12 ms·

A deep-dive into the future of subscription gaming

42 points by jsnell 6y ago

Bancakes 6y ago
You will buy Stadia. You will purchase temporary licenses for limited access to games (one per platform). You will own nothing and be happy.
- donaldo 6y ago
  Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I completely agree. It’s ridiculous that for housing and cars (the most important assets), leasing and renting is quite common but it’s suddenly taboo when it comes to something almost just as important like my video games. Also less wasteful for the environment to rent and play from a central supercomputer than have to buy my own computer and buy games. So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    I can afford to buy the latest 7nm components, with TDP no more than I need, undervolt them to my performance specifications, use them their entire functional lifetime or sell them to someone. Either way, these are components fully utilised and easy to run on green energy (500W is enough for a beast gaming rig, 250W for most people). There is minimal waste and no overhead to speak of. 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.
    - donaldo 6y ago
      Good points, I completely agree with everything you brought up. Can you try to find data on electrical usage per hour of a series of centralized RDPs vs your computer?
      - gruez 6y ago
        Random result: https://www.dataspan.com/blog/data-center-cooling-costs/ https://www.dataspan.com/blog/data-center-cooling-costs/ >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.
    - mekkkkkk 6y ago
      That all sounds good. Maybe you personally can make it work. In reality, for most people it's a cycle of buying new big hardware (consoles, desktop, laptop) every few years, using them very sporadically and then turning them to e-waste. I don't see how a centralized solution could be more wasteful than that. The latency part is true though.
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    It's not letting me reply to your second post but you can find me some RDP, and I'll compare it myself.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    Housing - I did not have enough money to buy it outright so no choice for me here. For cars I do so would never lease one. As for environmental impact - go preach to bitcoin miners and other heavy users. I would suggest starting with 3 percenters.
  - krageon 6y ago
    > leasing and renting is quite common 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.
- cloogshicer 6y ago
  Sadly, I believe that this is correct. Look at what happened to music and movies. 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.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - antihero 6y ago
      Or you can just plug your laptop/tablet into your speakers and play your local music collection.
      - KineticLensman 6y ago
        > and play your local music collection 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.
- npteljes 6y ago
  As soon as subscription is the dominant way, consumers will be squeezed hard. The same thing will happen that happened with for example the cable television: initially paying for it made sense because it did away with commercials and offered a more diverse selection. Now? You pay and also there are commercials, and the selection is quantity over quality.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    >"As soon as subscription is the dominant way, consumers will be squeezed hard" 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.
    - krageon 6y ago
      You've received some downvotes (perhaps because this read as being too flippant?) but I feel like you've covered it perfectly. The era where cable TV became truly heinous (nothing interesting to see, way too many ads, etc) was also the era where it just wasn't necessary anymore. While you have it it feels like it'd be hard to replace, but let's be honest: It'll take maybe a week of getting used to it and after that you won't miss it. 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.
      - FpUser 6y ago
        >"You've received some downvotes (perhaps because this read as being too flippant?)" 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.
- pityJuke 6y ago
  I could see this happening for quite a lot of games, sure. But... I'm skeptical just because the experience for some games would be so, so much worse. Anything requiring fine input goes straight out of the window, such as a tactical FPS like CS:GO, or VALORANT. MOBAs, maybe, except when you get to a high level where it, once again, requires precise inputs. Hell, even CoD, FIFA require it when laying against other players. Fortnite gets quite difficult when you consider the prevalence of building in that game - lord knows I struggled with accuracy even on a good machine. I guess Destiny 2 has demonstrated some aspects working, but AFAIK, quite a bit of the game is PvE. 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.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Better than the alternative IMO: Buying to own a bunch of games on Steam every time they go on sale and never even bother to play them because you have a huge backlog of games to work through.
  - chii 6y ago
    but nobody is forcing you to buy, and what you have bought will not cost anything to maintain your ability to play them (other than a PC). 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!
- antihero 6y ago
  This is why I like GeForce NOW or ShadowPC. You own the licenses to the games but rent the hardware.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    I discovered cloud gaming through Stadia but I now direct all of my attention towards GFN and, for the lack of availability of Shadow and equivalent, to G4dn instances on AWS with Parsec. 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.
  - krageon 6y ago
    I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd recommend GFN to literally everyone I know if they stopped limiting what games I can play on it. It's really very nice for what it actually works for.
- Noos 6y ago
  Considering none of you want to pay full price for anything ever, get used to it. I don't see people complaining about how Netflix isn't making DVDs and Blu-ray for their content, or buying physical games even any more. You all want the moon; you want digital content forever at rock bottom prices. 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.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Unlike the situation with paid media and adblocking, for games, the big boys were usually profitable aside from the occasional flop which was mostly related to bad games or aggressive monetisation. There are probably more examples of games killed by aggressive financial models in the recent past than by piracy. Consequently there's a lot less sympathy for "We're not making enough money" verus "We're losing money".
