monthly subscription for full access to all games

[Venatos]

maybe its just me, but a monthly subscription to have unlimited access to all the games on steam sounds like a good idea to me.
while you wouldnt "own" any of the games, it would also save you from spending 60bucks on a game that you play for 5-10hours and loose interrest, practicly wasting your money.
this way you spend money to play what you like and have access to all the games to find the ones you enjoy.(including new releases)

something around 30bucks a month would be worth it for me tbh.
that would be a "gaming as a service" i could get behind.
i personaly might even go up to 50/month just for the convenience of it.

but how would you get the money to the gamedevelopers?
splitting the monthly fee between the devs based on playtime could be an idea, you know, like youtube red/prime.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by Andrei:

yeah but i see that comming with big publishers Square Enix Bandai Namco Capcom Activision THQ Nordiq and all other big ones i bet they are going the same route like Electronic Arts since Valve allowed EA to bring EA access on Steam its only a matter of time big publishers are creating something like that as EA.

I'm just giving a more fair and likely pricing scheme if it were to happen, then what the OP did. Besides, many of those you mentioned don't even have stores of their own like Steam, so we are assuming things remain the same in that aspect.

It is only meant as an example.

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

I really dislike the idea, tbh.

Me too. For the same reasons I don't play subscription-based games.
I pay the subscription and then I feel forced to 'play the money worth of it' just because I've paid it. Makes gaming feel like work pretty fast.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

I really dislike the idea, tbh.

Me too. For the same reasons I don't play subscription-based games.
I pay the subscription and then I feel forced to 'play the money worth of it' just because I've paid it. Makes gaming feel like work pretty fast.

Because otherwise you feel like you're wasting money and sunk cost fallacy is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

[Blitz4]

This is what you want.
It's $1

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/pc-games

[RedLightning]

Steam servers are terrible to begin with .. just imagine if they pulled a stunt like this what would happen to them.

yea.

[Cathulhu]

Originally posted by Blitz4:

This is what you want.
It's $1

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/pc-games

Only for the first month.

[Blitz4]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

Originally posted by Blitz4:

This is what you want.
It's $1

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/pc-games

Only for the first month.

And?

[Venatos]

i dont see the problem, either i buy games for 50bucks on average per month, or i have a 50buck subscription, makes no difference to steam or the devs, same money for them, just distributed based on gamequality(what people actually play) instead of marketing budget.
... but i guess i can see how that would be a bad deal for some publishers...

[tacoshy]

Developers have high cost for a game. Assume a game needs "mere" 2 years for devolpment which for an AAA game is actually super fast. Then you have a staff of around 100-200 ppl workign on the game. With an average low payment of 3k USD per month you would already pay around 10 Million USD for the staff that work directly on the game to develop (actually way more). Then you need the office, electricty, hardware, testers, advertisement, distribution... so a rough estimation of 50 million USD to the point where you sell the game.

Thatws why the need then also to charge 70 USD+ per game. Also if they make less then 1-2 millions copies sold they would lose money and have to cover there income with other games in case a game should flop.

Now assume you have a person that pays 10$ per month to paly all their games for free when a single game cost them 50 million to develop and sale, where would they make then profit? Tehre is no reason for the sue to buy the game, he can play it through. and after that they play other games and wouldnt need to buy the game either as they wills till own the pass for the other games. Means if you take the 30.000 games on steam into account they would have to sell the game practically for less then 1 cent instead of 70 USD

[Start_Running]

You also need to rememeber that any game that does well has to absorb the losses of the games that didn't do so well. and pay towards the development of the next game.

[0nion_man_LV]

Horrible idea. Forget it!

[dave]

This could only work in the same way Amazon prime works.

- Monthly GaaS fee (20 bucks or something) to Valve for Steam access + Valve titles (Prime eligibility example)
+ Publisher specific rental fee per title (It could be a rolling fee for as long as you wish to
continue playing it, or a standard 10 bucks for a week or something.

That said, I don't think it's workable for the majority of Steam gamers.

