Most games would be developed for Playstation + XBox + PC + Cloud service to maximise audience (unless one cloud provider gains a monopoly, something so far nobody managed to do in either game platforms or cloud computing).
Of course you can decide to develop only for the cloud platform of your choice, but that's nothing new. Microsoft and Sony already pay you good money to make your game exclusive to their platform (if you're lucky even if you're indy).
Maybe I'm super negative here but I don't see any pros to this development. Today's games are already dumbed down and steered towards profits only. The only games I play these days are indie games made by 1 person up to a handful of people.
We really don't need more but we need better. (This applies to many other areas too)
Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones.
Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.
I'm not sure about that. Currently tons of people pay monthly for grindy MMO games. Expanding that sort of revenue scheme to single player games would encourage devs to create more Skinner boxes to keep players "engaged" over the long run.
Players aren't going to spend hours grinding if they know they're paying extra money for each of those hours.
Or it ties money directly to length, so you need your game to be 60+ hours to justify it's existence. Or people won't pay that much so we don't get any new dark souls or RDR2 length games.
Pay-per-hour means developers have an incentive to build addictive games that keep you just engaged enough to keep playing for an extended time.
> Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.
Monthly subscriptions mean that the platform has to choose what games to include and promote based on what is most likely to make users find value in the platform—which means focussing on those with widest appeal, unless their recommender engine can get enough signal to reliably predict niche interest.