Comment by torben-friis
14 hours ago
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...
They can be taken away from you at any point by locking your account for whatever.
You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).
Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.
I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.
So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.
>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.