Unsolicited Game Things
A few months ago I was ruminating on how game subscriptions are coming. They’re coming in a really big way. Now E3 has happened and that has become more clear. Clear in a scary way. There are too many game subscriptions. This is really interesting to explore though. I’d say that Netflix came up without much real competition. Traditional media is too slow to adopt new technology effectively. They slow it down by enforcing parity in every way and forcing the new medium to accept the weird facets of the old one. Shows must be 22 minutes long. Commercial breaks must exist. Content must be locked by publisher, region-locked in completely arcane ways, the dvd extras aren’t available... the list goes on. Games are different. The medium is, as a requisite feature, on the cutting edge of technology. The publishers and creators are more used to operating without the fetters of the past (with the important exception of HID which maybe is a different blog post). The frightening thing is that means there is no distinct front runner in the war for consumer dollars and that’s actually kind of terrible for the consumer. Games are a social behavior. Everyone is currently chasing the “lifestyle game” dollars. Most large games want to be a service. They *already* want you to subscribe to their particular brand. WoW is *still* $15/month. Dota2 Plus wants $4/mo (. Destiny 2 wants about $90/year from you ($7.50/mo) in a game+season pass format. Beyond that, publishers are now asking for subscriptions.EA/Origin All Access and Uplay+ are frontrunners because of their extensive back-catalogs that are fresh for new monitization opportunities, but they won’t be the last publishers to jump in. Then you have the Platform Holders themselves like Microsoft, Sony, and Google offering their own subs that partially encompass the back-catalogs of the other subscriptions, plus other, slightly more indie goodies. For a while, this will be anti-consumer. It’s going to feel real bad. Steam, Epic, GoG, Itch.io, and other Stores will get in the game, and that ALSO has overlap (microsoft has a store, sony has a store, google has a store). I don’t believe that these are actually very competitive because most of these services are aiming, perhaps rightly for the shareholder, at market capture. So that thing I said about social behavior. Yes, there are many insular gamers. Yes, there are many lovers of single player games. However, even in the case of single player games, people LOVE to share their experiences with each other. There are plenty that will disbelieve me, but I think this was all played out in the Console Wars in years past. Some people got to play Halo and others got to play The Last of Us. The Nintendo fans got their own set of games that nobody else could touch without buying additional hardware. It’s a real bummer to have a $400 gate between you and a game your friend played that you want to share with them. Borrowing consoles isn’t a very good option when they want to be rooted to your TV as your Netflix supply. That may be alleviated now that smart-tv apps are reasonably standard and more usable than in the past. There shouldn’t need to be an audible gasp when I tell someone I’ve never played The Last Of Us and it was simply because I had no access to the game. In the past, there were 4-ish platforms. Subscriptions have the potential to fragment that into the 10-20 realm. I think we’ll end up with 4-6 big players, with 2-3 subscriptions covering 90% of games but that’s not good enough if half the outliers are games that everyone wants to play. I can only hope that the big industry players think of the customer first and put their best foot forward in content negotiations. That said, while I’m no expert on publishing and content, I’ve seen some of the effects in other mediums and I’m not encouraged. I think the real sham here is that cross-play is FINALLY catching on, which means that platform doesn’t really matter as much anymore. People can finally play with each other without having that $400 gate between. However, as purchases move toward subscriptions (I don’t think this is an “if”), the gate will shift from hardware-based to a $10/mo which-subscription-do-you-maintain. Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see the same WhyCantWeAllHaveNiceThings problem unless the corps get their act together. The silver lining is that signing up and canceling these subs is more fluid than a 10-year console cycle. That much will be nice.