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Cord-Cutting Hits Video Games (axios.com)
Video games are the next entertainment industry undergoing a major disruption, all the way down to the consoles and controllers. From a report: Details: "In the past, you plunked down $60 at GameStop for a copy of Grand Theft Auto or Madden NFL and played it out -- after which you could trade it in or let it gather dust," the AP reports. "Now, you'll increasingly have the choice of subscribing to games, playing for free or possibly just streaming them over the internet to your phone or TV."
New subscription streaming services represent a massive shift from gaming into the cloud, which will make it easier to access games on any device, including mobile. [...] Gamers wouldn't necessarily have to buy individual games anymore -- they could buy them as part of a larger and potentially cheaper package -- and it means that they wouldn't be limited to expensive hardware devices that only work for certain games.
New subscription streaming services represent a massive shift from gaming into the cloud, which will make it easier to access games on any device, including mobile. [...] Gamers wouldn't necessarily have to buy individual games anymore -- they could buy them as part of a larger and potentially cheaper package -- and it means that they wouldn't be limited to expensive hardware devices that only work for certain games.
Stop mixing your damn metaphors, journalists!
Streamed games are a choke chain like we've never seen before in gaming. Portraying that as "cord-cutting" couldn't be getting it more wrong.
I buy my games on disc because I get half back when I sell them. I cant beat that deal. I lose full out with digital. Not only that but companies wont allow your purchases to track through generations because F U. Now with Steam and Epic going at it, the thought starts to form.. what if... just what if, steam went under? Would we get to DL our games? Probably not.
Just because I got first comment (maybe) - screw wireless controllers, they are hot garbage. Dropped packets causing deaths, certain holding positions interrupt data transmission, they are more expensive, and on top of it. they STILL have wires.
I barely have time to play the games in my backlog, let alone play new ones.
So fucking busy with work not even enough time to make a quip in a Slashdot post. Prosperity my ass.
Set an example for anyone else that betrays our country.
There was OnLive for streaming. GameFly is/was a subscription game rental service that operated like Netflix: mailing out the physical discs.
It's not "disruption" just because Apple and Google are doing it.
I know companies love the constant revenue stream, but I don't. It's not like I really have the time to play games, but I wouldn't be doing this if I had the time. I prefer to own the things I buy. I don't want software, games,music or anything i buy to just disappear one day because the company doesn't find it profitable any longer. How many music services have gone under now? I keep getting emails about Ultraviolet closing down. Or my favorite thing is when I hear about a service deleting ebooks or music from devices. I can still set up a Win 2K box and load Quake from the CD anytime i want. But that likely won't be the case with these games in 20 years.
This seems much more like a new cord rather than cutting loose from an existing one.
I pity the next generation of gamers. What will they do when they feel nostalgic for that game from their youth?
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Seriously, how stupid do they think I am, to fall for this obvious trap?
Hell, I'm not evem using Steam! Since I want my games to be playable in 30 years, even when Steam is gone and forgotten, and the client doesn't work on the newest/dumbest SimpletonOS UltraTard 90.01 anymore!
Don't want and not really worried about it. The market is so saturated and I have so much I'll never play already (not because it's bad but because of hours of content vs hours in the day), that anyone who tries to force this will most likely just get ignored.
I will emulate them. Sorry!
Workers lose out because they have to produce an endless stream of content for peanuts, in perpetual grind. Indies lose out, because they get squeezed out by mammoth competitors. Gamers lose out because the game disappears as soon as it stops turning enough profit to keep the lights on, and they have no chance to own it.
See also: declining DVD and blu-ray sales and the resurgence in "sounds okay for the first few plays" vinyl pressings.
Get your shit together Axios. As for this so called "disruption in games". It's bullshit. This article was most likely paid for by one of the bigs in the industry trying to push their streaming services. Also, game streaming is essentially a dead end in the US. The network infrastructure here has zero capacity to handle the amount of traffic a fully adopted game streaming service would generate.
There was nothing in the Google Stadia announcement that would suggest that it would be a subscription service, the fact that they're courting AAA game developers would suggest quite the opposite because aside from loss leaders (e.g. first party games like Microsoft's in game pass) the per month cost would invariably far too high for users to swallow.
The change that we're going to see here is that the upfront cost to start gaming is now zero; this fundamentally changes things because players drop out every hardware generation can be lured back for a single game and its much more likely that lower income parents will be able to afford to give their children the occasional game. Unfortunately we'll probably also see a lot of mobilification of larger games to reduce the upfront cost and bring in the causal mobile gamers.
This is basically the final nail in the coffin for places like Game-Stop.
Under a subscription service, once you're done playing, there isn't any way to trade it in.
Steam, Origin, et. al. have pretty much killed the PC versions of the secondary market already.
