Currently, subscription service contracts are a good deal for game developers and increase the likelihood of a profitable game.
The subscription contract generally pays an up-front dollar amount that covers a large but not complete portion of the budget (up to mid-size projects, i.e. <$30m)
The subscription contracts generally enforce exclusivity between streaming services but have no restrictions on other store releases. For games with up to mid-size budget, where awareness is the key marketing challenge, the buzz streaming access provides seems to increase sales on other platforms, rather than eating potential sales. It’s unclear to me if this holds for high-budget games with dedicated marketing spend.
Because the initial contract doesn’t pay the full budget, developers are generally encouraged to sell DLC. Combined with bonus structure incentivizing playtime, this will start pushing games towards long-engagement models. Of course, it’s not clear if this is different than what games are already trending towards without that explicit push. Note also that every Microsoft producer and game director involved in Game Pass I’ve talked to will emphasize making something compelling before diverting towards stickiness; Xbox at least has the awareness that the first and hardest challenge is still making a good interesting game. No, they can’t really help you with that.
Looking to the future, an industry consolidated around a few buffets and without open storefronts is a scary place for small developers. In one sense it would be a return to the days of curated Steam, where certain skills and social cues are necessary even if institutional backing was not. But at the same time it would foreclose the opportunity for breakout reward. If Game Pass does become the dominant model for distribution, I think it looks more like film and TV streaming than music streaming: a few major publishers controlling production, the former outlets for independent and breakout profits closed off, a strengthening of many niche content areas but under a flattening central voice.
Music seems to have ended in a different and worse local optima because of the relative value of back catalogs, the more independent nature of production and bands, and the cheaper cost of production, pushing more of the costs onto the musicians.
At this point, the incentives for consumers and developers all lead to signing these deals. Like a lot of irresistible market forces, it’s beneficial for each player in the game at each step of the way.
I’m sure Barlow’s team will be ok given that they also have a Netflix deal for mobile, but looking at their Steam releases…as of True Lies they fell out of what tends to sell on Steam. Based on reputation and cachet they should be able to get publishing deals for another decade no matter what happens, but this is probably the type of niche game that finds its home in subscription services rather than premium purchases. In other words, if all they had was storefronts, I’d be worried.
My first weird shit happened in the scene with the dude getting undressed and being painted, but happened when I set my controller down to do something and for some reason the Xbox typing interface popped up, and then the movie weird glitched for a second in the background, and it was mostly funny. Kinda ruined a moment there, but that’s OK. Other moments have been creepy, so.
My first one was in one of the Two of Everything table reads where Marissa is replaced and Durick (big spoiler incoming if you haven’t played deeply) just freakin disappears!! I assumed there was some meaning here but I didn’t think about it too deeply until like 8 hours later, when I fully understood what was happening with Marissa and durick during the production of 2OE
Based on what I know about the game there is no weighting or intentionality here besides a preference to show you new clips—you can really have any secret clip as your first one. I think the narrative design that unites these moments and makes them feel cool and significant is more in the thematic cohesion between clips/the uniting strains of objects that run between them. That form of connection is baked into the content rather than into a super sophisticated narrative design, which is really neat. It feels significant to jump between some scenes because of the symbols and shared characters and so on, but that’s not really the game serving you up a resonant moment intentionally—that’s just the overall thematic resonance of the game coming through for you in the moment. Very cool, I think!!
In some ways, I feel like the writing was constrained by a need to allow for these non-linear connections to be made all the time. I guess what I mean by this is that in a standard narrative, the author avails themselves of all the notes they wish to use, whereas Immortality is limited to a pentatonic scale. Even with those limitations, it manages to cut across 4 distinct genres (each of the films and the frame narrative itself) to tell one story. The reduced artistic palette allows for the themes of the work to resonate louder. Without those formal constraints, the themes would have been drowned in noise.
