Comment by paxy
20 hours ago
There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward. The cost of games is the same in either case. Beyond that you either pay $800-$1000 for a console/$2000+ for a gaming PC, OR $10-20/mo for cloud gaming. Depending on your needs #2 might be the better option, which is why services like GeForce Now are so popular.
> There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward
It turns out that the customer's perception of a product is pretty vital to its performance in the marketplace. The math can math just fine, but if the customer doesn't feel good about it, you don't make the sale.
Subscriptions try to soften the blow of a big purchase by lowering the monthly payments under your "casual expenditures" threshold. Upfront payments reward you with an immediate sense of ownership, and no recurring anxiety about affording the item.
Combining the two in this particular order is sort of the worst of both worlds - there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
Balloon payment loans are very rare in the United States. I don't know where you live but I don't think you realize how unusual balloon payment loans are.
They are the default in much of Europe, though the expectation is that you'll likely trade the car in when the balloon comes due.
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> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
What (where?) in the world are you even talking about?
Not present in the math is that the cloud gaming service is able (and likely) to raise prices substantially, worsen the service or simply disappear.
One of the silver linings of a subscription model is that you're able to stop paying and move when it's no longer interesting, here you're asked to invest in a platform that can be taken from you.
What are you investing in exactly? You can pay $10/mo while the service is good, and then stop. The games you buy are still yours.
> The games you buy are still yours
Are they really? You will "own" digital licenses to the games, but you will not have any way to play them once you stop paying for the subscription.
That doesn't feel like "ownership" to me...
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>The games you buy are still yours.
They're not yours. Can you resell and recoup? Nope, digital licenses.
Can you buy a 2k computer and play them? You can't or won't, that's the whole reason you're using this system instead.
So you effectively have 60 bucks per game as a moat to hold you in while they boil the water.
I tried #2 from here in Australia, but the experience was incredibly poor despite fibre to the home at 500mb/s. You'd be better off buying one of the gaming mini-PCs with 32GB DDR5 and a 760/780M iGPU for ~3-4yrs worth of monthly costs, but the Vimes theory of economics might prevent that.
(I wound up building a gaming PC, much more capable but much more than the cost of streaming over an equivalent lifetime - IF streaming services don't enshittify to cost more and deliver less over time, which we all know they will.)