Jokes on them though, I never buy anything on Steam unless it's = $20. Wait a year and get :D
the fully patched, bug-free, game-of-the-year edition. I let everyone else pay full price to be the
beta testers
The idea of a streaming service is laughable. US network infrastructure won't handle it, and data :|
caps will blow it out of the water before it even leaves the harbor. Unless, of course, we get the
same bullshit we see with streaming video. Stream with $service_provider and it won't count against
your data plan !
It's absolutely NOT "cord cutting" to make an end user 100% cord-dependent!
In the old days, you bought a game for a one-time fixed-price payment. In exchange for your cash, you got a disk or disks, manual, cheat sheet or mapos, or other assorted supplemental stuff, and the artsy box of course. But then it was YOURS. You could play it any time you wanted, for as long as you wanted, on any machine you wanted, etc.
Recently, games moved to "the cloud" (big brother's servers) and you can only play as long as you are online and they can make the game go away any time they want to. ("pray that I do not alter the deal any further....")
Now it is offered as some sort of utopia that this model will go even further.... your device simply becomes a dumb graphical terminal to the megacorporation servers and you will be 100% dependent on monthly fees.... and this is in someway superior????
This is only "good" to ignorant morons who are completely indoctrinated and have never known anything better. Companies move to models like this to make more money, not less, so you WILL pay more. [facepalm]
You don't own shit anymore. Service goes down? Ooh well!
Yeah, not something I'm happy about.
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
This is not the future. It's not anything. It's what typically occurs when sufficient number of psychopaths are left unsupervised. Nobody asked for needs or wants this shit.
This was posted on Slashdot immediately after an article about Google adding a line of advertising to the top of any Android TV as part of the latest update to the O/S. Sort of like TV in the Cloud. Game streaming/download/whatever that doesn't include the complete install media and allow standalone play is the same thing different "platform". As long as enough people keep buying in to it they will keep doing it.
$10/mo no way more like $20-$30 base + add ones.
Just hope that ESPN / Disney don't force you to buy shit like mickey mouse adventures and some sports games as part of the base rate maybe pushing it $40-$50 range.
4K RES add $5-10/mo
premium games $10-$15/mo from 3-4 differnt groups (each with there own change) like to days HBO, STARS, SHOWTIME.
PPV rents $7-10 for 48 hours (from clock start not in game time)
PPV BUY games (no time out but full game price) (will be lost if you don't pay the base rate)
$5/mo dosbox (player) (Storage fees are on top of that)
what about owned games expire when they lose the rights to them?
Isn't that the opposite of cord cutting? I suppose you can now go "corded" (subscription) then subsequently cut the cord. How does this shit pass editors?
People have been using wireless controllers since last gen.
Oh, game streaming was there since last gen and it won't take off.
The article content is the opposite of cord cutting. Who the fuck posted this? What a dumb ass.
I have many games that gather dust, but I like the peace of mind that if I want, I can go back to some game. With subscription models it could be that the content depends on region, someone can decide that the game is offensive and remove it etc. I like to travel and I bought the switch for this reason. Most of the time the connection in the train will be so slow that even opening this site is difficult, let alone stream media - music, games, movies. Not so long ago Nintendo stopped support for the Wii. There many people who prefer to play NES games on the original hardware, who also buy CRTs. There are a lot of reasons to chose the old way - go and buy the physical game. Why are these big companies so greedy? Don't they make enough money?
And it means that you will not be able to dust off your old game and play it again in ten years because we'll have deleted it by then.
Fuck off and die.
So you'd still be a criminal. And nobody would be allowed to distribute HOW to do it, that would be a crime too. You fucking moron.
It doesn't work without the steam client starting up FIRST. It has to check that you haven't stolen the game since last time it checked the game, found you hadn't stolen it and let you play it. Maybe it thinks there's some way for a game to be bought and THEN stolen, despite it being "licensed, not sold". So, please tell me, now Steam client no longer runs on WinXP, HOW DO YOU PLAY YOUR FUCKING GAME????? When Valve closes, they won't update the client, and when it doesn't work on Win25 or whatever, HOW DO YOU PLAY YOUR FUCKING GAME????
Fucking idiot.
Buying a game at Gamestop, then taking it home, then playing it, involved NO cords (except for the power cord, etc.). If anything, streaming games is cord cutting in reverse. Adding a cord (a subscription over an Internet cable) where there was none before. What a poor choice of title.
Article reeks of misunderstanding, incompetence and shill.
Tying yourself to a service seems like the opposite of cord-cutting. But apparantly this will be easier, cheaper and give us access to more. Wich is all a load of horseshit. "Easier" - as in no installing games and having progress saved in the cloud means server dependence(technically drm), and decreased security. Access to more games? Yeah, like we wont see even more competition and lock-in via separate ecosystems from the big names in the industry. Cheaper? Enjoy paying multiple subscriptions for as long as you want access.
Pay $60 and play through a game once and then let it gather dust? LOL. Swap "game" for "CD" and its straight from the RIAA's mouth. It's not how the traditional model of games, much less good games, work. I have several 10 and 20+ year old games i still fire up regularly. Most games (barring phone-home drm or mmo's and the like) can be reinstalled and played at will. My combined total spent over 20 years probably wouldnt cover 2 years of subscriptions, much less to several different ecosystems all of wich spy on my usage and sell the data.
