BTW, didn't mean for this to get so long. Just kinda ended up that way.
Everyone here is posting great stuff. I thought I'd go a bit to the dark side. I think we're going to see publishers and console manufacturers slowly try to get rid of the concept of game ownership. You saw Microsoft try to do it early on with the Xbox One games, and everyone rebelled, forcing them to undo all their limitations. But the industry is still moving steadily towards that outcome. Sony's push toward it is much more subtle with Playstation Now, focusing first on older titles. Soon you'll see titles simultaneously launch on store shelves and Playstation Now. Then you'll get your first Playstation Now exclusive, perhaps starting with Indie titles that won't cause much outcry. But as Playstation Now's userbase grows and begins to rise to physical copy levels, major games will become exclusive to Playstation Now too.
There's a huge incentive for console manufacturers to get rid of physical copies. They can give up the expensive practices of manufacturing game disks and the logistics of shipping. Not to mention get rid of the used gaming market to boot. A market that console manufacturers have always disliked for not getting a cut. For good reason in my book, I believe once you buy a physical game, it becomes your property that they shouldn't have a hand in.
But an even bigger plus for them is increased revenue, when all your games are behind a monthly pay wall, everyone will end up paying more for games as a whole. There are people that are regular game buyers who preorder and buy new games every month, but those people are really a minority. The much more common group of people end up buying a few games a year, if that. There's actually a number we can find to illustrate this, the tie-ratio also called the attach-rate. But basically it's how many games people buy per person on average for each console. Here's a source to find tie rates. Current gen isn't listed yet.
Lets take the PS3 data and do some math. The current lifespan tie-ratio for the PS3 is 12.76. Altogether using a $60 game price, people on average spent $765.6 in total for games for the market life of the PS3. Seems pretty good but here's the telling thing, the market life of the PS3 until the PS4 was around 7 years! That means that people on average only bought 1.82 games a year! Remember this is before the price of manufacturing and shipping the game is factored in. But now lets see how this works with Playstation Now as the leading model for getting games. Assuming the PS4 has a similar lifespan, 7 years, lets multiply that with the number of months, 12, and the monthly price of Now, $20. That comes out to people paying $1680 on average for the lifetime of their device. Remember this is on top of the console price too. A significant jump up from $765.6, which itself is a bit inflated since it doesn't account for costs and games that are less than $60. So you can see there's a significant motive for console makers to move to a subscription model like this.
I could go into this in more detail but I'll stop now because it's already getting a bit too long. But what will ultimately prove whether this happens or not is if gamers go for it. How do you feel about game ownership in the future?
like you i added more to the dark side of gaming, like you i see a dark future ahead of us, i completely agree with everything you said, and i actually mention some of your points on my wall of text, it just that i did it with broken English xD
As for the games ownership in the future, like now we don't own any, and I don't think i need to tell you we never did, unfortunately as you know, we only license software we don't actually own it, yeah i know the sense of ownership is different if you have the game in your hands on DVD, but god damn you don't even own it :( but if that game is stored on a compny server and you stream it, you can say goodbye to the very little control you had, they can do anything they want with it, dark future ahead of us dark future...
You're right about us not technically owning the games even now. But luckily the act of buying and having a game still feels like ownership. Unfortunately there has been a concentrated effort to remove ownership across many fields not just gaming. I don't think it's a conspiracy, I just think it's a trend as businesses realize the potential. I think the same thing is happening with cars and will really come about when self driving cars arrive. Instead of going out and buying a car, most people will pay a subscription for access to a car when they need it, maybe with a distance limitation.
One day in the future us old timers will be complaining about our car share being late and reminiscing about times when we still had driveways and a car whenever we needed it. While teens will ask, "What's a driveway?"
I guess the bigger question is, is this really a bad thing? I'm not sure myself.
Is it a bad thing? yeah at least in my opinion, imagine not owning your car! or not even have it available when you need it, or being stranded in the middle of nowhere "your subscribed mileage has ended, please subscribe to another mileage pack to keep driving" what the fuck is this :(
BTW, didn't mean for this to get so long. Just kinda ended up that way.
