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

by Earendil, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 15:37 (3504 days ago) @ RC

How is pay-per-play different than subscription. And which do you consider to be Games as a Service?

I sort of lumped all of those together as the same thing, because in each case you are paying a smaller amount for current content, instead of paying a large amount up front with the expectation of content. Even if nothing is ever added later, paying $60 is paying for content that you really don't understand yet.

Subscription: they don't care if you don't play as long as you keep your subscription
Pay-per-play: they want you to play as much as possible because that's how they make the most money.

I'll buy off on that definition, but has pay-to-play exist in the gaming world outside of coin operated arcades? And wouldn't Gaming as a Service (GaaS) be a subscription model not a pay-to-play model? At least in a lot of industries the service is offered based on a contract of time, and less on a contract of effort.

Jumping to another industry, Spotify has been running into trouble with it's Subscription-based model: their most lucrative customers are the ones that have the subscription but don't really listen much. So their costs are kept low. While the ones that listen loads and loads cost more to supply and drive down the 'royalties-per-play' for the Record Companies. And low royalties-per-play makes Record Companies very uneasy about keeping their records on the service.

That's an entirely different business. They have a subscription model but their costs are directly proportional to play time. In a game, the playtime does not increase developer cost. Cost is rather fixed since most people are salary in that industry. Sure, servers get hammered harder and need to be replaced, but I doubt even the top 100 Destiny players are costing Bungie anything but fractions of a penny more than the rest of us.

Given that play time does not increase Bungie's cost, it would be best for Bungie's community to encourage lots of play time, and only charge people the amount they need to recover or maintain businesses. They know exactly what their operational costs are, and they are probably rather steady.