Updating older games to newer platforms is real pro, but chances are they wont bother with old stuff, and even if they do we already have GOG for that. And they have a healty consumer-friendly attitude.
we'll have Google, MS, Sony, some other company (maybe Valve?), all with game-streaming services to pick from.
guess what, it will be the same horrible situation we have now with video streaming.
some services will have game x, which is not available anywhere else, gaming company y will end it's contract with service z and from one day to the next all those games will be gone (oh, but they will be available from service w or you know, or own service because we want in on the action!).
you can also bet that all these streaming services will have their own studios only making games that will be available on their own service.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
This is not going to work out for developers and publishers. They will get their money one way or another.
Say hello to individual game subscriptions paid for on the publisher's site, so when you log in to your game then your account tells the game what you have access to. We already see this with fortnite and pubg.
We got a lot of articles about cross network play that received few comments but they kept coming every time MS's Phil Spencer spoke about it, getting articles about Halo that few people are commenting on (how do they get pushed up in the firehose?), articles about how MS is going to "go big" at E3 to show their streaming tech, now an article about how people are undergoing a "major disruption" with steaming games.... Which makes absolutely no sense because we've had them for over a decade, including exactly what the summary is talking about such as including all DLC, Netflix style choose what you want to play, look at PS Now it does all of this and nobody cares. You could play it on your PC, on your console, on a tablet, built in on your smart TV with no set top box needed, but still makes up around 1% of the games market.
How is this a major disruption exactly? The amount of hyperbole and sheer push for these kinds of stories that not many people care about leads me to believe someone is really wishing this shit was true and wanting people to buy in to it but the numbers just don't back it up. Someone wants this bad.
Sounds great for the gamer. However, any gaming platform (cloud or otherwise) needs killer content to survive. What is the incentive for a developer to spend AAA budget on something that's considered just a small part of a low-cost package deal to customers? The ROI and time to recoop the investment (and make profit) won't be sustainable for a studio.
Clearly there's huge wins that use this model (Fortnite was mentioned). However, fortnite is a FPS/Battle Royale game. How would this work for say a single player RPG or say the next major single player action flick like Uncharted? How would those developers (and their publishers) justify development costs?
If anything it's giving you a cord (to hang with?). Amongst all the digital storefronts existing nowadays, GoG still remains my favourite for not being so cordy.
They've been trying to keep people from getting into their games to look around for decades. How can you get into a game's files to muck around when you don't even have a copy of the game at all?
FC Closer
Most games are streamed entirely on Twitch/like sites, so there's no need to buy them. I would have bought lots of games had they not been streamed on Twitch first. Unless the game isn't a story-driven one, there's little reason to pick it up and play it.
Disclaimer in big text on the packaging and game advertisements is needed along with a detailed list of what parts of the game work for local play without internet connection, internet based play without subscription and internet play with subscription.
"This game requires an internet connection. It will be playable for at least 2 years after initial release date. Single player campaign mode is more of a demo with limited functionality."
Based on the EA page FIFA 14 online lasted 4 years from Sep 2013 to Oct 2017. Don't know if there is anything in FIFA 14 which can be played without an internet connection or of the successive versions where you collect player cards will even function after EA shuts down the servers.
So, expect most games to last 3 years or less; and if you are budget minded and buy the game 1 year after release, you will get 1.5 years of use.
https://www.ea.com/service-updates/2017 is the EA server shutdown page.
This is an evil invention. Do not support it, do not sell it, do not do it.
FUCK RENTING EVERYTHING for worse response times, worse feel, worse games. FUCK IT!
Why not regulate this so the public has access to "Universal Basic Entertainment" to simulate how it was in the good old days of antenna TV? A basic Steam/GoG/Netflix offering that every resident can access anywhere. It will be funded by huge companies that shop around for the best state tax incentives.
If you're always connected, isn't that the exact *opposite* of what the title suggests?
This Ties you to an internet connection, and you can't play if you don't have one.
Cord Cutting implies (at least to me) that you don't need a connection to play. The exception is cooperative or competitive play with friends.
Am I the only one that misses the Good Old Days when we could play Starcraft (or Warcraft, or Doom) without a server, between friends?
LAN Parties will be a thing of the past if this goes through. I will certainly be left out. I don't (and Won't) have a Steam account for exactly this reason.
I'd say without a doubt that subscription game services are the exact opposite of cord cutting.
When people leave expensive TV subscription services from cable companies like Spectrum, we call that "cord-cutting" as we remove that complex and pricey relationship to a cable company from our lives.
Initiating that exact sort of relationship in gaming would be replacing that cord and getting hooked into a subscription.
Subscription services are popular with companies who want their products to be sticky and who want to enjoy monthly/yearly recurring revenue, but by no means do any of these constitute cord-cutting.