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Games

Cord-Cutting Hits Video Games (axios.com) 116

Posted by msmash from the new-age dept.
Video games are the next entertainment industry undergoing a major disruption, all the way down to the consoles and controllers. From a report: Details: "In the past, you plunked down $60 at GameStop for a copy of Grand Theft Auto or Madden NFL and played it out -- after which you could trade it in or let it gather dust," the AP reports. "Now, you'll increasingly have the choice of subscribing to games, playing for free or possibly just streaming them over the internet to your phone or TV."

New subscription streaming services represent a massive shift from gaming into the cloud, which will make it easier to access games on any device, including mobile. [...] Gamers wouldn't necessarily have to buy individual games anymore -- they could buy them as part of a larger and potentially cheaper package -- and it means that they wouldn't be limited to expensive hardware devices that only work for certain games.
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Cord-Cutting Hits Video Games More

Cord-Cutting Hits Video Games

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  • From cord-cutting to subscribing to games (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Stop mixing your damn metaphors, journalists!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I have to admit that I can't quite work out what the article is trying to say. It sounds like they are using "cord cutting" to refer to people playing games online, but that can't be because that would be introducing the requirement of having a connection and a reality would be cord connecting (wifi is just a wireless cord, but the tether to the internet is still required).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rhipf ( 525263 )

        By that logic though, cancelling your cable TV service and subscribing to Netflix (or any of the other similar services) isn't really cord-cutting either. You still need a cord to connect to the Internet to get those streaming services.

        • By that logic though, cancelling your cable TV service and subscribing to Netflix (or any of the other similar services) isn't really cord-cutting either. You still need a cord to connect to the Internet to get those streaming services.

          "Cord-cutting", i.e. cancelling your cable television subscription, means that, at the logical level, you're cutting one of the multiple cords that you currently have. Instead of having separate subscriptions for television and Internet access, you just have a single subscription for Internet access, and you use your Internet connection for the stuff you used to use your cable television service for.

          Yes, we all know that at the physical layer, it's typically all going over a single cord.

    • Yeah, they have this backwards. Cord-cutting soon to hit video games after people realize they're spending more money on a subscription service sounds more like it.

  • Leash Embracing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @08:16PM (#58387036)
    Streamed games are a choke chain like we've never seen before in gaming. Portraying that as "cord-cutting" couldn't be getting it more wrong.

  • Tired of the subscription model (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @08:36PM (#58387110)
    I know companies love the constant revenue stream, but I don't. It's not like I really have the time to play games, but I wouldn't be doing this if I had the time. I prefer to own the things I buy. I don't want software, games,music or anything i buy to just disappear one day because the company doesn't find it profitable any longer. How many music services have gone under now? I keep getting emails about Ultraviolet closing down. Or my favorite thing is when I hear about a service deleting ebooks or music from devices. I can still set up a Win 2K box and load Quake from the CD anytime i want. But that likely won't be the case with these games in 20 years.

    • Re:Tired of the subscription model (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Friday April 05, 2019 @12:06AM (#58387854)

      The article seems backwards to me. Dumping standalone games and going to games that require phone-home server approval and then going further to always-in-the-clouds games, this is the OPPOSITE of cutting the cord. This is like tying your umbilical back on again.

  • Where is the cord cutting? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @08:40PM (#58387122)
    This seems much more like a new cord rather than cutting loose from an existing one.
    I pity the next generation of gamers. What will they do when they feel nostalgic for that game from their youth?

    • Re:Where is the cord cutting? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @09:05PM (#58387232)
      Exactly. There werent no cord, and now there is. Opposite of cord cutting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      What will they do when they feel nostalgic for that game from their youth?

      Same thing they do now, pay for it again on the Virtual Console and get a half baked emulated version.

      Just look at how crap things like Playstation Mini are, and they still sell. No way they are going to give up that easy money by building a system that you can still play in 20 years time.

  • Most confusing headline ever (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Berkyjay ( 1225604 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @08:58PM (#58387198)

    Get your shit together Axios. As for this so called "disruption in games". It's bullshit. This article was most likely paid for by one of the bigs in the industry trying to push their streaming services. Also, game streaming is essentially a dead end in the US. The network infrastructure here has zero capacity to handle the amount of traffic a fully adopted game streaming service would generate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Two options: There's EA especially with their attempts to push gaming as a service. No other company has gone all-in on that level but them. The other possibility is Sony, since they're also trying to go in that direction.

