I would say subscriptions are bad because they are proven to make people spend more money then they would have normally. That’s why most big companies do it now. Someone buying a game for 30$ and playing it for 1000 hours over a couple years isn’t very interesting for the big guys.
But then how would you apply that logic to things like GamePass, where you will end up spending way less if you are a prolific gamer? I spent $120 for a year of PS+ Premium and it paid for itself in 2 weeks with the cost of buying the individual games vs just having access to the catalogue. And not just things I downloaded, played for 10 minutes and removed. There was plenty of things I would have out right paid $40-70 for and have put 40-100 hours in that I didn’t have to buy because they were on the subscription service. It would have cost almost a $1000 for the value of time spent playing games I got access to for only $120.
You probably pay more if using a gamepass, but you also try a lot more games.
If you played as many games without a gamepass as with one, you’d pay a lot more.
But without a gamepass, you usually restrict yourself to fewer games.
Whether removing such restriction is worth the (not as significant) additional cost is subjective.
So there’s an actual case for subscription in cases like this.
(The reason subscriptions make some sense here is because digital items are artificially limited. With physical items or services subscriptions are almost always a money grab. But with artificially limited things, such as digital items, subscriptions can definitely be reasonable.)
I would say subscriptions are bad because they are proven to make people spend more money then they would have normally. That’s why most big companies do it now. Someone buying a game for 30$ and playing it for 1000 hours over a couple years isn’t very interesting for the big guys.
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But then how would you apply that logic to things like GamePass, where you will end up spending way less if you are a prolific gamer? I spent $120 for a year of PS+ Premium and it paid for itself in 2 weeks with the cost of buying the individual games vs just having access to the catalogue. And not just things I downloaded, played for 10 minutes and removed. There was plenty of things I would have out right paid $40-70 for and have put 40-100 hours in that I didn’t have to buy because they were on the subscription service. It would have cost almost a $1000 for the value of time spent playing games I got access to for only $120.
For something like a gamepass it’s debatable.
You probably pay more if using a gamepass, but you also try a lot more games.
If you played as many games without a gamepass as with one, you’d pay a lot more.
But without a gamepass, you usually restrict yourself to fewer games.
Whether removing such restriction is worth the (not as significant) additional cost is subjective.
So there’s an actual case for subscription in cases like this.
(The reason subscriptions make some sense here is because digital items are artificially limited. With physical items or services subscriptions are almost always a money grab. But with artificially limited things, such as digital items, subscriptions can definitely be reasonable.)