A deep-dive into the future of subscription gaming
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
If the future of gaming is a subscription model, I'd rather just stop gaming.
After enjoying a SNES mini for a while, I considered maybe it could simplify life by getting a dedicated modern console rather than use PC, for playing the latest games.
However, then reading about how modern consoles are online connected and let you wait while they auto-download updates, makes it look exactly like PC, so not adding any value. So PC gamer I stay :)
Never again.
Adding nothing and removing much. I have yet to see a console that can handle mods properly. There is no greater sin for a console developer than to allowing the player to edit game files. That road leads to cheating and piracy. I don't think Minecraft would have become what it did without mods, without the creativity displayed by PC gamers.
I mean literally, you will get more games (and AAA ones too) for pennies. I have PS plus, and they throw games at you. It's a problem because it probably suppresses people's desire to buy new games; like why buy control at launch when chances are it hits plus later?
If you think it's not a value, you're mistaken.
Read only 2064 memories
Amnesia Collection
Absolver
All three Bioshock games
Bloodborne
Cities: Skyline
Conan Exiles
Control
Day of the Tentacle
Dead by Daylight
Fall Guys
God of war 3
Guacamelee
Metal Gear Solid V
Nioh
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Soma
Uncharted 4
What remains of edith finch
Yakuza Kiwami
If I wasnt already conditioned to buy physical games i'd legit not need to buy one ever. It's not like they throw junk at you.
I understand the frustration of having to pay to play online, but Sony has definitely made great steps towards making PS Plus a value beyond that.
I am not mistaken. I do what I want how I want where possible and that alone is of great value to me. And they would not be squeezing me later when they think that there are enough people on the hook and the alternatives are few so lets raise the price.
Also if you are a fan of Tomb Raider , Final Fantasy or other good game you will buy it and not wait years for it to appear on Plus.
It's not my job to convince haters to like something, but at the same time, just because you don't enjoy it doesn't mean that millions can't either.
For many of us, Xbox Game Pass is a serious bargain. Going forward we don't need to buy Microsoft studio titles, which the game pass makes super affordable and as for historical games, having 100s to play on Xbox or PC is super nice.
I couldn't access my Xbox for 2 months, I got it setup over the weekend. Downloaded 5 new games thanks to Game Pass, there's a lot more there as well but I need to play them and all for basically nothing.
Netflix - everyone pays $5 per month for the pleasure of scrolling. Add in Amazon, Hulu and everything else and you have over $50 worth of scrolling to do to watch the same movies and TV shows that was watched many times over.
Therefore any decision made by game developers are awful, they are all idiots, people who spend time on niche tech/gaming forums are all geniuses who understand their market better etc. etc.
No, it's $60 value. That's what you paid for it, that's what it's worth. You cannot compare it to a different ownership model, because that is not a fair comparison.
Just the GPU would cost me as much as the whole console and as my desktop PC has an ancient motherboard, RAM, CPU etc. I'd have to replace everything.
The Game Pass has been a pretty good deal so far, but I agree that having to pay just for online multiplayer is ridiculous and of course they could jack up the Game Pass price tomorrow and I'd have little recourse.
Quick Resume and being able to play on the sofa is decent as well when I don't have much time.
The main thing I miss is all the smaller games like Valheim etc. especially since AAA games have become less appealing as they just seem like time-sinks aimed to optimise "engagement".
Can't beat the ergonomics of chilling on your couch with a controller, but you could set that up with a PC if you really wanted to.
What's your point exactly? The recently released PS5 and Xbox Series X had launch prices of $400-$500 in the U.S.
So, even without the chip shortage, GP's point about the GPU alone costing more than a console still stands.
Hardware creep inevitabily leads to optimisation decisions about how much effort to spend getting things to run well.
I do agree that PC hardware tends to last around 5 years now though unless you run the latest AAA games, and there is a wealth of older games. Just the stuff I missed since 2000 would be enough to keep me busy for at least a decade.
YMMV but be sure to put the window in fullscreen, that helps with the frame drops.
This is the way they've been doing it for several console generations now.
Edit: looked for proof but for the life of me I can't find evidence amongst all the results for articles and blog posts reminiscing about old games and consoles!
See https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nint...
If a console is $500 and lasts 3 years your $600 gpu, and overall build (mine is about $1200 new but has features that I splurged on for work and could be 300 cheaper for just gaming) will last at least double if not a little more than double that time. At least that's been my experience.
