Agreed. Putting big AAA games on there day one (especially the ones they acquire) just doesn't make financial sense.
Regarding indies, I at least partially agree with you. The rest would be a separate discussion, but I'd recommend reading this article.
The industry goes in cycles for indies, Finji CEO Bekah Saltsman tells us in a discussion at last October's Megamigs co…
www.gamesindustry.biz
It's a very good, balanced piece. Finji CEO, Bekah Saltsman, put Tunic on Game Pass, and many others that she didn't. So she has a first-hands experience of what goes on when they put an indie on Game Pass and when they didn't.
The counterargument to your point is that GP has created a terrible situation for indie developers and games who choose not to put their games on Game Pass.
Give it a read; it's very interesting and balanced.
It’s scary but selling individual games honestly won’t work much longer unless you’re the biggest dev with the biggest IPs.
I never bought indie games in the past, I heard people talk about them but never bought anything besides a few hyped ones like Braid and The Witness. I simply played the biggest AAA games with the highest scores and skipped the rest. It was enough for my time and cost me enough.
And today I never buy indies because I get enough through Gamepass (and PS+ Premium because it’s very similar but rarely talked about), I don’t even buy AAA games unless I have to, if I can wait I know they’ll be on a subscription library,
The big difference now is that I now play small stuff like Loop Hero as well as the mid sized ones like Scorn and The Ascent and the huge ones with mid user reception like Wo Long. I play a ton of games. I think my 2022 stats on Xbox showed that I played like 90 titles or something like that.
Would I keep playing small indies and the mid sized games without high scores without Gamepass?
Nope.
I would just go back to what I did before and play Uncharted, Gears, Forza, GT etc and skip the rest. Would be enough for my time and would cost me enough.
So I see subscription libraries as an inevitable evolution, it’s what will keep anything less that AAA alive. It’s just like what has happened to TV Shows. When did you last buy a TV Show box? Maybe some early GOT season? When did you buy a TV Show box for a less hyped show? I have a shelf full of season boxes but it was many many years since I bought something now and less popular shows was never bought.
Would a TV Show outside of any streaming service even survive today? I doubt it. I know I wouldn’t watch it anyhow, probably wouldn’t even know it existed.
I think that’s where gaming is heading, like it or not, and it can’t be stopped.
The devs who don’t adapt and evolve will disappear. The big ones will survive because people will keep on buying the big 10/10 games, for awhile. The Tunic devs and similar small devs could survive with high enough scores on their games, but one wrong step and they’ll be gone, the masses won’t bother checking if the game is good, they’ll look at the scores and go nah.
With a subscription library more will check out your game, because there is no investment, it’s just a press of a button and some download time. Like I could say that Loop Hero is one of the most unique games I’ve played in years (it really is) and I know someone out there will go hit that install button on Gamepass, because why not?
When looking deeper into the crystal ball I see episodic content being a big thing within 5 years. Could evolve from something like No Man’s Sky and Forza Horizon where the core gameplay is similar but new things are added once a year or so. The static 10 year gigantic full game releases will slowly fade away and evolve into episodic games as a service games. Us oldies won’t be around to witness it fully but our kids will, and they won’t care because that’s what they’re already used to in everything else they do and just means less waiting for new content. And retro gaming won’t exist, the Commodore 64 cassette library will outlive what I’ll have on my Xbox.