Everyone here is posting great stuff. I thought I'd go a bit to the dark side. I think we're going to see publishers and console manufacturers slowly try to get rid of the concept of game ownership. You saw Microsoft try to do it early on with the Xbox One games, and everyone rebelled, forcing them to undo all their limitations. But the industry is still moving steadily towards that outcome. Sony's push toward it is much more subtle with Playstation Now, focusing first on older titles. Soon you'll see titles simultaneously launch on store shelves and Playstation Now. Then you'll get your first Playstation Now exclusive, perhaps starting with Indie titles that won't cause much outcry. But as Playstation Now's userbase grows and begins to rise to physical copy levels, major games will become exclusive to Playstation Now too.
There's a huge incentive for console manufacturers to get rid of physical copies. They can give up the expensive practices of manufacturing game disks and the logistics of shipping. Not to mention get rid of the used gaming market to boot. A market that console manufacturers have always disliked for not getting a cut. For good reason in my book, I believe once you buy a physical game, it becomes your property that they shouldn't have a hand in.
But an even bigger plus for them is increased revenue, when all your games are behind a monthly pay wall, everyone will end up paying more for games as a whole. There are people that are regular game buyers who preorder and buy new games every month, but those people are really a minority. The much more common group of people end up buying a few games a year, if that. There's actually a number we can find to illustrate this, the tie-ratio also called the attach-rate. But basically it's how many games people buy per person on average for each console. Here's a source to find tie rates. Current gen isn't listed yet.
Lets take the PS3 data and do some math. The current lifespan tie-ratio for the PS3 is 12.76. Altogether using a $60 game price, people on average spent $765.6 in total for games for the market life of the PS3. Seems pretty good but here's the telling thing, the market life of the PS3 until the PS4 was around 7 years! That means that people on average only bought 1.82 games a year! Remember this is before the price of manufacturing and shipping the game is factored in. But now lets see how this works with Playstation Now as the leading model for getting games. Assuming the PS4 has a similar lifespan, 7 years, lets multiply that with the number of months, 12, and the monthly price of Now, $20. That comes out to people paying $1680 on average for the lifetime of their device. Remember this is on top of the console price too. A significant jump up from $765.6, which itself is a bit inflated since it doesn't account for costs and games that are less than $60. So you can see there's a significant motive for console makers to move to a subscription model like this.
I could go into this in more detail but I'll stop now because it's already getting a bit too long. But what will ultimately prove whether this happens or not is if gamers go for it. How do you feel about game ownership in the future?
like you i added more to the dark side of gaming, like you i see a dark future ahead of us, i completely agree with everything you said, and i actually mention some of your points on my wall of text, it just that i did it with broken English xD
As for the games ownership in the future, like now we don't own any, and I don't think i need to tell you we never did, unfortunately as you know, we only license software we don't actually own it, yeah i know the sense of ownership is different if you have the game in your hands on DVD, but god damn you don't even own it :( but if that game is stored on a compny server and you stream it, you can say goodbye to the very little control you had, they can do anything they want with it, dark future ahead of us dark future...
You're right about us not technically owning the games even now. But luckily the act of buying and having a game still feels like ownership. Unfortunately there has been a concentrated effort to remove ownership across many fields not just gaming. I don't think it's a conspiracy, I just think it's a trend as businesses realize the potential. I think the same thing is happening with cars and will really come about when self driving cars arrive. Instead of going out and buying a car, most people will pay a subscription for access to a car when they need it, maybe with a distance limitation.
One day in the future us old timers will be complaining about our car share being late and reminiscing about times when we still had driveways and a car whenever we needed it. While teens will ask, "What's a driveway?"
I guess the bigger question is, is this really a bad thing? I'm not sure myself.
Here's an interesting article for anyone interested in this
scary...
Is it a bad thing? yeah at least in my opinion, imagine not owning your car! or not even have it available when you need it, or being stranded in the middle of nowhere "your subscribed mileage has ended, please subscribe to another mileage pack to keep driving" what the fuck is this :(