TotalGaming Tries Yearly PC Subscription Gaming

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the announcement of Stardock's TotalGaming.net PC indie gaming subscription service. The press release explains: "While users can purchase games individually, Stardock expects the real appeal of TotalGaming.net to be in the subscription. For $89, users receive a host of good games plus everything added to TotalGaming.net for an entire year afterwards", and goes on to note: "For the initial launch, Stardock has put together an impressive list of games that will be available on day one, such as Galactic Civilizations, Celtic Kings, Orb, The Corporate Machine, LightWeight Ninja, and a new compilation of Disciples II called Disciples II Ultimate Edition... [and] plans to add a new game each month for the rest of the year starting with The Political Machine in August." Notably, the announcement mentions: "Even if [users] choose not to re-subscribe, they can still re-download the entire game years later." Does this approach appeal more than somewhat similar monthly services offered by Comcast, Atari, and Yahoo?

Comments

TotalGaming

[sqrt(2)]

TotalGaming subscription based service is phenomenally successful and revolutionizes the gaming industry...in Japan.

Heh.

[jgaynor]

Nice to see stardock finally doing something besides inspiring bad UI design.

Re:Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like all of these designs?

Re:Heh.

[jgaynor]

yes.

Penny-Arcade

[sqrt(2)]

TotalGaming.net was also mentioned on PA in the last three paragraphs of todays news post

Corporate Machine

[snuf23]

I don't know if this subscription is worth the cost - I guess it remains to be seen what they release on the service.
I will say that StarDock's Corporate Machine is a very fun little strategy game. Quick paced and doesn't take hours to play. While compared to modern games the graphics are abyssmal, I still find myself loading it up for a quick run every now and then. Great "beer and pretzels" strategy gaming in the same way the Rails Across America is.
That being said, the game is available at very low cost from resellers (once saw it for $3 at the local store).
Looking forward to seeing how the Political Machine stacks up.

Uhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if [users] choose not to re-subscribe, they can still re-download the entire game years later.

You have to download the game(s) each time you subscribe? I mean, they're not the most recent games, taking up 1GB or more, but still, that could take a while, especially if other people are also downloading...

Re:Uhh...

[AuMatar]

Sounds more like that if you subscribe once, even if you later quit, you can download the games you once had access to at any time. So if you lost the games or your hard drive wen bonkers or you want to install them on a new machine, you could.

Nothing new, not even for StarDock's tired stable

[MBraynard]

1) Other services offer similar services with much better games at somewhat higher prices.

2) Stardock *had* a service like this before - it was called djijon or something funky like this. Except it was all the same games but only cost ~$40.

3) All of those games are old/mediocre. They were mediocre when they came out years ago. I conceed that GalCiv is quality but it's over a year old and can be had for $20 on a real disc in a box.

4) Corporate Machine is fun but Entrepreneur was better.

Drengin.net

[BlueCup]

They did this before with Drengin.net, which I thought about joining, but despite their other year long subscription having almost weekly updates Drengin hardly ever changed. It didn't seem worth it to me to spend 50 dollars for a service with at the time only one quality product.

On the opposite side of the spectrum though, I'd be a little worried with this "game released every month" thing. I've got a feeling games are going to be rushed, especially near the end. If a game has to come out on a certain date there is a large chance that it wont be at its full potential. Not to mention the short time for development. Assuming they have 6 teams (probably high for a company the size of Stardock) developing games, thats a game every six months! Chances are these wont be games competing with other mainstream games. I'm not saying this endeavor is without a doubt going to fail, but I certainly will not be one of the first people to give them a shot.

Re:Drengin.net

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

"I'd be a little worried with this "game released every month" thing. I've got a feeling games are going to be rushed, especially near the end. If a game has to come out on a certain date there is a large chance that it wont be at its full potential.

Here's the thing - for most games released these days, they are rushed. You've got to have a guaranteed best seller like Half Life 2 or Doom 3 in order to delay release dates. I don't think that such a release schedule is going to lead to any more of a rush than what game developers currently suffer through.

"Not to mention the short time for development. Assuming they have 6 teams (probably high for a company the size of Stardock) developing games, thats a game every six months!"

