EA Access Hub app $5 a month $30 a year xbox one exclusive program

[Brad]

Seems weird to have a ps+ like service for just one publisher but also seems like good value.

[Dogg Thang]

It's only good value in the short term and on its own rather than seeing gaming as a whole. The splintering this begins will reduce the value of other services and, while each separate service might also be good value, everyone will quickly hit their own personal subscription threshold as the cumulative effect costs. This is small but it's already on top of PS+ or Gold for many people.

[EvilBoris]

This is just another step towards games being worthless to consumers. IOS steam and PS+ set this in motion and I'm sure it's going to end badly.

All this will bring is more DLC and more microtransactions as we move ever close to the vast majority simply not wanting to pay the full price for a game.

[Dogg Thang]

^ And this too.

It's a bad thing. This is the gaming equivalent of fracking. Very short term thinking.

[wakka]

Agreed with the above. A best case scenario outcome at this point is all games delivered via a PS Now style service - but still ever more laden with microtransactions.

Selling complete games for ?30 - ?50 is sadly not going to be sustainable in the future, I fear

[Kron]

Agreed with the above. A best case scenario outcome at this point is all games delivered via a PS Now style service

That'd be the worst case scenario, Videogames still need to be hosted locally otherwise you're throwing money away on games with bad latency and input delay.

[Guts]

You think EA are going to give up selling games for $60? Yeah, right. They aren't morons. This isn't going to replace the retail $60 games, this is just trying to squeeze all that's left out of old **** that no one wants and attack the used market. They aren't going to give their new games available for $30/year, it'll be stuff like Mass Effect, Army of Two and crap everyone has played two years ago. But hey, it's cheap so I'll subscribe for a year on corporate promises and hope, yay!

[wakka]

I'm thinking long term. Not 2014, not 2015, more like 2025 and beyond.

That'd be the worst case scenario, Videogames still need to be hosted locally otherwise you're throwing money away on games with bad latency and input delay.

The worst case scenario is that all games are streamed digitally and distributed only via a 'free' to play model. Games will almost certainly be primarily, if not eventually exclusively, delivered by digital streaming in the future. No one in the videogame hardware industry wants to continue making powerful, expensive, fault-prone boxes that cost a fortune in R&D. They would much rather sell you a cheap AppleTV-style little hockey puck that merely receives the picture of the game.

Local storage of games may continue for a while in a niche for PC gamers, but that's probably about it.

Streaming will win out in the end, because it is more convenient. BluRay is way better than Netflix - the picture and sound are much better quality, and the range of choice is far greater. But I don't know anyone except myself IRL that buys BluRays, yet I know many who subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, or both. Convenience will always win out. And a PS5 or PS6 that can launch at ?99 because it's such a simple hardware device would be a powerful proposition.

Of course, it will be married to both a mandatory subscription service and games that are designed around microtransactions.

We've already seen how much microtransaction based games can make on mobile. The revenues are frequently far in excess of what can be turned over on a standard $60 release. Better to sell lots and lots of cheap things than a few expensive things.

[EvilBoris]

You think EA are going to give up selling games for $60? Yeah, right. They aren't morons. This isn't going to replace the retail $60 games, this is just trying to squeeze all that's left out of old **** that no one wants and attack the used market. They aren't going to give their new games available for $30/year, it'll be stuff like Mass Effect, Army of Two and crap everyone has played two years ago. But hey, it's cheap so I'll subscribe for a year on corporate promises and hope, yay!

They don't want that to happen, but as the cost of games ever increases and the numbers of games sold don't scale in line with that to cover the costs and the growth that is required by a business like EA or Activision, they will simply keep the price of the base game the same and more and more of that game will be provided outside of that base cost. Just like has been happening with DLC.

They want to sell you DLC because they can't sell the "full" game for the appropriate price, which stems from our reluctance to pay more than what we've been paying for a unit price for the last 20 years.
All these free games just make that magic ?40/$60 price seem ever more increasingly expensive by comparison.

[Brad]

I think im all but done with video games now. Might be another bout of apathy but I don't think so this time. Feel sorry for future gamers though in a way as I think they'll have to go retro.

[nakamura]

Sorry what's happening? I've been busy playing awesome 16 bit games.

[EvilBoris]

Fifa 1914?

[nakamura]

It's awesome. You have to dodge bombs whilst losing to the Germans on penalties.

[Asura]

Kinda glad Sony have done this, if I'm honest.

Many recent developments in gaming have been about pushing us toward "open" platforms, where publishers etc. can do what they like. On the one hand, there is much to gain from this, but in the end, the ultimate refinement of it is the Apple AppStore, where gaming is cheap, disposable, and forever hamstrung by a stubborn userbase that doesn't think videogames are actually worth any amount of money. Ultimately this leads to free-to-start-but-expensive-to-enjoy, bland, inoffensive tat.

(someone will be along in a moment to say "but there are good games on iOS! Look at X-Com" and yes, that's true - but you can't argue that those are anything but aberrations, blips on the radar in a sea of crap. I play a fair bit of iOS stuff in queues etc. though not at home on the sofa)

I don't want gaming to be open; or rather, I don't want every platform to be that way. Steam can do it, and does it pretty well, but I want my console boxes to be closed, to be expensive to develop for (to act as a filter), and most of all, I want someone with the reigns who moderates the content that appears on that box who at least professes to be doing so in the interest of those people who actually like videogames. iOS, Steam, they can be like television, but I want the gaming boxes I buy to be the video game equivalent of the cinema; premium, a spectacle, worth doing for its own sake. I want my gaming box to have a sense of identity in what is released on it; not just be a conduit for practically anything (a PC will always better at that anyway, and mine is set up in the living room on my main telly).

It's stuff like this which makes me want to get a WiiU; because gaming might go this way, but Nintendo will at least be the last people to embrace it.

Basically I don't buy this whole "why not let people vote with their wallets" angle. People have voted with their wallets already; you know what they've picked? Candy Crush.

[DeathAdder]

No, it's played between the trenches, on Christmas Day.