Games as a Service is awesome, & hearken back to shareware (Off-Topic)

by Earendil, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 11:01 (3504 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Instead you'll buy access to a game and the quality of the games themselves will just improve over time.

Haha. HAHAHAHAHAHAH. No.

Why not? In a single large purchase sale, a software company has little incentive to upgrade their software "for free", even when it comes to bug fixes. Most of that is done out of pride and in hopes that it won't be such a crappy experience that you won't buy their next product. In a SaS, the customer hasn't fully paid for the product yet, so the company need to improve things to keep customers paying until they have AT LEAST paid for it.

Take Destiny for Example. If they had said Destiny was free with a $10 a month subscription fee, you and many others could have gotten away with only paying $10 once, and if they wanted another $10 out of you they'd have to give you content worth coming back for. In the current model you've already forked over $60. I can hear you say "but Earendil, if I play Destiny for a year I'll have paid $120 for this game!". To that I would say that if you could guarantee a game that would hold my interest for an entire year, I'd gladly pay $120. The problem is you can't, and so I end up paying $60 for a lot of games that interest me for not even a week. Titan Fall can die in a horrible firing pit.

The only problem I see with SaS and Games, is where the service is over a period of time SaS is usually measured in months, but Games are usually measured in hours of playtime. It's a rare game that keeps me coming back month after month for say an entire year on a consistent basis.

Maybe it's because I grew up in the Shareware model of software era, but I really miss it and see "DLC" as a reincarnation of that model. The model allows for two things:
1. I don't have to pay up front for a product I may not like.
2. If your product is good, there is a method by which I can pay you to create more content.

Compare that to the traditional model where you pay everything up front, and to get "more content" is to pay for SuperAwesomeGame 2, assuming you hand over another $60.

Where DLC falls apart for me (and I hope for the company) is when they charge too much. What Blizzard did (is doing) with Starcraft 2 where the next story campaign cost a full game price, when it's a shit story and adds two vehicle models. Big whoop.

If Bungie put out new DLC every couple months and charged a modest amount, I'd be all for it. I can buy it if I want, or skip it if I don't. What they can't do is break the game world or backwards compatibility.

I see my 3 sentence response turned into a few paragraphs, so I'll stop now :)