Because if I happen to post so and so game crashes a lot on PC (even those I don't buy), you say if only there was a way to play games without them crashing, etc. If you're a PC gamer you know not to buy on day one and wait until updates are out and in exchange you get tons of benefit including such as I pay once and I have it on any PC and also on my handheld and I only have to buy once.

Nobody is forcing them to put their game on GamePass for free.

Studios wouldn't sign the deals with Gamepass if it wasn't worth it. People act like MS isn't paying the studios, which is silly.

FWIW:

Really not understanding the discourse about Expedition 33 here or what it has to do with this thread which is primarily about studio closures.

Is the studio being shut down or something?

The game is doing very good sales on PC and PS5, and the “Game Pass” effect is that the studio got paid upfront to have it there. Any studio doing Game Pass deals (or PS+ Extra deals, for that matter) factors that into their metrics for success.

As noted above, nobody is putting their games up without getting paid. Sure those contracts vary, but that’s the case for any other service, too.

I guess I just worry about the viability of the medium. MS is a huge company and they're not going to go broke. But these studios have to be missing out on a ton of income if a game is a huge hit like Expedition 33. And they'll still shutter studios that produce bombs like that vampire game.
Sony doesn't give away their AAA games like Astro Bot or Ghost of Tsushima on their premium subscription service at launch and I think they're better off for it financially.
It's like in 2021 when we got Warner and Disney films at release on their streaming services. It was on one hand a cool thing to get for free, but it also did a lot of damage to the industry. And to be honest it made the products released feel a little less special.
But hey, if companies like Activision and Blizzard can remain just as successful without selling nearly as many copies of Call or Duty and Diablo, we'll good for them.

One question : those PC numbers : are those all retail purchases, or do GPU copies show up on the Steam numbers?

Sold. And the game sold a million so it's pretty evenly split.

FWIW, your statement makes me* think of the food delivery industry... So many of the restaurants are really getting the shit end of the stick, due to exorbitant fees paid to the delivery companies, but they also feel that if they opt out of these services, they'll really take a beating with the size of their customer base.

*disclaimer, my days in the industry far predate anything like Gamepass, or Steam.

Also the studios acquired by MS don't really have a say in the process. They could have been working on a game at Bethesda or Activision for years before it was purchased. And they could have stood to have made a fortune if their game was a smash hit. Not saying MS wants studios to fail, but maybe their primary interest is in seeing that Game Pass succeeds, even at the cost of game sales.
It's not analogous to the indie studios cited as support for the GPU model.

* checks thread title

I think we are continuing to discuss the increasingly tricky business of video games, n'est pas?

It’s a valid point. However, the difference is that with food delivery, while there are multiple options, those services are still the only viable delivery options left; both for consumers and restaurants. Nobody’s hiring drivers dedicated to their single business anymore and nobody wants those jobs either since the work is less frequent. In other words, food delivery is effectively locked behind a service that charges extra fees. At least consumers have the option to pick up orders themselves instead of relying on a service.

With gaming subscriptions, nothing is exclusive to the service; you can always buy and sell the games. Those options haven’t gone away just because the subscription exists.

The argument some are making seems to be somehow both that Game Pass is too small to make developers any real money and yet also that Game Pass is too big that it cannibalizes the sales. I just don’t see how both are true. Reports have shown that Game Pass subscriptions are fairly flat anyway, meaning they’re not converting people over to it; people are happily still buying those same games if they want to, and there’s nothing forcing them to commit to a subscription just to play specific games, because those games are readily available outside of the subscription.

And, while I pay for Game Pass, I also paid for deluxe upgrades and expansions, even if I didn’t pay for the base game. If COD wasn’t on the service, I likely wouldn’t have bothered playing the game at all.
Point being that it’s nice to have all of these options, and not being forced one way or another.

None of us know how much any of those games would have made, whether successful or not. We simply don’t know if they made more or less money than they would have otherwise.

Similarly, look at all the mega popular free to play games. Your argument is no different than saying those games could and should have made so much more money if they were sold at full retail prices instead, which is just impossible to know.


Looking at the past few pages of this thread before yesterday, it’s fair to say the bulk of discussion has been about actual studio closures, and less about rehashing the pros and cons of subscription services, particularly that of the last-place (by a wide margin) console maker. But, I digress, yes it’s quite a tricky industry.

