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Making the bait more appealing doesn't make this any less of a trap than Xbox game pass.
Say no to subscriptions !
I wanted to keep an open mind but two things turn me off immediately:
The site just doesn’t seem trustworthy .
No, thanks
Hard no, this benefits roughly nobody
the firm is working to sign up games from other developers, who'll earn from a revenue share based on player engagement.
This is the dealbreaker for me. If there is a masterpiece game on there that takes 10h to complete, and a slop game that people sink 100s of hours into, I want the rev share to reward the 10h masterpiece more. I do not want an indie subscription service that incentivizes player engagement, full stop.
I don't pay any subscription for games, I hate the idea of not being able to play what I want whenever I want. Even when it's free (fuck you, No man's sky expeditions FOMO).
But yeah, even though there are games that are not necessarily slop but with a structure that ensures I can enjoy them for hundreds of hours, it doesn't feel fair that they'd dwarf the cool shorter ones I also play for revenues.
Some of the games I've completed in a dozen of hours still live rent-free in my head (most of them in a good way).
I was more hoping for a way to passively support indie devs that the market may otherwise not be giving enough attention to. I agree, I'd rather own a license (or better yet, physical copy) of a game and play it when I want, but I still view that relationship as part of the problem. I'd rather quality artwork not need to worry so much about playing the attention-lottery in order to survive.
The problem is "passive". Its not helpful to a game developer to not play their games cause then no one engages with their art. I wouldnt want to pay for a musician I dont listen to.
We do need a way to discover stuff easier. That was one of the joys of the early internet compared to now. But if you want to support indie devs, follow them or find smaller stuff and support it. Ignore the algorithms, decide what you want and look for it. Life isn't passive.
I wouldnt want to pay for a musician I dont listen to.
I disagree, and here is why.
The difference is between entertainment value and artistic value. There are a lot of art (music, film, writing, games, etc) that I think are important to exist for the betterment of humanity, but are too emotionally heavy to enjoy recreationally, or too niche for most people to engage with it; and yet, I believe are important that they exist. I want to support quality art that falls into those categories, even if I never consume them, because if I don't, then one day when someone does come up with an idea that would be relevant to my niche, they are less likely to make it.
I don't want a game's ability to maximize engagement to be what determines how valuable it is, which is equivalent to saying, I don't want the games I put my money toward to only be the games that I engage with. If you agree with the first half, then you must agree with the second half.
Sure, but you need someone who is inspired by it to have played it to be so. Dont get me wrong I also agree with things existing for the sake of it but thats also up to someone inspired enough.
I think its on the individual to not be responsible to spread themselves out but to actually interact with their niche and keep it alive, I want the games I engage with to be engaged with so that its felt.
I dont think art needs my support as much as people do.
Fair criticism, though I’m curious if engagement translates directly to hours spent. I wonder if they have any other way to measure.
Maybe one simple thing would be if players take the time to review a game, it presents a boost to “engagement” disregarding their playtime.
If Steam is any indication, a system like this would reward devs for posting something controversial on twitter
No thanks. To me, indie is an escape from all this bs.
If I believed for a second It would hold that price forever and My saves are mine forever I M.I.G.H.T conceder it, but that is a lot of impossible qualifications that only leads to a soft maby
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.
I get the impression most devs would rather you didn’t use the refund window as a trial; eg, if you think you’re only 5% interested, they’d rather you don’t buy it with plans to refund.
Refunds still cost them, and some players have received warnings from Steam support for excess refunds even if they follow the hour limits each time.
Where did you get this impression. I refund games all the time with no issue, warning or not.
Also I doubt devs would prefer I never try their game versus trying it and maybe enjoying it.
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 I thought the majority of my $7 went to indie game devs, particularly ones doing interesting stuff that the market doesn't properly reward, then I wouldn't bat an eye at it. Probably wouldn't even use the service and would continue buying game licenses directly, but if I'm only funding the few hits that make it in front of me, then I'm just contributing to the BS capitalist lottery that is the entertainment industry. Would much rather have a communal way to fund devs.
This doesn't even sound like a real business. This sounds like one of those extemporaneous pitches that gets pulled out of the ass after martini 3, delivered by the sales doofus that doesn't know how to send an email.
The red flag that caught my eye was all the cheerleading and then snuck at the bottom was (paraphrased) 'well, people can play as much as they want but, ya know, if it's like 10 games a month we might have to look at stuff'.
So, what? It's subscription service but the games vanish (oh you can buy them individually) and and if you use the service for its advertised purpose, there's going to be problems - only $7.99 ?
I should have said martini 8
Fuck subscriptions
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!
No.
nope. Pirate and if its good buy in preference order of direct then gog then steam.
Yea this will only screw over indie devs
I'd rather see them do a Humble Choice like subscription where the player gets to keep the games.
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.
So like UFO 50? We just need basically demo jams in a packaged form factor
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 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.
Makes no sense when fanatical exists.
I just type random words into the search bar and see what comes back, the mystery key bundles gave me frog detective 1 to many times.
But now I'm playing a fun gnome game so I am pretty happy with my method.
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'll try it out. I buy most of my indie games off fanatical bundles. It'd be nice to try a bunch one month. It'd be great if they integrated the subscription in steam so I could easily try stuff through proton
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.
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.