Steam should have game pass ?

[timecop]

So I recently started using game pass (1$ for 3 months, trial) and I think I might play games there more often than on steam. Its incredible value for money. Steam should do something like that.

[Morgan Fun Gamer]

Yep

[feytharn]

And all the designers, coders and assosiated staff will rejoice and vow to, from now on, do full time work for mere cents.

Seriously: The number of games available on Steam (as compared to pretty much every platform that offers a game pass) makes something like that very unlikely. Maybe other publishers (like EA already does) will offer a 'Publisher Pass', but a gamepass for Steam will most likely not happen.

[Jarek has quit gaming]

Ubisoft+, Game Pass, EA Play, Playstation Now.. Subscription services seem to be the future.

Can't imagine Steam won't jump on that boat aswell.

feytharn eredeti hozzászólása:

Seriously: The number of games available on Steam (as compared to pretty much every platform that offers a game pass) makes something like that very unlikely.

Why? Just like gamepass they can add and remove games from the list every now and then.

Developers can apply to get their games featured and Steam pays them a fee when accepting them. I don't see a problem with it.

[J4MESOX4D]

timecop1994 eredeti hozzászólása:

So I recently started using game pass (1$ for 3 months, trial) and I think I might play games there more often than on steam. Its incredible value for money. Steam should do something like that.

It would be incredible value for money for gamers but not for publishers or developers on this platform. The only way to implement such as thing as mentioned above is if passes were publisher-based in which they would have to opt in. Steam can't simply decide to add a pass for $15 on a platform with almost 40,000 games.

These are either curated time-based passes or in-house ones attributed to the store owners like EA and Ubisoft. Not many developers would opt-in because they would make far more money through sales even at extremely high discounts than a slice of a pass.

The best Steam could probably do is maybe a monthly pass with 12-15 hand-selected games in each in which the publishers have agreed to.

[rawWwRrr]

Monkeymind eredeti hozzászólása:

Ubisoft+, Game Pass, EA Play, Playstation Now.. Subscription services seem to be the future.

that's not necessarily a good thing.

[Cathulhu]

Considering Microsoft started removing games from the game pass, i have to agree.

[Jarek has quit gaming]

rawWwRrr eredeti hozzászólása:

Monkeymind eredeti hozzászólása:

Ubisoft+, Game Pass, EA Play, Playstation Now.. Subscription services seem to be the future.

that's not necessarily a good thing.

True, but that can also be said many times in the past, when companies started with microtransactions, xp boosters in paid games, paid mappacks, lootboxes, etc etc..

Apparently subscription services make enough profits for companies to put a big amount of focus on. Remember the time people actually went to the store to buy pc games? Digital stores have almost completely removed that part of at least pc gaming. Subscription based gaming might be next, whether it's a good thing or not.

[Kargor]

A curated pass would probably work on Steam, and publishers ARE likely to want to participate. It doesn't matter whether their share is a fixed fraction of the monthly fee while they are on, or whether it's based on actual distribution of gametime spent by users -- chances are they are getting more money through the pass than they get from people not buying the game at all.

Ignoring the publisher passes (which are a different beast entirely, as they are meant to lock players to a specific publisher catalog that they have already paid for), the question is whether existing "rotating" passes across a larger library of games feature a lot of newly released games, or whether they focus on older games that have already had their full-price sales, and are now trying to catch people that are not focused on wanting that particular game no matter what.

A course, a major obstacle to a pass curated by Steam is that Steam doesn't want to curate anything... and seeing how their various guessing-systems could just as well just roll a die and probably come up with better results, having an automatically curated pass probably won't work...

[Brian9824]

It won't happen, The difference is all those subscriptions are owned and operated by the game owners or at least one major publisher.

Steam fully supports game passes being made and sold thru steam in which they take their cut just like with EA Pass. It doesn;t make sense for steam to try to negotiate with multiple developers and create a game pass when the developers themselves are already free to do this on their own. Indie dev's could band togethor and release an Indie pass, or a visual novel pass, or a sports pass, etc.

Also in the unlikely event that Steam ever did a gamepass, you realize it would be for an incredibly tiny portion of steam's games right? Your not going to see a gamepass with all of steam's games.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

There are (at least) two parameters to consider in the implementation of this idea:

* What/how many games the subscription would cover
* Who/how many people the subscription would cover

If this were an optional subscription that allowed access to a Valve's own games, that would make the most sense and be the easiest to implement, but it'd also have the least impact.

Valve could potentially increase that scope by partnering with some bigger-name publishers, though I don't know how they'd structure the revenue that comes from such a subscription.

Covering all games on Steam with a subscription would probably be difficult, unless Valve devised some new subscription model for all publishers. That is possible, but could take a while.

Meanwhile, if the subscription were mandatory for all Steam users, that would go over horribly.

[Mad Scientist]

This is another example of "just because everyone else is, doesn't mean you should".

Not everyone needs to do the same stuff as the other, that's why social media is often horrible, and downloading a launcher / service for each developer is just bloating systems needlessly just so people can push microtransactions and hunt for whales. There's a reason such systems are strongly disliked among regular users.