General Gaming Outer Wilds developer: subscriptions will "unlock the market to weirder things"

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Co-creative lead Loan Verneau talks about launching into Xbox Game Pass, industry monopolies, and self-defeating crunch

Quote

Verneau believes subscription services will find value in attention-grabbing, innovative content that customers would like to try, but maybe aren't so curious about as to make a stand-alone purchase.

I really can't disagree with this notion at all: the subscription services do offer a relatively low-risk way for a customer to "experiment" with a title that they otherwise would be reticent to pay full price for.

[XxEvil AshxX]

There have already been a handful of games I've played and enjoyed that I never would have, if I had to purchase them.

[crispy4000]

He’s right.  Subscriptions and Fortnite money both. 

 

Its a positive, but at the same time, there will always be good indie games that won’t find an easy road into a popular subscription.  Or Epic’s good graces.

 

I want to see more bundles of indie games on consoles.  Because why not?

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

8 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

He’s right.  Subscriptions and Fortnite money both. 

 

Its a positive, but at the same time, there will always be good indie games that won’t find an easy road into a popular subscription.  Or Epic’s good graces.

 

I want to see more bundles of indie games on consoles.  Because why not?

Or in the case of Outer Wilds, a highly successful FIG campaign.

[crispy4000]

13 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

Or in the case of Outer Wilds, a highly successful FIG campaign.

 

Crowdfunding is a desperation play these days, lol.  It’s sunsetting.

[Dexterryu]

It's exactly why I have 2 running subs (Viveport and Xbox Game Pass PC). Both are cheap ($60/year) and get me access to a ton of games. They keep me from buying a lot of games that I think I might like and keeping me from stubbornly finishing a game just because I paid for it. It's easy to try a game and love it, just like it's easy to try a game and drop it if it's not for me.

 

 

[TwinIon]

In tv and film, the subscription war is funding a ton of stuff just because there is so much competition, and the assumption is that not all of these services will survive. We still have more to come with HBO MAX, Peacock, Quibi, and whatever else I'm forgetting launching this year, so everyone is pumping untold amounts of cash into productions hoping that when the dust settles and cable TV revenues disappear, they're still standing with a sizable subscription base.

 

For games, I feel like we're going to accelerate past that pretty quickly. There just isn't the explosive growth potential, and there isn't a slowly dying giant to siphon dollars from. The expectation certainly is that subscriptions will be the way forward, and I hope that weird indie games continue to find funding thanks to that new model, but the transition hasn't seen the same explosion of investment in games. If this is what peak investment looks like (and I'm not sure it is), I hope we don't see those dollars disappear in a few years.

[crispy4000]

1 hour ago, TwinIon said:

In tv and film, the subscription war is funding a ton of stuff just because there is so much competition, and the assumption is that not all of these services will survive. We still have more to come with HBO MAX, Peacock, Quibi, and whatever else I'm forgetting launching this year, so everyone is pumping untold amounts of cash into productions hoping that when the dust settles and cable TV revenues disappear, they're still standing with a sizable subscription base.

 

For games, I feel like we're going to accelerate past that pretty quickly. There just isn't the explosive growth potential, and there isn't a slowly dying giant to siphon dollars from. The expectation certainly is that subscriptions will be the way forward, and I hope that weird indie games continue to find funding thanks to that new model, but the transition hasn't seen the same explosion of investment in games. If this is what peak investment looks like (and I'm not sure it is), I hope we don't see those dollars disappear in a few years.

 

You say that, but we still haven't seen an ActiBlizzard or 2K Rockstar subscription yet.