An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off.
Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off::An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off.
These people are like an adversarial neural network being trained to find the most efficient ways to piss of their own customer base.
I think it's important to note that the entertainment landscape as a whole has been changing, and those changes have mixed with the shitty investor culture that already existed to create a terrible set of incentives that are wildly misaligned with consumer sentiment. I say this because I think that if we want things to change, we need to look at root causes.
The entertainment industry is feeling very threatened. It's hard to make money. That's a reality. And all the solutions to the problem are fucked up attempts to find ways to get players to give more money for things they don't want.
If buying something doesn't mean you own it, then pirating something doesn't mean you stole it! As long as there is a subscription fee, take the justifiable torrent option to choose to pay ZERO. The only way is not to pay!
There's the thing... Data is infinite. Piracy isn't great - it does nothing to support creators - but existing structures siphon off most of the money before it ever gets to them anyways. We don't have a working system.
Donations rarely can support a single person these days, and frankly it seems to require being a public social media figure of some kind... And that's a skill unrelated to art or building things
I don't see an answer aside from ubi - some of us live to create things, and we'll do it whether we're paid or not, whether we even release it or not. Take away the unnecessary coercion to make what other people want to survive, and you remove the stress from all of us. There's no longer this requirement to monetize everything - we'll make weird and beautiful things that makes everyone's life better
Writing this, I had this idea for gaming in particular... What if you had a service where you paid whatever the creator demanded for a game (as we do now), but then your monthly spending was distributed based on your play time? Realistically, only steam or an app store could do something like this, but it seems like an interesting way to incentivize quality and lowering prices