Anti-piracy DRM solutions like Denuvo don't do a great job at stopping illegal sharing, and the gaming industry is surely looking at alternatives. Rather than techological, I think the answer is contractual. I break down the history of game piracy and where I think it's headed next.
For the last couple of years (a decade at most) my experience is that most AAA titles are oddly unsatisfactory compared to many Indie titles - for example I get more fun from playing something like Valheim than I do playing God Of War.
Further, almost “infinite replayability” titles (the kind that you play until you’re fed up and then come back a year later and they’re fun again) are either Indies or old titles - things like Factorio, Rimworld, Valheim, The Sims, Oxygen Not Included, Project Zomboid and so on.
I get the impression that most modern AAA titles are made to be “experiences”, which in practice tends to make them oddly constrained and linear in terms of gameplay (something which sometimes is compensated with extra grindy gameplay), which personally I find not really all that fun.
Anyways, all this to say that at least for this old salty dog of a gamer I don’t quite see how I can be pushed to a pure game subscription model given that there are A LOT of indie titles and old games which are a lot more fun than the kind of titles that would end up as subscription exclusives.
not to mention, AAA games, for all their bloated budgets and ridiculous number of people working on them… often come out broken messes that are released 6-18 months too early and require a massive crunch campaign of panic patches to stem the bleeding once its released and the hype dies from the shit show.
I’ve been gaming for over 3 decades.
For the last couple of years (a decade at most) my experience is that most AAA titles are oddly unsatisfactory compared to many Indie titles - for example I get more fun from playing something like Valheim than I do playing God Of War.
Further, almost “infinite replayability” titles (the kind that you play until you’re fed up and then come back a year later and they’re fun again) are either Indies or old titles - things like Factorio, Rimworld, Valheim, The Sims, Oxygen Not Included, Project Zomboid and so on.
I get the impression that most modern AAA titles are made to be “experiences”, which in practice tends to make them oddly constrained and linear in terms of gameplay (something which sometimes is compensated with extra grindy gameplay), which personally I find not really all that fun.
Anyways, all this to say that at least for this old salty dog of a gamer I don’t quite see how I can be pushed to a pure game subscription model given that there are A LOT of indie titles and old games which are a lot more fun than the kind of titles that would end up as subscription exclusives.
not to mention, AAA games, for all their bloated budgets and ridiculous number of people working on them… often come out broken messes that are released 6-18 months too early and require a massive crunch campaign of panic patches to stem the bleeding once its released and the hype dies from the shit show.