There's also no reason that games developed by third parties could not be licensed in order to keep up with this schedule for releases and, unless it's in some type of end user agreement, they don't have to stick to this release schedule. There are plenty of recent [1-2 years] games selling little to no units [if they're even still available at retail] that could be licensed for a relatively low cost in order to keep the 1 game a month schedule on pace.

Re:Drengin.net

[greenreaper]

There are plenty of recent [1-2 years] games selling little to no units [if they're even still available at retail] that could be licensed for a relatively low cost in order to keep the 1 game a month schedule on pace.

That is indeed exactly what Stardock is doing.

Re:Drengin.net

[Anonymous Coward]

i noticed that you marked acidic_diarrhea as a foe. what's the matter? don't like being pointed out for the fucking moron you are? you obviously are not that intelligent. why do you persist, asshole?

Re:Drengin.net

[kfx]

Green hit the nail on it's head. Though there are several games under development (GalCiv2, Political Machine, and possibly a Master of Magic sequel), the majority of the games on TG.net will be third party re-releases.

Ripoff..

[rtechie]

Why pay $90 for the privlidge of eating up huge amounts of your bandwidth downloading overpriced mediocre games that you could buy of eBay for $5 a pop. Nevermind that you could get a usenet account to download all the games (and porn, and movies, etc.) you want for $10 a month.

Personally, the only such kind of service I'm interested in would be a Netflix-like mail-in service that for $20 a month you could have out 5 games OR 5 movies.

Re:Ripoff..

[c3k]

Companies like Gamefly, etc, do this with console games, however, there really hasn't been an alternative PC game model for this (and I doubt Gamefly would make this jump). There are some companies that do download service (i.e., go to Ubisoft's page, and you can download select Myst games - newer ones, not older ones; go to kazaa and Atari lets you download games for a set time limit trail period, then you have to pay for the rest of the content.) The problem with a PC based model for a "Gamefly" type service is how many PC games do you play in one month? Would it be cost effective to keep the PC game until you're done with it? Also, getting past the "need a CD" to play the game gets tricky. In terms of downloads, I've downloaded one game from Kazaa (Civ Conquests), have had it for about 4 months and have yet to stop playing it. Therefore, download models make more sense, but more so for long-term and replayable games rather than play-and-your done games.

About time

[Xentor]

Despite the criticism, I think I'll be subscribing as soon as I get home from work... Here's what I see (Read their media packet for more detailed info)...

1) $90 for the first year, $50 after that.

2) 6 games so far, plus one a month (Though they said one a month for the rest of this year, not necessarily one a month forever). That comes out to at least 5 more games by the end of '04... 11 games total, even if they use the sneaky wording and stop after that.

3) So we have $90 for 11 games. They seem like relatively good-quality games (I love Business Tycoon, despite the lack of maps), but let's say there are a few junk titles and 8 of them are worth playing... That's $11.25 per game.

4) Some of them are bargain-bin crap, but it looks like some are full $30-40 titles, so the average $11/game seems fair.

5) If you're on broadband (As I am), who cares about download time? Set it to run overnight and play the next day.

6) No copy protection, no CD-keys, no DRM, no activation... (I think they're going for the "Why pirate it, it's affordable" strategy).

So anyway, I'll stop there, before I start sounding like one of their media lackeys... Granted, I've got a good job and a pretty lax budget, but I think I'll go for this.

I just hope their download servers are faster than Steam (VALVe software)...

No subscription

[Lord_Dweomer]

They need to get it through their heads. If its not an MMORPG or an online matchmaking service or something, people don't want to pay a subscription. They want to pay a one time fee and own the game. Period.

Re:No subscription

[Carnildo]

My understanding is that you do own the game. You're paying for download access to their game library.

Re:No subscription

[AuMatar]

You buy the game through this service. The subscription allows you to get all additional games they develope for the same price.

Re:No subscription

[kfx]

That's it. A subsciprion to Drengin/TG.net *buys* all the games they have now, and everything they release/publish within the next year.

Whether or not you resubscribe after that, you retain rights to all of those games that came out before or during your subscription, and can download them at any time through Stardock Central if you lose them.