist (or similar).
All these music behemoths are way too powerful and they twist entire society globally to dance as they want. Not a fraction of a worry for pirates of course, just for decent paying fools.
If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.
But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.
This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.
the resale market for disk has been on a downtrend for years, you can sign into someone's else psn account too and share games, you are a washed up gamer, its okay I am washed up too.
Yep, agreed. Recurring, consistent revenue is the ultimately a common-sense business best interest. It can be extremely unfortunate for consumers as there's an unaligned incentive here.
This can still be acceptable if they give HW for free. but paying up to 1k for console and then full price for games which often have their own paid loot boxes/whatever... yeah good luck no thank you,
I can afford it trivially, but its like paying say 20 bucks for a standard bread or bottle of milk. Insulting
Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing. They've been chasing that high ever since.
The key to owning modern multiplayer online games is to have private servers run by human persons on their own owned computers. But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions. This is what is killing ownership.
> Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing.
I know Sega and Namco operated some arcades, but mostly companies sold arcade machines and operators ran them. Coin boxes didn't connect to the developer except that games with good earnings sold well.
It's not just the arcade machine implementation. The owners of these companies want to go all the way and move everything to data centers so they can rent compute time, similar to the idea of the time-sharing days of the 60s.
Absolutely this.
Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry. One aspect of this was that if you stopped paying you lost access to the game.
The industry has been looking for the next way to level up this subscription model on gaming. Battle Passes, Xbox Live, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, Stadia, Game Fly, and a ton of other ideas. Sony is now using the stick to directly attack ownership instead of the carrot to entice subscriptions. We'll see how this plays in the PS6, but I think they are overplaying their position, especially with how underwhelming the PS5 has been received by gamers.
I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles. It's becoming a larger and larger player in the non-mobile gaming market, and it's too big to be treated like a second class citizen anymore. The open platform prevents anyone from acting as a gatekeeper between game developers and players.
For me personally, I began losing interest in consoles the first time I had to install a console game to a hard drive. The plug and play magic just fell apart.
People still don't own their games with Steam, the main PC platform. I don't think its going under anytime soon and currently its reasonably customer friendly but as we have seen these big tech companies can turn on their customer base at any moment. GOG is about the only way to actually own the games since no DRM is applied and you can download the entire package and keep it and don't require their launcher.
PC already went digital no ownership for most people unfortunately.
I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.
Is there really a rise in PC gaming going on? Isn't that dependent on people having PCs and hardware?
We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.
Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?
I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.
Ownership as in resale-able.
Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.
Resale-able maybe, unable to be revoked I think is more important.
As in you can't wake up one morning and your game is gone overnight because copyright around in-game music changed.
Thats easy to do (on paper). Dont let copyright owners revoke/expire their licenses (or if its revokable mark and price it clearly). Once a product containing it is purchased, its owned till product ceases to exist (or similar).
All these music behemoths are way too powerful and they twist entire society globally to dance as they want. Not a fraction of a worry for pirates of course, just for decent paying fools.
Abhorable business.
If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.
But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.
This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.
the resale market for disk has been on a downtrend for years, you can sign into someone's else psn account too and share games, you are a washed up gamer, its okay I am washed up too.
>Everyone wants to be Netflix
This is the most perfect sentence about this situation
Yep, agreed. Recurring, consistent revenue is the ultimately a common-sense business best interest. It can be extremely unfortunate for consumers as there's an unaligned incentive here.
This can still be acceptable if they give HW for free. but paying up to 1k for console and then full price for games which often have their own paid loot boxes/whatever... yeah good luck no thank you,
I can afford it trivially, but its like paying say 20 bucks for a standard bread or bottle of milk. Insulting
Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing. They've been chasing that high ever since.
The key to owning modern multiplayer online games is to have private servers run by human persons on their own owned computers. But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions. This is what is killing ownership.
> Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing.
I know Sega and Namco operated some arcades, but mostly companies sold arcade machines and operators ran them. Coin boxes didn't connect to the developer except that games with good earnings sold well.
A per-play revenue share is not uncommon in some markets, especially for games with frequent updates or more complicated network features.
This is why so many machines now have accounts and global high scores.
It's not just the arcade machine implementation. The owners of these companies want to go all the way and move everything to data centers so they can rent compute time, similar to the idea of the time-sharing days of the 60s.