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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

The Game Pass model really worries me. It's a definite chilling effect to game studios and traditional publishing, not to mention indies.

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Why do you say that? I am a Game Pass subscriber and find myself playing _many_ more indie games with it than before. It's easier for me to pay for the service and effectively amortize the cost of paying for indie games which is, at least how I would put it, inherently risky.

Before I would pay $5, $10, or $20 for games with a chance I'll like them - some are worth way more, some worth way less. With Game Pass I have a 'sunk cost' so I download and try out games much more eagerly and find myself enjoying many more indie games than before.

I have seen an interview where an indie dev said that Microsoft covered their entire development cost for a game to get it on Game Pass, leaving their sales on other platforms to be 'pure profit' in a sense.

I am not having a great time with the 'traditional publishing' model of the industry right now. If it gets shaken up, that seems like a benefit to me, not a drawback.

Before, the indie dev got that entire $5, $10, $20 (minus the stores percentage), while now they get whatever percentage you played out of whatever percentage of the game pass fees are paid to the gAsk me what working on Manhunt 2 was like some time.ame developers. Maybe that ends up more than before, especially if you play a game a lot and more than just during one month, but its not clear to me that this is the case, especially if you split your time between many games.

It seems like this model is better for the consumer (pay one fee, play whatever and however much you like), but whether or not its better for the game developers, I don't know.

I think the point is the OP and people like myself wouldn’t be buying the Indy games at all.

But those same indies get more people playing their game with a subscription like game pass. This is all just speculation, though. We need an indie dev to tell us how game pass has affected their company—positively or negatively.

Indeed. I’d love to see some real statistics from a variety of indie devs.

Bah too late to edit the accidentally pasted text in my message :(

how is this better than the steam model? pay for games you want, get a refund if you don't like them.

Feels like the subscription model is an answer for popular games being free, which itself make a bank on the 1% who spend an enormous amount of money on in-game items. Seems like everyone wants to be Valve in a way or another, owning a platform while making a bank on transaction cuts rather than the content itself. I wonder how much of a conscious decision this was on Valve's part when they made DotA 2 free. At the time it seemed more like a user-grab from LoL and Garena private-servers, and the in-game items were more like an afterthought that came from modding tools.

I'm not so sure it's chilling. Many indie folks actually feel like they get more reliable income from gamepass or epic exclusivity than they do on steam for example.

Game pass is like Netflix for games. Netflix doesn't just steam their own productions.

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