      In EA's case it's likely in response to multiple fuckups relating to game titles over the last year, and their absolutely dismal performance. During EA's 2018Q3 report they were pinning their hopes on Anthem to drag them out of the dirt, it didn't. The gaming media sucking their dick d

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Get your shit together Axios. As for this so called "disruption in games". It's bullshit. This article was most likely paid for by one of the bigs in the industry trying to push their streaming services. Also, game streaming is essentially a dead end in the US. The network infrastructure here has zero capacity to handle the amount of traffic a fully adopted game streaming service would generate.

      This.

      They've tried streaming before and it failed miserably, so much so, practically no-one noticed it. Do you remember OnLive, InstantAction or Gamefly... I had to look them up too, they either went insolvent or got bought up by one of the major industry players like Sony and were discontinued.

      The fundamental problem is that whilst 30ms of network lag for netcode is quite good, 10ms of lag for input is going to see controllers launched at TV's with devastating regularity. This still has not been solv

  • There was nothing in the Google Stadia announcement that would suggest that it would be a subscription service, the fact that they're courting AAA game developers would suggest quite the opposite because aside from loss leaders (e.g. first party games like Microsoft's in game pass) the per month cost would invariably far too high for users to swallow.

    The change that we're going to see here is that the upfront cost to start gaming is now zero; this fundamentally changes things because players drop out every

    • That's ridiculous. Google can afford to make zero dollars a year while spending billions deploying AAA titles to try to own the market. As for per-month-cost,my guess is they'll try to hit $50/$60 a month... which people will pay.

    • its much more likely that lower income parents will be able to afford to give their children the occasional game.

      So instead of buying a used game for cheap that runs fine on older hardware, they have to subscribe to basically ALL the games and have something that decodes H.264 well.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Final solution to secondary game markets (Score:5, Informative)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @09:18PM (#58387286)

    This is basically the final nail in the coffin for places like Game-Stop.
    Under a subscription service, once you're done playing, there isn't any way to trade it in.

    Steam, Origin, et. al. have pretty much killed the PC versions of the secondary market already.

    Jokes on them though, I never buy anything on Steam unless it's = $20. Wait a year and get
    the fully patched, bug-free, game-of-the-year edition. I let everyone else pay full price to be the
    beta testers :D

    The idea of a streaming service is laughable. US network infrastructure won't handle it, and data
    caps will blow it out of the water before it even leaves the harbor. Unless, of course, we get the
    same bullshit we see with streaming video. Stream with $service_provider and it won't count against
    your data plan ! :|

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Works with games on CD too. Similar price drops, and eventually there may be some re-release that has all the fixes too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Terwin ( 412356 )

        Works with games on CD too. Similar price drops, and eventually there may be some re-release that has all the fixes too.

        I prefer GOG.com, no worries about DRM, losing disks or running out of storage space.
        All the older games come with pre-configured dosbox built in and connections are only needed for downloading new games/manuals.
        (Sure, some games still have their built-in manual based DRM(spell lists for MM and KQ3 for example), but you get a digital copy of the manual, so not a big deal).

        Perhaps not the latest and greatest, but most of those seem to be MMOs anyway, and I just don't want to invest the time needed to be comp

      • games on CD? Don't they just have a shortcut to steam.com? I've never seen a patched release in recent history except on gog.com

        • The X3 Gold edition by Egosoft. Admittedly a few years ago. Two games in the series for 30 Euros instead of the typical 50 Euros for one game. And both had a few patch levels compared to the original release.

          This is typical for Egosoft BTW:
          They tend to release their games in lousy condition, but then they keep working on them and fixing the bugs. Best bought a year or two after reklease..

    • Jokes on them though, I never buy anything on Steam unless it's = $20. Wait a year and get
      the fully patched, bug-free, game-of-the-year edition. I let everyone else pay full price to be the
      beta testers :D

      You realize you can only reliably do this because of Steam, right?

      Back in the old days, the "clearance" section at the game store was not all that well stocked with good titles.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

      I'm personally sick of buying incomplete games. Just wait for the "Game of the Year" edition and pay a lot less.

