With the ambience of this year's E3 trade show still hanging in the air (I guess), I figured this a good time to discuss video games. Namely the future of video games as a medium.
Here's what I want to pose to everyone today (but especially to @
The Xl and @
Ethereal): as of this year, there are now more people playing video games through increasingly Netflix-like subscription services than through traditional direct-purchasing models like buying physical or digital copies of games. Other entertainment mediums like music and TV have undergone an analogous transformation over the last decade, though gaming has taken a bit longer owing to a stronger ownership culture that has persisted around this particular medium. Trump's elimination of net neutrality will probably also slow momentum toward subscription/cloud-based gaming for obvious reasons, ensuring the ongoing viability of at least semi-traditional gaming consoles for at least one more console generation. (Microsoft and Sony have both announced new ones that are expected to release in the fall of next year.) But the long-term trend seems evident.
Demand for physical games has bottomed out, with corresponding retailers like GameStop suffering major losses in recent years. At present, only 17% of video game purchases are acquisitions of physical copies according to
the Entertainment Software Association's latest annual report and the shift to digital and especially subscription-based gaming of late has caused VG Chartz to abandon its traditional business of recording game sales data, as it's becoming increasingly futile, being as a growing number of publishers don't measure a game's success in sale terms anymore and therefore don't bother releasing sales data. Google has recently announced that they'll be releasing their first gaming console this fall...and it won't even offer physical or digital purchases; it will be
entirely subscription-based streaming. Microsoft and Sony are planning to seriously beef up their subscription services on their next consoles as well (in fact, it has been reported that Microsoft may even offer a low-priced model of their next system that, like Google's upcoming Stadia system, will be exclusively subscription-based, priced at about half of what the corresponding traditional console will cost) and even Nintendo now offers a subscription service of its own for quick, otherwise free access to a bunch of mostly first-party games from their old NES catalog, although the latter is hardly competition for any of the former as a service.
Subscription-based services increasingly allow players to access "their" games on multiple devices instead of just the TV and the free-to-play access model has proven to encourage people to experiment more with different game genres than they would normally play if they instead had to pay say some $60 up-front and thus also to play more video games even outside of their subscription catalog. Publishers are rushing to provide these services now since, as Newzoo founder Peter Warman aptly put it, the gaming industry is facing a lack of "fresh, innovative blockbuster titles replacing the current, aging top titles." People here know this is something I've complained about for years; that nearly all the real creativity in the gaming business today seems to come from smaller, independent developers rather than from the mainstream AAA market, as the astronomical cost of making mainstream, AAA games today has rendered major publishers increasingly risk-averse in terms of what content they will allow developers to release. Real, substantive innovation today, accordingly, mostly only happens when major publishers aren't in the equation at all. Subscription services help combat that dilemma the industry faces by effectively re-monetizing a publisher's older games that have already been through sales.
What it all suggests to me is that, whether their Stadia platform itself succeeds or not, perhaps it's Google here that's ahead of the curve in launching a totally subscription-based system. Whether this first such machine sells well or not, it's very announcement seems to me to portend the sort of direction that Microsoft, Sony, and even Nintendo may eventually wind up going after perhaps one last quasi-normal console generation that still offers the traditional purchases in addition to more robust streaming. SO...
1) Am I right? Will this upcoming console generation be the last one to offer games for actual purchase?
AND
2) If so, is that a good thing or a bad thing on balance, in your view?