It might be better in the short to medium term but it will be worse in the long term.

And the sequel! Literally just came out today on all platforms + netflix.

Just look at what Spotify has done to the music industry. There was a massive contraction in the music buying market and music streaming services now are fully dominant. And Spotify + Apple have used their oligopoly status to fuck over artists and even record labels, forcing them to accept a fraction of a penny per stream.

It’s not a one to one comparison, but I could see subscription-based game licensing crowding out buy to own games eventually if Microsoft keeps consolidating the market as it has been. And then, once consumers are used to never paying for games individually, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, etc will be able to dictate whatever terms they want to game developers.

I highly doubt it will be in the format of a flash portal. It sounds closer to the Netflix model of producing and licensing games for subscribers.

Stadia was basically a game console as a service, assuming you had good enough internet. You had to pay for the subscription for access, then pay for each game individually. The one benefit of that was very little initial barrier to entry, as you just needed chromecast and a stadia controller.

Youtube playables appears to be just lightweight html5 web app games that run locally in your browser, similar to what flash player was like.

Funniest gaming news in a while! But I imagine it’s a welcome feature for players.

I don’t understand how anybody could see this market consolidation as a positive! Yes, in the short term ABK games will be added to Game Pass, but once Game Pass is the only “game” in town, the price gouging monopolistic behavior will follow.

Machine learning dialoge is almost never going to be as interesting as dialogue written by a human with a real viewpoint.

Had to turn away eventually, it seemed like they were going to show every boss and set piece in the game!