[rudeboyrg]

I know this is an old post, but I'm reviving it.

You are talking about Spotify and Youtube music but for games. The way they pay the artists / publishers is based on how many people listen to which songs, how long, and how often. That is how they divide the money.

Steam would need to charge approx 60-80/month. And no, it wouldn't just divide the amount equally among all game publishers. But your 80/month would go respectively to the game developers based on which games you play, how much, and how often (after steam takes their cut of course).

There is a flaw in this of course , which is different from music. Most songs are approx 3-5 minutes long. In music streaming, first 5-10 seconds are ignored for payout (they assume you are browsing, skimming, or looking for appropriate music). After that they being counting seconds for payout. If you listen to full song, recording artist gets full amount (eg: $0.20). If you listen to half the song, they get ($0.10), etc. The more people listen and the more times you listen the more they get paid.

If you have a favorite song, I bet you listened to that same song 50 times. Probably 20 times in one day. That is easy because song is 3 minutes long. But what if about your favorite game? How is that counted? Especially if a game takes 300 hours to complete and what do you consider a game to be completed? What if the game doesn't have a completed status. What constitutes a game developer getting full payment?

You can't use same standards for game as you do for a 3 minute song. They would have to define what constitutes just browsing, searching, or skimming means in each game to justify the point when the developer can now start getting paid. And you can't pay a developer based on length of time spend playing game because you are penalizing short games and rewarding long games. Do you really want developers to focus on making horrible, boring 500 hour long games just to get paid more rather than short 3 hour amazing games that penalizes them with less money?

If they work out those issues then yes, you could have a "spotify-like" subscription service for gaming. But just like spotify and other music streaming services, not all publishers would be willing to sign on and you would find that your gaming library would mysteriously change, dissapear randomly as games you were in the middle of playing would suddenly get removed due to publishing agreements.

[Venatos]

i am going to argue that the boring 500hour grindfest is going to see less playtime from me than the amazing 3 hour game. i am more likely to play the 3 hour game twice than to finish the first hour of the grindfest, but thats just me, so i see your point.

i think simply splitting the monthlyfee(after steams cut) between the games you played based on playtime of each game is fair. no need to measure "completion".
in the end better(more popular) games get more money because more people play them.

grindfests have so much playtime globaly because they are "something to do", not of fun or quality. im positive that most people would go ham on a massive library of "new" games they just got access to with the "steampass"(or whatever it would be called) and rather quickly forget about the grindgame.

doesnt matter if its a 10buck indigame, or a 60buck AAA-Title, where i spent my gametime, that is where my money should go.
im sure im not the only one that regretted a crapy AAA 60buck game after 1hour or spent 10s if not hundreds of fun filled hours on a tiny 10buck indigame.
both of these just feel wrong.

thnx for the necro btw. ;)

[nullable]

Have you tried Microsoft Game Pass? It's pretty great. It's like $10 a month. It hardly includes every game on the MS Game Store but titles are being rotated in and out fairly regularly and what's available is more than enough to satisfy the cost of the subscription. And now it includes EA Play too.

I canceled my Humble Bundle legacy plan as a result of Game Pass, it's just a better deal. And I think it's probably the future. But I don't think every store needs to implement it either.

I've gotten to try out and play a bunch of games I was interested in, but not interested enough to buy, even on sale. And mostly I found that the those games are fine, but my instinct was right so and being on subscription it's a bit easier to walk away because I haven't committed to buying them.

If your Steam library is big enough already. If you only play games through once and owning them perpetually isn't the most important thing for you. Game Pass is hard to beat right now.

That being said I don't think I'd buy a game from the MS store.

And one way Game Pass doesn't screw developers aside from games being rotated in and out is most of the time (that I've seen) the base game might be on game pass, but the DLC is not. So if you want it you have to buy the game and the DLC.

And I'm not sure how the revenue from the subscription is split up, or if it's just some sort of loss leader. I mean it did get me to use the MS store which I was never going to use as a standard store. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. And at least some of those people will buy games from MS too.