nope. Pirate and if its good buy in preference order of direct then gog then steam.
No.
Fuck subscriptions
No thanks. To me, indie is an escape from all this bs.
I could see this as useful to get for a month so you can try out a bunch of indie titles to find ones you like before you buy them. Could be helpful for developers that don’t have small demos or anything.
Certainly not useful to have perpetually.
2 hour refunds on steam have never let me down. Also I’d rather encourage devs to release a demo versus yet another subscription model. This is a big pass from me.
To be sure, that’s a decent way to do it. If indie.io had something similar, that might be nice.
Though given it’s all indie games over there, I’d be on board to pay this 6.99 not as a subscription, but as a fee to get a week to try out whatever I’d like for some reasonable amount of time, maybe set by the developer. Then of the games I’ve tried but not purchased the full version of, split the 6.99 between them.
Maybe utopian thinking but it’d be nice.
If you’re a developer, make sure you read all the terms and/or have a lawyer. I support an outreach system for indie games but do not wish for them to be taken advantage of. Protect yourself!Protect your content!
I resound with the other commenters, this is a hard pass for me.
I got enough subscriptions to deal with than have a subscription for the cheaper style games.
This type of model isn’t even going to be helpful to the developers either, it may increase publicity but, the article says itself that it bases money earned on gametime and if people played a lot each dev is going to have diminishing returns… Nobody buys a subscription model with the expectation they are only going to play 1 or 2 games, people play as many games as they can, that way they can get the most out of the subscription. for 6.99 a month, even locking myself down to once a week only, if I played 3 inde titles a week, for an hour each, thats 12 games a month, which means that 6.99 is going to be less than 60 cents to each developer a month, and that is ignoring whatever cost they charge as a platform fee.
Sure the argument can be made that thats still money the dev wouldn’t be getting otherwise but, I see this as more of a disadvantage to inde studios. I think the example they used in the article is very optimistic and not super realistic to what will happen.
The thing that might be missing from your hard math is addiction. You’re right that most games will be a blaze-past tryout period as you described, but sometimes will have 6 hour stories that you get invested into, while others are roguelikes that actually become compelling for 20+ hours. Which ones will form that addiction is unclear from browsing a store page, so it’s nicer to have complete access to them.
I’m also a little curious what worthwhile subscriptions you have. Most things I used to sub to, like Game Pass, have gone up to $15/$20-month and I decided to leave. Something simpler at $7/mo is a bit more agreeable to me. I spend more than that on some individual Patreons.
I intentionally left addiction out of the equation as I don’t expect the everyday person is going to have that occur to them, and if it did occur that’s only going to make it /worse/ for the devs on the platform as it’s almost certainly going to favor rougelites and proc gen over story and action titles. I see no use of this.
as for my subs? I left the gaming sub field almost entirely. My only gaming sub I still have is humble bundle, because you own every game as long as you had choice the month it was released. I had gamepass ultimate for 2 years as part of the xbox X all access pass thing they did but, I found that there was very little actual decent “I want to play” games. I would play a few of them(like 6-8 of them) a month and then say “ok ill come back to them some day”, and then just not. For the price of a AAA title every 3 months (now a AAA title every other month) it wasn’t worth it for me.
From the consumer side, I feel the same way with this pass, I could take that same amount, and buy 1- 3 of the games listed on this and have them to keep, and be helping the devs way more money wise. It’s a no brainer.
Being said, I could see how this could be useful with the more expensive titles on the pass, but that is the case with normal GP as well.
I really don’t think we needed a subscription service for indie games (nor they do). Game Pass for AAA games makes somewhat sense, as the games are expensive. Game Pass concept in general will favor slop over creative and good game design with long time support. I am not a fan of this concept at all and its even worse for indie games in my opinion.
If this campaign is for discoverability, then they should find a different way to “advertise” the games. I agree that most games do need some discoverability though, besides the hits on Steam. There are so many good indie games for low price. But Game Pass concept is the wrong way in my opinion, for the entire industry (the player and the devs).
I mean, I can understand the appeal of it. I’m probably not going to buy any of the games on here even if they were cheap, because I don’t know anything about them. But if I have an opportunity to try out 70 games for a low price, I might give it a try. Afterwards maybe I found a couple that I actually liked and I can shell out a bit more directly to the developer to buy it.
No thanks. Ill just buy the ones I want.
There is a space for rentals to exist, but if you know exactly what you want already, the price of that indie game you’re looking for already isn’t very expensive, especially during a sale. We’ve probably got a bunch of these games in our libraries already just from bundles.
I feel like 10¢ US per game per month is pretty expensive. I mean, that’s 30% more expensive than Xbox Game Pass Premium which offers top tier, popular games, and their monetised multiplayer servers. I think they’re gonna struggle to make a sustainable service from this
That seems like a somewhat disingenuous way of boiling it down; realistically, most people will never play a significant percent of the games in a subscription. I think stats have shown most game pass players only end up playing 5 or 6 games in the majority of their time.
They also probably want 70 to be the low point if they’re still collecting indies into the program.
Makes no sense when fanatical exists.
Or I could just spend that much on a single game that I would then own that supports the artist(s) directly and would likely take me about a month to play fully anyway and I could pick up again whenever I wanted without having to pay anything more.
I like it. This is what I wanted from Game Pass, minus Microsoft enshittification. Honestly, most of what I played on Game Pass was indies I was curious about, but sometimes only played 2-3 hours of.
That said, it doesn’t seem to be a complete announcement yet; much of the site is still marketing to developers, not gamers.
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What? This isn’t run by Microslop. It’s an indie store called Indie.io - the title is just comparing them to MS Game Pass.
