The traditional way of selling and playing video games has been like buying 99% of all other products: you pay for it upfront, a one time deal, and then it is yours forever. This is the way it has been ever since video games were able to be sold to customers and they could take it home. This happened from the 1980's to about the mid 2000's. That's when things started to change, slowly at first, but now, this new way of selling video games is becoming more and more prevalent, and analysts say that eventually, all video games will be sold in the way I'm about to describe. This is rather annoying for me, because this new way completely fucking sucks.
This new way is that you pay per month to log onto a company's server online to play a game. You no longer have a physical copy of the game. You just have a subscription, a log-in that you use. This sucks for us, the customers, for a number of reasons.
- The cost of subscription based software will rapidly become more expensive than buying a physical copy, starting in just the first few months of owning the software. For example, let's say I bought Hellgate London in 2008 for $50. That's all it would cost me to play that game till the day I die. Now, let's look at the second example, where I would pay $10 a month to play Hellgate London online, through the company's servers. In just half a year, it would be more expensive for me to subscribe to that game versus if I had paid a one time price to have a physical copy of it. Fast forward to November of 2013. In the first example, guess how much money I've spent on Hellgate London? That's right, still $50. But how much would I have paid in the second example? A whooping $900. For one fucking game. That is absolutely mind-boggling how expensive it would be, in addition to how mind-boggling it is that band-wagoning swag fags think this subscription based software is cool and hip and so much better than the "old way."
- If you want to avoid paying that astronomical amount as described above, you have to constantly subscribe and un-subscribe to all your video games, based on the ones you're only currently playing at the moment. Let's say you only play 2 video games at a time. So you subscribe to those two for a while, then once you beat the game or tired of playing it, you have to unsubscribe to those 2 games, (to avoid being charged monthly for a game you don't even play), and then subscribe to 2 new video games. What if one of your friends comes over and wants to play a game you're not currently subscribing to? "Oh sorry man, can't play that one, I'm not subscribing to it at the moment."
- If your internet goes out, bam, there goes your game. This is critical for people with shitty internet, like me. (Xfinity is ripping my landlord off like a motherfucker. She's paying for 55 mbps and I'm sitting on the fucking computer and can clearly see I'm only getting 5 mbps). Meanwhile, I'm having a blast fighting sand monsters in Prince of Persia, while you're sitting on your ass, not being able to play any of your games, because your internet went out.
- If the company goes under and gets rid of it's servers, then bam, there goes your game. I play a few games, like Hellgate London and Titan Quest, whose companies who made them no longer exist because they went out of business. Guess what, I'm still having a blast playing those games. But if you subscribed to one of these games online, then you lost your game. Sucks for you.
But let's say you and your 3 friends are smart and get the actual CD for Microsoft Office 2013. Guess how much that costs each of you? $13.75. I know critics of this idea will say "But the box software of Office 2013 will only let you put it on one computer!" To which I reply "Then install it without internet access and never register it. That way, Microsoft will never know how many times you've installed it!" It's a simple and easy way to save money. My siblings and I did this with Office 2010. We've had it installed on 5 different computers, all for way less than if we did Microsoft 365.
In conclusion, this is very troubling for gamers like me, because if all video games start to be sold like this, then I'll simply not buy anymore new video games, and I'll just continue to play old video games. I refuse to go through all that BS just to have a little fun. If I spend my hard earned money to buy a game, then I better damn as well be able to play it when I want, how I want, and install it on as many systems as I want to. Combine this problem with the fact that the quality of storyline, gameplay, and the music of video games on a whole has substantially gotten pathetically worse since about 2008, (Skyrim is the one exception, and the only game since 2008 that I'd consider to be one of my favorite games), and we could possibly have the death of the video game industry as we know it.
