Games

Good to see them calling these shitty AAA publishers and their terrible, anti-consumer ideas out.

The thing is that this guy is not the head of a public company where shareholders demand massive and continually growing profits. So he acts in the interests of the consumer, the customer, the gamer. But if this was a public company, shareholders would buy shares and then demand he do something to grow that share price, so they can sell the shares later for profit.

When that happens we see that CEOs do everything they can to maximize profits, like promising release dates in earnings calls.

The difference between private and public companies is the single biggest threat to us all because as soon as the company acts in the exclusive interest of profit, everything else gets fucked. And most do.

That means employees, customers, everyone. Only the 1% benefit from the gutting of everyone else.

I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you'd have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.

Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.

Only reason I never got into World of Warcraft

Here's an idea, I give you money for a game, I download it off the store front, I keep it forever.

"You only have a licen..."

Shut the fuck up, if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.

I mean, no shit.

These days we are expected to be subscribed to tons of shit, including stuff that simply doesn't justify subscriptions. We know it's not a benefit to us, but to the companies that dish them out.

Baldur's Gate 3 boss

Wow, Larian really breaking the 4th wall in this game.
One of those boss fights where you really regret having to fight him because he actually has a good point.
Probably still evil though.

He’s right

God damn I love Larian studios.

That's a big part of it. Right now, Microsoft tries to put a number of big titles in their subscription service, a bunch of filler titles they can buy from publishers for cheap, and maybe a few that sold more popularly than they expected.

If subscription gaming becomes the majority, Microsoft and other streaming providers get to pick the contenders and not much else gets seen. Games like Lethal Company won't have a sudden boom in popularity because it wasn't on Microsoft's radar.

As much as I agree with his sentiment, this title is bullshit - he never wrote "gamers don't want subscriptions" but that they shouldn't want that due to where it might lead.

"Gamers" aren't some hivemind entity that wants a specific thing. Many people don't worry whether an idea pushed by the publishers will have a long term negative effect on the industry, they just want to have fun with their hobby.

Look at microtransactions - there's a lot of negative discussion about them and yet they bring huge amounts of money, who's to say if the same won't happen with subscription services? We might not like it but majority doesn't necessarily care.

Sorry for being pedantic about a title but third-parties changing someone's words is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

Wait, a CEO said that? What's the catch?

Corporations want gamers to want mass subscriptions because they want to rent out their games forever instead of getting only a single payment for their product. And then they find flimsy excuses to push subscriptions for products that do not warrant subscriptions but are mutilated to squeeze some way of adding subscriptions into them. And then the corporations let games without subscriptions fail while pretending that subscription-based services are delivered because there's demand and not because they don't want to deliver finished products that don't generate easy endless trickling revenue streams.

Tell Sony, they got so fucking greedy with their PS Plus.

I mean, this is a very Captain Obvious take. The problem is; it won't change and it'll only get worse.

No one wants mass subscriptions. "Gamers" is a red herring.

Good. This guy is not a piece of shit then, unlike that other guy who runs Ubishit.

Oh dear he's not been a good CEO is he, he isn't talking out his arse at all.

Ubisoft: Whatever, hold my subscription.

I hope they don't say gamers need to pay a subscription fee to keep their purchased games.

Was it Raphael or which BG3 boss said this?