Comment on A Game Pass for indie games: meet Indie Pass, a $6.99-a-month subscription launching with 70 titles
Pika@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I resound with the other commenters, this is a hard pass for me.
I got enough subscriptions to deal with than have a subscription for the cheaper style games.
This type of model isn’t even going to be helpful to the developers either, it may increase publicity but, the article says itself that it bases money earned on gametime and if people played a lot each dev is going to have diminishing returns… Nobody buys a subscription model with the expectation they are only going to play 1 or 2 games, people play as many games as they can, that way they can get the most out of the subscription. for 6.99 a month, even locking myself down to once a week only, if I played 3 inde titles a week, for an hour each, thats 12 games a month, which means that 6.99 is going to be less than 60 cents to each developer a month, and that is ignoring whatever cost they charge as a platform fee.
Sure the argument can be made that thats still money the dev wouldn’t be getting otherwise but, I see this as more of a disadvantage to inde studios. I think the example they used in the article is very optimistic and not super realistic to what will happen.
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The thing that might be missing from your hard math is addiction. You’re right that most games will be a blaze-past tryout period as you described, but sometimes will have 6 hour stories that you get invested into, while others are roguelikes that actually become compelling for 20+ hours. Which ones will form that addiction is unclear from browsing a store page, so it’s nicer to have complete access to them.
I’m also a little curious what worthwhile subscriptions you have. Most things I used to sub to, like Game Pass, have gone up to $15/$20-month and I decided to leave. Something simpler at $7/mo is a bit more agreeable to me. I spend more than that on some individual Patreons.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I intentionally left addiction out of the equation as I don’t expect the everyday person is going to have that occur to them, and if it did occur that’s only going to make it /worse/ for the devs on the platform as it’s almost certainly going to favor rougelites and proc gen over story and action titles. I see no use of this.
as for my subs? I left the gaming sub field almost entirely. My only gaming sub I still have is humble bundle, because you own every game as long as you had choice the month it was released. I had gamepass ultimate for 2 years as part of the xbox X all access pass thing they did but, I found that there was very little actual decent “I want to play” games. I would play a few of them(like 6-8 of them) a month and then say “ok ill come back to them some day”, and then just not. For the price of a AAA title every 3 months (now a AAA title every other month) it wasn’t worth it for me.
From the consumer side, I feel the same way with this pass, I could take that same amount, and buy 2 or sometimes 3 of the games listed on this and have them to keep, and be helping the devs way more money wise.