I would say looking at lifetime value building your own rig is much more cost effective and has a much higher lifetime on graphical features that are added.
As an example my 1070 that I only replaced this year and only because I felt like it was easily still getting me 80+ fps in modern games and supporting new features like DLSS.
I could have easily kept using it and been fine for a few more years with new features and updates all the time.
Whatever tricks your NVidia card can pull, aren't reflected on someone's else GPU card, let alone everything else on the computer.
Additionally, game development culture is definitely not in line with the FOSS culture that is usually discussed in sites like HN.
The Xbox Series X and PS5 are phenomenal pieces of hardware that are pushing the limits of consumer goods. Both support 4k 120hz and HDMI 2.1, free sync and much more.
Instant on, fast resume, keyboard/mouse, controllers, they're a hell of a bargain.
The Xbox One is older than the 1070 and cost much less and still is supported to this day.
I have the Xbox Series X and just got a LG OLED 55" tv and it's all running at 120hz with freesync, HDR and looks beautiful.
I have a regular 3060 i scored from newegg and it can't keep up with with the XSX does... my 3060 cost 499 and my XSX cost 499...
PS5/XSX is extreme value right now... and to be honest, the 0% pay 31/month deal is stupid easy and affordable to jump in - much easier than paying scalping rates or hoping for lotto slots from vendors just to buy a video card.
I got a PS5 through playstation direct as well when they do their lottos, but i'm a fan of gamepass so i sold the ps5 to a friend at retail cost.
I don't know, I have a GTX 980ti and an overclocked Sandybridge Core i7 2600k in my gaming computer, both bought many years ago, and I haven't had any problem playing new games. I'm sure there may be some stuff it would struggle with but Doom Eternal, the latest Deus Ex, Far Cry 5, etc. play perfectly well as far as I can tell.
If you're chasing top performance and regular upgrade cycles I agree, it can be a pit of (up to) infinity monies.
The current situation with GPU prices and coin mining etc does make things especially tricky right now if you're not already set up with a gaming rig from the past ~5 years.
Also I have an Ultrawide monitor which perhaps isn't the best for gaming, but is far superior for work.
> For Xbox this coming generation is about "going beyond the console," as Ahmad says, "and really trying to reach as many people on mobile and PC" as possible.
ugh
I could have paid 400$ for a Switch and then buy 3 games at 80$ and play the same games all the time and I'd be bored in less than a year.
I used to love renting games as a child. My family wasn't well off and if it wasn't for renting games I would have missed many gems.
Now with Gamepass I have almost 300 great games to play, I finished 3 games already and I'm currently playing Hollow Knight. After that, I'll play FF7 original and then all the Kingdom Hearts.
I won't have to spend a penny on games for the next 34 months, legally.
So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.
Compare this to generations old server farms that require maintenance, extreme cooling solutions, run virtualisation layers on top of virtualisation layers, necessitate 5G equipment and increasingly high internet costs and middlemen, on top of a user device in the first place.
My computer can also be used as charity for Folding At Home, run my homeservers, and train my AI models. All this instead of purchasing different subscriptions for different servers. In effect, I can optimise the hardware exactly to my needs and use it efficiently to its full extent, reducing waste completely.
Not to mention game streaming will never look as good as native rendering, and "negative latency" is physically impossible. I also don't lease cars.
>According to research, anywhere between 30 and 55 percent of a data center’s energy consumption goes into powering its cooling and ventilation systems
Meanwhile the cooling cost for a computer in a home is probably zero.
The latency part is true though.
Leasing is common because people don't quite understand they're always worse off with it (though you could make the argument that it saves hassle and could therefore be worth it).
Renting is as common as it is because for a large amount of people it's literally impossible to buy a house where they'd need it (or even at all, without significant moving distance). Renting is always a terrible idea and most people understand this, they just don't have a choice.
The only question is if the tech, and especially people's internet connections will get there. Personally, I much prefer being able to 'own' games and run them on my local hardware. But I think the convenience of not having to download/install/update anything, just hitting "Play" and go will outweigh the disadvantages for most people.
Which is sad, because I think this will make the overall experience worse for everyone, for the sake of just convenience. Everything will be stuck again in walled gardens like Netflix, Spotify & Co are now.
> Which is sad, because I think this will make the overall experience worse for everyone, for the sake of just convenience.