Here’s hoping Marathon, and by extension, Bungie, doesn’t suffer the same fate as Concord & Firewalk, a game and studio shuttered after being considered the most expensive known flop in gaming history since E.T. on Atari. Impossible to know if it would have survived if it had been included on PS+ EssentialExtraPremium, though.

It also continues to be awful on the gaming journalism side of the fence. Valnet just bought Polygon and laid off most of its staff, and it sounds like Giant Bomb as we know it is pretty well dead at Fandom.

But Game Informer seems to be rising from the dead, right?

All great points!

I think an interesting conversation to have would be if all digital gaming has helped or hurt the industry in general. Maybe it has already been parsed out, the obvious is known, and I just haven't read enough about it.

Digital games can't be resold, thus killing the resale/used market. That should be good for the game developers because they are selling a new game every time and not missing out on the "used" game sales.

But is that hurting them from not as many people playing the game, buying extra DLC, buying the future sequel if successful, etc. because they could not get the game cheaper as a resale? I would assume that this is where the streaming subscription model helps out on that front but does it actually compliment the lack of resale marker or hurt the game company in other ways that have been mentioned here?

I'd think digital would be a boon in most areas: always available, don't have to count on retailers devoting space to it, pretty much direct control over pricing, don't have to print a disk and a case and pay to ship it, etc. If you want people to buy the DLC discount the base game and get it out there. Lots of different ways to sell your product.

The hard part is how do you get your digital game to get noticed when there are hundreds of new digital games, a ton of shovelware, and each console's "store" kinda sucks? How do you get engagement, how do you make sure people notice your game? There's a similar problem with retail shelves of course, but I find that's really the hardest part to me about digital and/or online shopping, if I'm in a store looking through games maybe I find something I like, if I have to search a huge database for it then I pretty much have to know what I want already.

Another subscription stumbling block was Star Wars Outlaws, a game I recently played to the end and really enjoyed. It's a well made AAA title with maybe the most valuable IP in gaming. But, according to Ubisoft it sold poorly, or at least below expectations. Now certainly part of that issue is Ubisoft's continued insistence on dropping games by 50% in 6 months or so. That had to hurt sales (and I myself didn't buy it until it dropped 50%). But in addition, the Ubisoft+ program allowed anyone, on PC or Xbox, full access to the game at launch for a fee of $15/mo. That was enough time to finish the game. Now that HAD to hurt sales of the game. It's hardly fair to blame the studio for those sales numbers, but it's entirely possible they will suffer layoffs as a result.

Ubisoft seems to have unrealistically high expectations for most games. Similar to Square Enix. Sometimes their numbers don't make sense.

Yeah. They churn out far too many games to expect any of them to sell as well as they think. They have different genres and IPs tied to them, but I'd say more than half of content in these open world games is the same across all of them. Played one, played them all.

And as said before, only a sucker (or someone who really needs to play a new game) pays full price for them.

But wasn't that Ubisoft's decision to add that game to the streaming list?

Don't you think they thought that decision through before doing that?

At least there's that! They're owned by Gunzilla Games, which is part of the whole web3/blockchain deal, so who knows what that'll look like long-term.

Since $69.99 became standard(ish), I don't think I've ever paid full price for a game, at least not out of pocket. Even the ones I'd gotten at launch, I'd at least redeem credit card rewards or something to get a few bucks off. I have paid MSRP for several over the past few years, but they weren't $70 games (like Split Fiction).

The only full price games I buy are nintendo games and even then if I want to go digital I use a voucher. But there is zero chance I buy an ubisoft game without a discount.

That is EXACTLY my point : Launching a successful Streaming service can run exactly counter to having a massive sales numbers at launch. It might not be possible to do both. And if the giant Corporate parent company expects a game to sell well, and then it disappoints, is that really the fault of the game developers, or the corporate strategies employed that allow players to circumvent purchasing the game at MSRP at launch?

But don't you think the "giant Corporate parent company" has at least some say in that decision or is at least briefed so they know what is going on?

I just don't understand the thought process that everyone in the business is completely ignorant of how the streaming model works, especially when it is their decision to join said streaming model and they don't have to, especially on high tier games on release date.