    - Noos 6y ago
      nah, if anything aggressive financial models seem to work better, because they increase the limit of what people spend on a game. People pay $30 just to own a mount now; and its easy to make a lot of mounts for people who buy them. A fighting game like Dead or Alive costs you literally a thousand dollars for a "complete" version with all DLC. To the point where they just toss the base game for free. 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.
  - 6y ago
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable. Even the fact they have a data center near most population centers who would use Stadia isn't enough to combat it. 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.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    > Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable. 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.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      I play on gigabit hardwired and fiber and it was basically unusable for me. They need to do a lot better than that if they want mass adoption imo.
  - Thaxll 6y ago
    "Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable." This is plain wrong. Tech wise stadia is amazing.
- deleted 6y ago
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npteljes 6y ago
With subscriptions, control is higher for publishers, so the only thing they need to do is making it a better deal than owning a game. As an important milestone, digital distribution paved the way so now people don't expect actual ownership over games, it's enough to be able to pay and then download and run. Along this system, I think an indie scene will remain that distributes games as traditional downloadable software. As long as we'll have computers able to do generic computation of course.
0xy 6y ago
I've heard this one before! 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.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  > 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
  - samwestdev 6y ago
    > Also FUCK EA for destroying SimCity Amen bro
    - henrikschroder 6y ago
      Well, we got Cities: Skylines out of their mistake, so...
      - ascagnel_ 6y ago
        I feel like I'm alone in saying this, but I found Skylines to be a pale imitation of SimCity 4. It's a city-building game, where SC4 is much more of a city management game; you fill the map in Skylines, and there's almost nothing else to do.
deleted 6y ago
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mrpotato 6y ago
Playstation Plus is what lead to my eventual move to PC Gaming. I didn't (and still don't) see the benefit of having to pay monthly just to play games that I want to play. At the time (ps3/4 era), most if not all the free games were all indy games and games I had no interest in playing. That meant that I was paying full price for games I wanted to play and I had to pay a monthly fee just to play online multiplayer (and internet of course). Moving to PC saved me something like 30$/month for something that gave me little to no value. If the future of gaming is a subscription model, I'd rather just stop gaming.
- Aardwolf 6y ago
  I've always been a PC gamer, on Linux mostly (Steam enables so much). 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 :)
  - killtimeatwork 6y ago
    Also, historically consoles promised high quality technical experience - no major bugs and consistent high FPS, while currently it's no longer guaranteed. It's basically PC gaming without the hassle of GPU driver incompatibilities.
    - scaladev 6y ago
      When was that? I spent quite a bit of time on PS1, then PS3, and then PS4, and enjoyed my share of that sweet 24 FPS "cinematic" experience. That heavy post-processing as an attempt to hide the (sometimes extremely) low texture resolution. The atrocious load times. Never again.
      - killtimeatwork 6y ago
        The pre-3d era (SNES etc.) was perfect. Meanwhile on PC you were fighting IRQ conflicts and HIMEM.SYS etc.
swiley 6y ago
I've given up on commercial games after online DRM. I'll play the game when the source is on github.
- ioulian 6y ago
  Have a look at https://www.gog.com/ https://www.gog.com/. I only buy new games from them. You can download the whole package to store offline and play in a few years without needing to "login" or being online
simlevesque 6y ago
Counterpoint: I bought a Xbox Series S for 380$CAD and 3 years of Game Pass Ultimate for 240$, both before taxes. 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.
- jdgoesmarching 6y ago
  I’m also enjoying Gamepass, especially when the alternate trend that’s been making buckets of money for the industry is microtransactions. Yes, I absolutely wish that the model of just making a really good game and selling it directly was the standard. But hey, we live in an economic system that demands unlimited revenue growth and out of all the options that preserve the creation of games that I like to play, subscriptions are by far the best option. If you don’t like it, take it up with capitalism.
  - simlevesque 6y ago
    Yeah, you get it. I'm a Stallman fanboy, all about GNU, ownership etc... but I'm also pragmatic.
foolfoolz 6y ago
i think subscription is here to stay and solves the “new game are expensive but i want to play them” problem. on the other end of the spectrum you have all these game stores selling old games on heavy discount sales or epic store giving away a free game each week and this solves the i want to own, even if i’m years later, cheaply solution. i think there’s room for both
trixrabbit 6y ago
Check "Game as a service is a fraud" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Semaphor 6y ago
I don’t know. I know many people just want to play all the new AAA games and then move on. For those subscription services seem perfect. 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.
de6u99er 6y ago
Remember the VR hype? It's most certainly the same marketing experts saying game subscription services are going to be a big thing one day. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
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42 points by jsnell 6y ago