I miss the convenience of pushing a physical thing that I own into a slot on a device that I own and hitting a physical button labelled 'play'. Especially when the cheap app running on an expensive tablet that connects my expensive physical speakers to the library of all the music I could possibly want to rent for some reason can't see the speakers, even though I have rebooted my wifi, logged off and back into my streaming service account, re-installed the app, updated the speaker's firmware, etc etc.
The local collection that I stopped expanding three years ago because I was now paying for a streaming service.
Clearly, it's a trade-off. I don't miss paying vast amounts for a CD that might at best have one or two tracks that I really like plus a load of fillers. I've discovered a lot of music that I wouldn't have found otherwise thanks to streaming. But I worry for some of my older relatives who can barely navigate a smartphone interface, and for whom setting up the streaming on a modern device is a hit and miss affair.
I know that feeling. When what.cd went down it was a tragedy but I was able to continue mostly as normal. I even "slimmed down" my collection to make it more portable, which was a mistake because all of the classics on streaming services are fucking remasters. God, I miss those days of music forums.
My music discovery hasn't had half the same intensity or wonder since those years. Now what, Spotify playlists? Their shitty nerfed "radio" playlists?
I miss music forums and trackers dearly. There's reddit but it's not quite the same.
And let's not even talk about selecting hardware for a pre-built PC or building a gaming PC from scratch. That's just too much to ask for, for most people.
Don't get me wrong, I love all that stuff. But I think most people don't. That's the only way I can explain why anyone would pay the premium for the awful and expensive experience that are modern game consoles.
It's a lot more common for me to have a handful of games I am interested in installed and ready to go whenever I have the urge to play.
Can't talk about all consumers but in my case I got rid of all TV services some 15 years ago because I felt bein had. Maybe longer, just do not remember exactly. So no they will not be squeezing me hard. I'll just find something else to do with my money.
If subscription gaming gets this bad, it'll go the same way. In thirty years it'll be dying a slow death because fewer and fewer people use it and most people will have moved on to whatever replaces it. After they've spent another ten years dying there'll be the inevitable Netflix (i.e. streaming TV) moment, but for streaming games. Wonderful, but ultimately just the same thing but with time rolled back fifty years.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it might (probably will) go wrong, but nobody will really suffer for it and it'll fix itself given a little patience.
Thought police. Myself I never downvote and do not give a flying fuck if I get downvoted.
As for the rest of your I totally agree.
I can't think of an analogous comparison for this in other media, to try and make a comparison to. Either something groundbreaking needs to happen (and doesn't physics prevent this?) or if the transition truly happens, these types of games will require a fundamental change in how they work.
Another thing - if VR ever actually gets any traction, I can't imagine cloud streaming working here.
And eventually you would finish the backlog, and then you can buy more to fill it again! With subscription, you are paying even if you don't got time to play!
It's definitely great to be able to get games on sale on various platforms and then rent hardware to play it on my laptop. Even with pretty heavy costs on AWS I'm still very satisfied (spot instances + one ebs-backed snapshot for the AMI + bandwidth out costs = about 1 CAD/hr played with about $10 of fixed costs). Even if I played a hundred hours per month on AWS, it would barely reach the cost of a basic desktop by the end of a year, let alone anything that has RTX cards. And I'd have to do it all over again soon as specs requirements increase.
I appreciate the ease of use of Stadia but I definitely hope that in this fight it's the generic cloud-computing crowd that wins.
The subscription services exist because people didn't want to pay for games. The games as service model exists because trying to make what you want just leads to piracy and enough lost sales to make it not worth releasing the content. GTA V for example probably learned its lesson from the piracy of chinatown wars on portables; its GAAS forever.
This is the world you made, I guess.
I mean, even with advertising on the net; no one wanted to pay subscriptions, and people here wanted content to be free. So the people moved to a model that would get them paid, and it was much worse than if we all just subscribed to physical magazines. Monetization models are often in reaction to the audience's willingness to pay; what we are finding out is that the old model of "buying physical product and not pirating it" actually was the best way to balance value and demands from the customer.
Consequently there's a lot less sympathy for "We're not making enough money" verus "We're losing money".
Something like Genshin Impact prints money hand over fist compared to other games. If anything, the worry is that it works too well and drives out less aggressive games.
My response is, well, how much money do game devs expect to make in non-original games anyway? Perhaps they should lower their revenue expectancies.
