Mike Rose, founder of No More Robots, may be the canary in the coalmine when it comes to game streaming services changing not only how games are consumed, but the potential dangers on the indie developer landscape.
But here’s the catch:
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) February 6, 2019
None of these platforms want to pay anything upfront. Instead, they want to pay us “per number of hours” that their users play our games, compared to how many hours their users are playing games overall. Which is obviously going to be *shit* for indie devs
Apparently over a DOZEN different services have reached out to Mike over the course of the last half-year. What’s worse, some of these services don’t even want to actually PAY for the games. They would rather implement a revenue sharing scaled to time played across the platform’s subscribers. He continues:
So let’s say in 5 years, if Netflix-style subscription models have become the norm, and no-one is paying for games anymore, a la what happened with both music and TV… how are indie devs even making money anymore?
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) February 6, 2019
They’re not, is the horrible answer.
Can you see yourself being a part of 6 or 7 different services? Sounds more enticing to a consumer (as Mike mentions later), but how can a developer make money and grow, if nobody is paying full price for their games? In some cases “full price” is $5! The potential for the domino to fall and cause a catastrophic disaster for the indie dev community is terrifying. Mike continues to lay out the path of destruction:
To clarify: From a consumer standpoint, I *love* sub models. I currently use Netflix, Now TV, Amazon Video, Spotify, Xbox Game Pass…
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) February 6, 2019
It’s not that I’m rallying against them — I just think we could do with having a real conversation about how they should be implemented best
So what do you say? Let’s have a discussion about this ourselves. I am honestly losing count of the subscriptions I belong to. All the “free games” I “own”. The thing is, without the subscription, the privilege of owning the game is out the window. Besides losing indie devs completely, I worry about the AAA publishers all adopting the Free-to-Play model and microtransactioning the hell out of us. Remember: Apex Legends and Fortnite are cool and all, but we still get God of War and Super Smash Bros. Indie developers don’t have the luxury of a massive publisher behind them. The potential for a Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrafice will fall by the wayside, wouldn’t it?
What do you think? Is this an overreaction? Is this the beginning of the end of the way we consume video games?