      Or forget that you cared about it in the first place, and catch the GotY edition when it goes on sale.

  • Astonishingly misleading headline! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 04, 2019 @09:19PM (#58387294)

    It's absolutely NOT "cord cutting" to make an end user 100% cord-dependent!

    In the old days, you bought a game for a one-time fixed-price payment. In exchange for your cash, you got a disk or disks, manual, cheat sheet or mapos, or other assorted supplemental stuff, and the artsy box of course. But then it was YOURS. You could play it any time you wanted, for as long as you wanted, on any machine you wanted, etc.

    Recently, games moved to "the cloud" (big brother's servers) and you can only play as long as you are online and they can make the game go away any time they want to. ("pray that I do not alter the deal any further....")

    Now it is offered as some sort of utopia that this model will go even further.... your device simply becomes a dumb graphical terminal to the megacorporation servers and you will be 100% dependent on monthly fees.... and this is in someway superior????

    This is only "good" to ignorant morons who are completely indoctrinated and have never known anything better. Companies move to models like this to make more money, not less, so you WILL pay more. [facepalm]

  • You don't own shit anymore. Service goes down? Ooh well!
    Yeah, not something I'm happy about.

  • Wtf is that headline? (Score:5, Informative)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @11:59PM (#58387844) Homepage

    Isn't that the opposite of cord cutting? I suppose you can now go "corded" (subscription) then subsequently cut the cord. How does this shit pass editors?

    • They're connecting to the service via WiFi.

      • Game streaming seems to start at 25Mbps and don't handle retransmits all that well (e.g. input lag). WiFi is only an option if you spent a lot of money on a good setup.

  • Stupid title (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The article content is the opposite of cord cutting. Who the fuck posted this? What a dumb ass.

  • I have many games that gather dust, but I like the peace of mind that if I want, I can go back to some game. With subscription models it could be that the content depends on region, someone can decide that the game is offensive and remove it etc. I like to travel and I bought the switch for this reason. Most of the time the connection in the train will be so slow that even opening this site is difficult, let alone stream media - music, games, movies. Not so long ago Nintendo stopped support for the Wii. The

  • horrible (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Friday April 05, 2019 @06:44AM (#58388728) Homepage

    we'll have Google, MS, Sony, some other company (maybe Valve?), all with game-streaming services to pick from.
    guess what, it will be the same horrible situation we have now with video streaming.
    some services will have game x, which is not available anywhere else, gaming company y will end it's contract with service z and from one day to the next all those games will be gone (oh, but they will be available from service w or you know, or own service because we want in on the action!).
    you can also bet that all these streaming services will have their own studios only making games that will be available on their own service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by h4x0t ( 1245872 )
      I doubt that Valve will get into this market for the same reason they stopped making games; it competes with their core business.

  • They've been trying to keep people from getting into their games to look around for decades. How can you get into a game's files to muck around when you don't even have a copy of the game at all?

  • This is an evil invention. Do not support it, do not sell it, do not do it.

    FUCK RENTING EVERYTHING for worse response times, worse feel, worse games. FUCK IT!

  • Why not regulate this so the public has access to "Universal Basic Entertainment" to simulate how it was in the good old days of antenna TV? A basic Steam/GoG/Netflix offering that every resident can access anywhere. It will be funded by huge companies that shop around for the best state tax incentives.

  • If you're always connected, isn't that the exact *opposite* of what the title suggests?
    This Ties you to an internet connection, and you can't play if you don't have one.
    Cord Cutting implies (at least to me) that you don't need a connection to play. The exception is cooperative or competitive play with friends.

    Am I the only one that misses the Good Old Days when we could play Starcraft (or Warcraft, or Doom) without a server, between friends?

    LAN Parties will be a thing of the past if this goes through. I wil

  • I'd say without a doubt that subscription game services are the exact opposite of cord cutting.

    When people leave expensive TV subscription services from cable companies like Spectrum, we call that "cord-cutting" as we remove that complex and pricey relationship to a cable company from our lives.

    Initiating that exact sort of relationship in gaming would be replacing that cord and getting hooked into a subscription.

    Subscription services are popular with companies who want their products to be sticky and who w

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