A little over a month ago I had thought about doing p2p resource sharing to reduce the amount travel time and latency and make game streaming an edge computing problem and I still think that might be the way to go.
P2P resource sharing in a local area. Start with PC gaming friends with the assumption that a lot of people have local friends when you want to game but not own a PC you boot up the system and it uses your friends GPU, when they play it'll bump you to another friend or in the case you don't have another friend that's where you fall back to a reduced server farm in a datacenter some where to handle that.
As people use the service you gradually expand who can resource share from friends to a general Geolocation based pool. Now you very rarely fall back to the datacenter. Problems like spot instance turnover in the cloud have forced people to solve the problem of gracefully transferring resources before spur of the moment shutdown and worst case I think you can run multiple copies that you could hard cut over to.
You'll need a pretty tight lower bound for the types of hardware that can join that network and be used as resources among other things.
Anyway I'm 100% certain I'm missing a bunch of problems and technicalities here but it seemed like a good enough idea where I still want to set this up in a small example using kube and a few friends' computers.
I dunno, I've used it on connections I consider "not too great" like at my parents house and was surprised at how well it works. Like a lot of things though I'm sure it's YMMV, maybe I got lucky.
This is plain wrong. Tech wise stadia is amazing.
If anything you're wrong here. Neat tech, swing and miss product and quality wise imo.
What do you define as unplayable? Reading your comments that you have fiber meaning low latency sounds very suspicious.
Me? I buy Albums and listen to them a lot. I don’t use Spotify. I buy games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker (1283h), Slay the Spire (1011h), Stellaris (762h). I sink a lot of time into those games I actually love. I might buy games that I don’t enjoy enough, but in the end for me it still wouldn’t be worth it to buy a subscription like gamepass.
But I think there are a lot of people who want that.
What we're sold: a low monthly price to enjoy all the content we could ever want.
What we get: rapid balkanisation of service offerings.
Disney+, Netflix, Peacock, Discovery+, HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube Premium, Prime Video, Crackle.
Soon: Xbox Game Pass, PS Game Pass, Steam Game Pass, Ubisoft Game Pass, Take Two Game Pass, Activision Game Pass.
It's worse than bundles! Not to mention publishers just giving up on live service games and switching off servers. Games are art, and art should not be ephemeral.
I'll be able to fire up SimCity for DOS in 50 years. I won't be able to fire up SimCity (2013) in 5 years, let alone 50.
This industry is rapidly hollowing out. Microtransactions permeate every single AAA release, everything is "always online", paywalls for content and disastrous releases.
That's not true. there are good games that dont come with BS exploit gamers for every cent.
Hades, Disco Elysium, Valheim are my most recent games i played last year that are without microtransactions.
Also FUCK EA for destroying SimCity
Amen bro
None of those are "AAA" games. Don't get me wrong Hades and Disco Elysium where great (haven't played Valheim), but if your idea of a good time is CoD, Fortnite and Madden I won't blame you for not enjoying them.
Why not?
Good art can and often does contain topical references which are mostly ephemeral, but I can't think of anything I've ever seen which was both a) entirely ephemeral and b) worth a damn.
I can look back to some really really good fireworks shows.
Not by necessity, but by design. The world and life are transient - I see no fault in embracing it (for certain things)
...big fraction these days. I "cut the cord" a couple of years back and am now paying close to what I was paying before.
Once Steam came up, and our standard of living increased, we pretty much stopped pirating games due to the convenience. When Spotify came up, and all the other music streaming services, we pretty much stopped pirating music. When Netflix popped up, most of the torrent sites dissappeared over night.
Now, a lot of people seem to turn back to piracy, and I suspect money is not the primary reason.
The only ones I keep are Hulu+ an Netflix simply because they're so affordable and have so much content that i don't need to binge a show to cancel because there isn't anything else I want.
I think this is a little too unilateral for my tastes, but I do agree that it shouldn't be almost exclusively ephemeral. Culture is worth preserving.
I see it this way. PlayStation to XBox, is like Apple to Android. On one side you pay for a product, on the other side you are the product. Sony runs the infrastructure, and provides bandwidth. You get two games for free every month (if you haven't bought them already) and you won't get into a Netflix situation where, when you have time to pick up a game it suddenly isn't available any more as part of the subscription.
This all might take a generation of kids who grow up with subscription services to ve successful, until they eventually find out it hasn't always veen this eay and then post on HN hoe grrat it would be to own your stuff again.