You will buy Stadia. You will purchase temporary licenses for limited access to games (one per platform). You will own nothing and be happy.

donaldo 6y ago
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I completely agree. It’s ridiculous that for housing and cars (the most important assets), leasing and renting is quite common but it’s suddenly taboo when it comes to something almost just as important like my video games. Also less wasteful for the environment to rent and play from a central supercomputer than have to buy my own computer and buy games. So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  I can afford to buy the latest 7nm components, with TDP no more than I need, undervolt them to my performance specifications, use them their entire functional lifetime or sell them to someone. Either way, these are components fully utilised and easy to run on green energy (500W is enough for a beast gaming rig, 250W for most people). There is minimal waste and no overhead to speak of. 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.
  - donaldo 6y ago
    Good points, I completely agree with everything you brought up. Can you try to find data on electrical usage per hour of a series of centralized RDPs vs your computer?
    - gruez 6y ago
      Random result: https://www.dataspan.com/blog/data-center-cooling-costs/ https://www.dataspan.com/blog/data-center-cooling-costs/ >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.
  - mekkkkkk 6y ago
    That all sounds good. Maybe you personally can make it work. In reality, for most people it's a cycle of buying new big hardware (consoles, desktop, laptop) every few years, using them very sporadically and then turning them to e-waste. I don't see how a centralized solution could be more wasteful than that. The latency part is true though.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  It's not letting me reply to your second post but you can find me some RDP, and I'll compare it myself.
- FpUser 6y ago
  Housing - I did not have enough money to buy it outright so no choice for me here. For cars I do so would never lease one. As for environmental impact - go preach to bitcoin miners and other heavy users. I would suggest starting with 3 percenters.
- krageon 6y ago
  > leasing and renting is quite common 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.
cloogshicer 6y ago
Sadly, I believe that this is correct. Look at what happened to music and movies. 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.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - antihero 6y ago
    Or you can just plug your laptop/tablet into your speakers and play your local music collection.
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > and play your local music collection 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.
npteljes 6y ago
As soon as subscription is the dominant way, consumers will be squeezed hard. The same thing will happen that happened with for example the cable television: initially paying for it made sense because it did away with commercials and offered a more diverse selection. Now? You pay and also there are commercials, and the selection is quantity over quality.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"As soon as subscription is the dominant way, consumers will be squeezed hard" 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.
  - krageon 6y ago
    You've received some downvotes (perhaps because this read as being too flippant?) but I feel like you've covered it perfectly. The era where cable TV became truly heinous (nothing interesting to see, way too many ads, etc) was also the era where it just wasn't necessary anymore. While you have it it feels like it'd be hard to replace, but let's be honest: It'll take maybe a week of getting used to it and after that you won't miss it. 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.
    - FpUser 6y ago
      >"You've received some downvotes (perhaps because this read as being too flippant?)" 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.
pityJuke 6y ago
I could see this happening for quite a lot of games, sure. But... I'm skeptical just because the experience for some games would be so, so much worse. Anything requiring fine input goes straight out of the window, such as a tactical FPS like CS:GO, or VALORANT. MOBAs, maybe, except when you get to a high level where it, once again, requires precise inputs. Hell, even CoD, FIFA require it when laying against other players. Fortnite gets quite difficult when you consider the prevalence of building in that game - lord knows I struggled with accuracy even on a good machine. I guess Destiny 2 has demonstrated some aspects working, but AFAIK, quite a bit of the game is PvE. 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.
xwdv 6y ago
Better than the alternative IMO: Buying to own a bunch of games on Steam every time they go on sale and never even bother to play them because you have a huge backlog of games to work through.
- chii 6y ago
  but nobody is forcing you to buy, and what you have bought will not cost anything to maintain your ability to play them (other than a PC). 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!
antihero 6y ago
This is why I like GeForce NOW or ShadowPC. You own the licenses to the games but rent the hardware.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  I discovered cloud gaming through Stadia but I now direct all of my attention towards GFN and, for the lack of availability of Shadow and equivalent, to G4dn instances on AWS with Parsec. 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.
- krageon 6y ago
  I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd recommend GFN to literally everyone I know if they stopped limiting what games I can play on it. It's really very nice for what it actually works for.
Noos 6y ago
Considering none of you want to pay full price for anything ever, get used to it. I don't see people complaining about how Netflix isn't making DVDs and Blu-ray for their content, or buying physical games even any more. You all want the moon; you want digital content forever at rock bottom prices. 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.
- Macha 6y ago
  Unlike the situation with paid media and adblocking, for games, the big boys were usually profitable aside from the occasional flop which was mostly related to bad games or aggressive monetisation. There are probably more examples of games killed by aggressive financial models in the recent past than by piracy. Consequently there's a lot less sympathy for "We're not making enough money" verus "We're losing money".
  - Noos 6y ago
    nah, if anything aggressive financial models seem to work better, because they increase the limit of what people spend on a game. People pay $30 just to own a mount now; and its easy to make a lot of mounts for people who buy them. A fighting game like Dead or Alive costs you literally a thousand dollars for a "complete" version with all DLC. To the point where they just toss the base game for free. 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.
- 6y ago
Grimm1 6y ago
Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable. Even the fact they have a data center near most population centers who would use Stadia isn't enough to combat it. 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.
- thebean11 6y ago
  > Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable. 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.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    I play on gigabit hardwired and fiber and it was basically unusable for me. They need to do a lot better than that if they want mass adoption imo.
- Thaxll 6y ago
  "Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable." This is plain wrong. Tech wise stadia is amazing.
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npteljes 6y ago

