• ampersandrew
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    fedilink
    10
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    1 year ago

    We’re not really headed to a subscription-based future. People like Game Pass, but it has no exclusive content. Nintendo’s the only one trying to make a catalog of games exclusive to their service, but they’re all retro games, and Nintendo can get bent, because we can all pirate and emulate those games better than Nintendo can rent them to us. They could get be getting some revenue from actually selling those old games to customers in the places they want to play those games, but Nintendo isn’t interested in that. If this particular situation gets worse, then I might be worried. There’s just too much diversity in the game industry for this to be a threat. There’s no central cartel or representative group for games the way there is in movies and music to dictate those markets away from what the customer actually wants. In video games, you can switch to Xbox or, more likely, PC when Sony raises prices. PCs have gotten easier, and they’ve always been more open, and I think the gaming market has demonstrated that they value the openness.