According to former Bioware veteran Mark Darrah, the Live Service models along with subscription services are slowly becoming detrimental to the entire industry and specifically to many other genres that currently exist. As these models have resulted in much more profit than the earlier, traditional videogame experiences, chances are that publishers wouldn’t be inclined to invest in any other forms of titles at some point in the future, and while it’s only a possibility at this point, it’s still a valid concern in many ways.
“I think that the overreliance on microtransactions is overemphasizing certain genres and preventing other genres from flourishing,” he said in a YouTube video. “So, is it worth a think? I would say that it is. Do I have a great answer? Do I have a great model? I don’t. Not yet.
“But it’s something I think that the industry should be considering because everything can’t be a live service, as we’ve, I hope, proven pretty definitively over the last year and a half. If our monetization is coming primarily from live services, we run the risk of ending up in a world where there are no AAA games that aren’t live services. I don’t think that’s a world that any of us really want to live in.”
You can watch the entirety of his perspective on the current state of the industry in the recent video from his channel:
The problem with subscription services is that they place too much control in the hands of the companies and almost none to the actual players and if services like Game Pass continue to become even more successful with moves like these, there could be a time when the megacorporations who control the videogame industry decide to make the entire medium run solely on subscriptions which means players would lose all control over their games altogether.
There are other reasons why subscriptions services aren’t nearly as great as the companies would have us believe, and here are some of them as spoken by Former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden and the former vice president of Bethesda Softworks Pete Hines.
