I think this is a good place to link Stop Killing Games. Thereâs currently an EU initiative under way to mandate that developers have to plan for the retirement of games with online services in a way that customers can still enjoy the game after the online services are shut down.
If you are a citizen of any EU country, please take your time to read through the initiative and sign it.
Thatâs not true. There was no way to own a television show until DVDs, and now thatâs disappearing. Yes, there were compilation VHS âbest ofâ tapes and whatnot, but youâd never have the entire season. Hollywood was so threatened by the mere existence of home video that they charged an arm and a leg for a copy and set up profit sharing deals for rentals, because they thought this threatened their stranglehold on charging for the theater viewing. Now weâre at a spot where you can buy a âdigital copyâ of movies and TV shows, which is the same thing as not owning anything at all, because once their store goes down, so does your âcopyâ of the movie you bought.
Across the entire landscape of consumer media, there is only one industry in which this business model of non-ownership and dependence on subscription services is not rapidly becoming the norm: video games.
Think of how many songs, movies, or TV episodes you can get through in a month for one cheap subscription fee. Now think about, on average, how many video games youâll get through in a month. Thatâs just simple economics. Itâs usually more worth it to buy the games outright.
Games will likely never be free from aggressive and unnecessary DRM software. AAA titles in particular are falling victim to faux-live service systems where games cannot be played without a good internet connection, even if they are singleplayer experiences. I am not saying that buying the newest release from EA for $80 will guarantee your long-term access to it. It wonât.
Games will only never be free from this stuff if you keep accepting it as an inevitability and pay for them. In the meantime, do what you can to support the Stop Killing Games initiative. I wrote my representative asking for consumer protections for this stuff, knowing that sheâs a member of the other party and likely doesnât care, her e-mail response indicating as much too, but itâs better than doing literally nothing.
Think about the titanic power of the music industry in the 20th century. Back when people paid to own music, music idols were at the center of pop culture.
Itâs funny, because all I heard back then was that the artists made hardly any money off of record sales and made all of their money touring. Now I rarely go to concerts because Live Nation is going to tear my eyes out with ticket prices, and thereâs no competition I can go to instead.
I donât see Game Pass as a threat to gaming. Their subscription numbers have stalled out, and theyâre not doing the lousy things with it that Nintendo does, at least for now. Once again, just simple economics. Even Nintendoâs online subscription will eventually fade, perhaps over the course of a decade or more, as PC becomes more and more the de facto way to play games.
Game pass numbers stalled out because Microsoft stalled out on adding blockbuster games since Starfield, which was poorly received. Check the numbers once the new CoD, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., ARK, Indiana Jones all get added towards the end of the year. CoD in particular will likely show the reports about them reaching full saturation to be false
They increased the price for the tier that gives you access to the likes of CoD, so I donât think this is going to grow that offering by much, if at all. I think the numbers stalled out because this (admittedly substantial) number of customers is what the market is for people who would get more value out of a subscription than buying the games outright. And besides that, I think the numbers are pointing toward the very real possibility that theyâd have been better off without Game Pass.
OK, but how much did actual game sales make? Iâm willing to bet the proportion of that money this is citing thatâs hyper-exploitive microtransactions is pretty damn high.
I have no real interest in a library over owning games (I did pay the ~$30 difference in Black Friday sales to add the library for a year on PS5, but I own my games for the most part), and I think everything being day one gamepass on Xbox weakened their already not great first party ecosystem and encourages microtransactions to an extent.
But the biggest existential threat isnât âpay $x a year to rent a libraryâ. Itâs lootboxes and other microtransactions built to milk everyone they can for every penny they can. It fundamentally alters the design of games when âhow can we extract more cashâ is part of the process, and itâs not something that just happens after the fact. It also, unlike renting games, actually pushes invasive anticheat, always online requirements, and onerous mod restrictions on games that should be single player, because they canât milk you for cosmetics if fans can make their own for free.
I never understood the appeal with Xbox Game Pass.
Like youâll have the game available for you while you pay for it, ok, but what happens when some license disagreement occurs and the game is removed or is removed because of censorship? Why not just pirating that game if buying is less interesting than paying for a subscription.
Not only that what happens when eventually a game is released only via subscription model? How people gonna pirate it? We need to hope that someone will upload the installer on the web? What happens when the game is not install on your machine but instead is the stupid idea of streaming? How pirating works for that type of shit? If people canât pirate it, how the game is preserved when they are removed from the library like I said before? Thatâs for me the biggest concern.
While I agree thatâs itâs nice to have the option of a physical copy, I own too many games to want a physical copy of all of them. And if they are ever âtaken awayâ I will not hesitate to get them back. I donât want to own physical copies of my games, but I do feel entitled to continue owning them even after the store I bought them from no longer exists. I will just download any game I have owned that I want to play again but no longer have access to the paid version. Kind of like how emulation works. I only use it to play games I own that I donât want to play the physical copy of.