the only reference I’ve seen w/r/t payments to publishers and devs is based on a time-played metric
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I mean, the writing was on the wall when outfits like MS, Ubisoft and EA started talking about not sales numbers (which is mostly a smart, shrewd move by MS but that’s not the point here) but rather things like monthly average users, engagement and keeping lists of time spent in games but actively gating payouts to time played is a whole new level of bullshit in the kind of design paradigms it’ll bring to the fore
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Nobody wants to be Spotify, which can’t survive even as it can’t pay artists much because it doesn’t own its own content. Everyone wants to be Netflix, which created its own library to get away from Disney and others.
In the short to medium term, it’s very good for those making things: lots and lots of contract work. In the long term, it concentrates power in the single portal, which is worse for those with a reasonable guarantee of profitability. Small creators are generally better off working to contract, but tend to get fewer gigs as territories are established and move upmarket.
So: mostly good for small devs, but money will proportionally move to these networks.
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I think such a system would funnel small devs to either going through Google’s own Stadia studio or just create the kind of nonsense YouTube is going through where the large majority of creators fall under content producers/networks as catch-all umbrellas where there is Networking and Connections and leave the really, really independent devs out in the rain. any kind of discovery issues the App Store, Steam, etc. have now would be magnified if you don’t have a rep or someone who can get your foot in the door
EA and Ubisoft already kind of do this but ostensibly they see these as prestige releases as if the sins of AAA can be neutralized by Grow Home or Unravel but hey, it worked for Hollywood and what are video games but eternally chasing the tail of movies
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alternate outcome: Google just makes Stadia like YouTube and kids end up playing White Protector 7: Palestinian Purge after clicking on one too many gaming videos
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So what’s the business model here? Do you buy games or subscribe to a service? (I did not watch any of the videos)
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These are in opposition: when there are human gatekeepers everyone who gets in has a modest chance of success (this is like Steam 2010-2015). When you say no, it shouldn’t be up to us to decide who wins and losses, smaller projects get in and have a chance but everything gets more crowded (like Steam now). People are hurting either way, and indies only prosper in general in unexploited markets (platforms before the big boys move in or where the platform holder has pruned away competition). The Switch is great for indies! but it’s mostly because it’s a relatively empty storefront and Nintendo gets barely any big-budget third party games. As the store fills up it’s getting hard like everywhere else.
Now, eventually even with gatekeepers a platform gets crowded enough with legacy content to make it very difficult for new entrants. Braid and Super Meat Boy still sell better than almost any indie game vanishing into the ether. Netflix is expected to relax at some point after its filled all its niches, at which point we’ll see them buy less small content.
honestly, I’m looking at it from a place where the big pubs and devs get in right away because Stadia is super obviously a play at nascent EMEA and Asian markets instead of it being a curiosity forever and crowding out, to some degree, smaller indies, who then have to turn around and either make deals with either Google or said pubs or devs or risk being stuck in the “legacy” market until they accrue enough notoriety
it’s either get in and give up a lot, get in and not get seen or not get in at all. at least if you don’t get in on Steam, we have other platforms and avenues where you can build cachet and build your own success because there’s not a central point of game.
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I totally understand that small and mid-major devs and studios would thrive in a theoretical Stadia-based economy but the real small teams and the one-person operations will either have to sell their souls or end up standing on the outside, looking in
(which, admittedly, Google probably already sees as a problem since they’ve already said you can just rent a Stadia instance in a datacenter as your devkit and it’s very clearly a play at entities that can’t outright buy a blade but that still doesn’t make their games rise to the top)
Yeah, you give up any upside revenue potential in exchange for a guaranteed paycheck for the project.
Getting in is probably the same as always – on the sub-$2m scale, no one expects you to come with notoriety or a history, they just look at your game and whether you seem to have a team and then toss the spare change on the floor. So it relies on networks picked up in local indie scenes, conventions, and at school programs.
this is how we know you’re the game dev and I’m the consumer, where I’m worried about purity and you keep trying to tell me “no, it’s cool, we’re getting paid”
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bwaha
I’m just very cynical about the odds of small teams making it in any environment, and anything that gets the money upfront is good for them.
They can’t squash games made for free, after all.
I agree with only this post of yours though
the rest belie way too high expectations of Google
I’m really talking about the move to a subscription-based model, which Microsoft is heavily trying and Sony is somewhat trying. We don’t know what Google will use (but I think this is the most sensible play to leverage the lower-friction advantages).
This is the conventional frame about where power shifts under the model and who wins and losses; nobody I know really likes Google but we can game out how it would affect us in our various situations. We’re not anticipating Google is dramatically worse than anyone else creating a streaming model (do you think it will be? I’d be interested to know why).
Business thought is inherently depressing. It mostly involves hugging various uncaring gods; in fact, I often feel like a medieval theologian trying to worn out the technicalities of a book of allegory when I really want to say it’s simple to just love man and god. But you put indies together and they all talk about business because an overriding concern about survival is the one thing they all share
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if the state of Google Play presents any indicators, well
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no one makes money off of google. if you did, they wouldn’t be google
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As an aside, while Google killing dedicated hardware at some point in the future is huge and terrifying and odd, the weirdest GDC news bit is that Microsoft and Nintendo are now good friends
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it’s worth it for cuphead on switch tho