As much as I hate myself for saying it, this game feels in dialogue with novels like Pale Fire and Dictionary of the Khazars where these sort of symbolic connections that cut across narratives are the meat of the story (though I certainly wouldn’t say this is anywhere near as well written as Pale Fire, it is structurally even more complex)
Well I played this game last night, and then tonight for 6 hours straight. It is almost 2:30AM which is unheard of late for a Dad. Gotta delete it tomorrow. I saw the credits but Xbox says I am only 30% done with clips of each movie which seems insane to me. Feel like I saw enough of each story if not seeing all of it.
Fantastic experience. Want to get Lady Rude to try it. It has Japanese subs!
I reached the ending. Time to start reading spoilers
The actual last scene I had to discover before reaching credits was maybe more interesting than the pre-credit scene. It was the lip-synch cover of “Candy Says” which went on for a surprisingly long time, and it felt like was going to be an actual ending. In some ways it might have been fitting if we consider the songs associations with stardom, bodies, agency, death. I liked it, but it would have been a bit saccharine and kind of anti-climactic to end things just on that.
Edit: some very interesting interpretations up above, all of which feel true, but not present in my experience with the game. At least so far. Maybe I would have a better sense of the actual events around the production of these movies if I saw more clips. Right now it’s hard to really say what happened to some of the major characters, even Marissa herself. What did she do, what happened to her, what exactly was her will behind making these films? I just don’t have anything to even begin piecing together an interpretation like some of you have created.
that’s the exact thing that was sorta bothering my partner the first few hours we were playing it. i think it can feel a little aimless and overwhelming with the information they give you and sometimes it feels like the items/people you click are just drawing from like… a bucket of related clips that it can choose at random. does that make sense? i don’t know anything about game development, so not sure if that’s even right. but i really liked that aspect of it. kinda felt fun in this freeform way of getting to chase down my thoughts, even if there was no clear pattern/reason to it yet.
my first weird was at the end of the clip where heather thanks mr. fuckin’ asshole (can’t remember his name right now) for giving her the opportunity or whatever. as it was playing, i saw the silhouette of the one and for some reason thought it was david lynch and rewound to see if i was right.
haven’t been able to get back and 100 it but really hoping for more scenes of the one being incredibly violent towards dudes. especially liked the one where she threatens to pop hitchcock’s eyeball out like an oyster i don’t really know if that’s something that happened and dude saw it as marissa doing that to him or if sometimes we get fantasies from the one’s perspective or what. i want to know what’s going on, but also don’t mind the sort of dreamy logic of not really getting a full and total explanation. biggest q for me is i don’t really understand the relationship between the two immortals. can’t tell if they’re being playful while antagonizing each other or if it’s more sinister than that
My take on their relationship is the kind of playful rivalry that can only develop between people over 2000 years when you can’t die even through violence. It seems sinister from the outside but is more intimate than that. Imagine that there’s literally only one person who understands your situation, and you don’t like them that much but you don’t hate them either.
My take on the last clip of The Other burning Marissa is that something basically caused The Immortal to be essentially brain dead, and the fire is a mercy killing. Pulling the plug so to speak. But i never quite figured out what happened to cause that.
My Theory: The Immortal starts breaking down because she wore the guise of Marissa for too long, I think. She was smitten with this french girl from just after a world war (I’m unclear/forgot whether it was ww1 or 2) and kept wearing her guise despite the cost to herself. I think this ties into how Immortality inverts the artist-muse relationship and turns it into a faustian bargain. The guise of Marissa Marcel, taken from a murdered french girl, had a vampiric effect on the vampire. There’s a certain symmetry to the artist-muse relationship and the vampire-prey relationship that this game uses to sometimes sincere, sometimes ironic effect.
Gonna put a thought here that I haven’t seen other people mention so that when it comes up in a youtube essay I can say they stole it from me:
Spoilies
There are scenes in all 3 movies of people failing to play dead. “Ah fuck I blinked”. Failure to Act? Something that isn’t real? Something something immortals?
Then the 3rd movie has at least 3 scenes of The One dying. I played a bit more last night and kind of gave up. It may be random but I thought about how it kept showing me the scene of the mannequin burning. Over and over it would return me to that. Which may be the last scene filmed? I don’t got the time to expand these thoughts further.
Great Game. One Of The Games I’d Want Normal People To Play (highest accolade).