With subscriptions, control is higher for publishers, so the only thing they need to do is making it a better deal than owning a game. As an important milestone, digital distribution paved the way so now people don't expect actual ownership over games, it's enough to be able to pay and then download and run. Along this system, I think an indie scene will remain that distributes games as traditional downloadable software. As long as we'll have computers able to do generic computation of course.

0xy 6y ago

I've heard this one before! 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.

me_me_me 6y ago
> 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
- samwestdev 6y ago
  > Also FUCK EA for destroying SimCity Amen bro
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    Well, we got Cities: Skylines out of their mistake, so...
    - ascagnel_ 6y ago
      I feel like I'm alone in saying this, but I found Skylines to be a pale imitation of SimCity 4. It's a city-building game, where SC4 is much more of a city management game; you fill the map in Skylines, and there's almost nothing else to do.

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mrpotato 6y ago

Playstation Plus is what lead to my eventual move to PC Gaming. I didn't (and still don't) see the benefit of having to pay monthly just to play games that I want to play. At the time (ps3/4 era), most if not all the free games were all indy games and games I had no interest in playing. That meant that I was paying full price for games I wanted to play and I had to pay a monthly fee just to play online multiplayer (and internet of course). Moving to PC saved me something like 30$/month for something that gave me little to no value. If the future of gaming is a subscription model, I'd rather just stop gaming.

Aardwolf 6y ago
I've always been a PC gamer, on Linux mostly (Steam enables so much). 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 :)
- killtimeatwork 6y ago
  Also, historically consoles promised high quality technical experience - no major bugs and consistent high FPS, while currently it's no longer guaranteed. It's basically PC gaming without the hassle of GPU driver incompatibilities.
  - scaladev 6y ago
    When was that? I spent quite a bit of time on PS1, then PS3, and then PS4, and enjoyed my share of that sweet 24 FPS "cinematic" experience. That heavy post-processing as an attempt to hide the (sometimes extremely) low texture resolution. The atrocious load times. Never again.
    - killtimeatwork 6y ago
      The pre-3d era (SNES etc.) was perfect. Meanwhile on PC you were fighting IRQ conflicts and HIMEM.SYS etc.

swiley 6y ago

I've given up on commercial games after online DRM. I'll play the game when the source is on github.

ioulian 6y ago
Have a look at https://www.gog.com/ https://www.gog.com/. I only buy new games from them. You can download the whole package to store offline and play in a few years without needing to "login" or being online

simlevesque 6y ago

Counterpoint: I bought a Xbox Series S for 380$CAD and 3 years of Game Pass Ultimate for 240$, both before taxes. 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.

jdgoesmarching 6y ago
I’m also enjoying Gamepass, especially when the alternate trend that’s been making buckets of money for the industry is microtransactions. Yes, I absolutely wish that the model of just making a really good game and selling it directly was the standard. But hey, we live in an economic system that demands unlimited revenue growth and out of all the options that preserve the creation of games that I like to play, subscriptions are by far the best option. If you don’t like it, take it up with capitalism.
- simlevesque 6y ago
  Yeah, you get it. I'm a Stallman fanboy, all about GNU, ownership etc... but I'm also pragmatic.

foolfoolz 6y ago

i think subscription is here to stay and solves the “new game are expensive but i want to play them” problem. on the other end of the spectrum you have all these game stores selling old games on heavy discount sales or epic store giving away a free game each week and this solves the i want to own, even if i’m years later, cheaply solution. i think there’s room for both

trixrabbit 6y ago

Check "Game as a service is a fraud" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

Semaphor 6y ago

I don’t know. I know many people just want to play all the new AAA games and then move on. For those subscription services seem perfect. 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.

de6u99er 6y ago

Remember the VR hype? It's most certainly the same marketing experts saying game subscription services are going to be a big thing one day. 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.

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