Earlier this year, a quotation from Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay was doing the rounds. Many news outlets seized upon it, as did bloggers and commentators – and the reaction, at least from what I’ve seen, was pretty negative. Tremblay suggested that players will get comfortable with “not owning [their] games,” and that four-word phrase sent usually sensible critics and analysts into a state of meltdown.
As I state in the title of this piece, the way in which practically all of us engage with and consume media has changed dramatically in the last few years – and that change is continuing. I’ve been through multiple stages of this transition myself with different forms of media for at least twenty years, if not more. It began with music, with digital downloads replacing cassette tapes and CDs. It happened again with DVDs and Blu-ray discs losing out to video-on-demand. It’s happened already in gaming with the move from cartridges to discs and then the decline of optical discs in favour of digital downloads.
And all of that is before we get into subscription services and streaming.
Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have predicted the rise in streaming and subscription platforms – but now they’re everywhere. Many people, especially younger people, have never purchased so much as a single song or film – they’ve grown up streaming their music and videos. Forget about physical discs or tapes, there’s a whole generation of younger people who’ve never even bought a song on iTunes or paid to watch a film or TV series on demand. Subscriptions have become the way many people want to engage with different forms of media – and it’s easy to see why.
Subscriptions offer a “best of both worlds” approach. Like a cable or satellite TV package, they offer a good deal of choice. And like video-on-demand or a DVD box set, they let viewers choose when they want to watch. Music streaming, too, has these same advantages: an abundance of choice and the freedom to choose what to listen to and when. Audiences no longer have to put up with the rigid schedules of broadcasters and TV channels, while also having access to far more viewing or listening options than they would with CDs or DVDs. For a relatively low price per month, massive libraries of content become available – opening up far more titles than any of us would ever be able to reasonably expect to purchase. This was the original appeal of streaming, and while in the film and TV space there are problems resulting from the “streaming wars,” it remains the major appeal of the format.
I don’t have a crystal ball, so I can’t predict what the media landscape might look like another twenty years down the line. It’s quite possible that further changes and disruptions will have come along, and streaming may no longer be the flavour of the month. But right now, as things stand, it’s the direction of travel for music, television, film… and even gaming. Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that is simply wrong, and unfortunately for folks who want to push back against it… I think that’s a losing battle right now. Is it worth being aware of the shortcomings of streaming and subscriptions? Absolutely! Is there a reasonable chance of reversing this trend in the next few years, and can we expect people to go back to buying cassette tapes and DVDs? Absolutely not.
It’s no shock to me that gaming is also moving toward a subscription model. The only real surprise, if I’m being honest, is that it’s taken until now for subscriptions to begin to take off. An all-digital product like a video game is well-suited to being bundled into a subscription package, and gamers – who tend to be a younger demographic on the whole – are exactly the kind of tech-savvy people who are already engaging with other forms of media in this way. It makes perfect sense that subscriptions would be the “next big thing” in the gaming market.
Here’s the fundamental question at the heart of this controversy: do I, as a player or viewer, need to own outright the media that I’m engaging with? Because answering this question should go some way to explaining why some people are so angry at Ubisoft for this comment, and why others seem to be just fine with it.
I’m happy to watch a movie or TV show once and never come back to it again. I can think of many, many films and TV shows in that category. I watched them, I enjoyed them, but I have absolutely no need or desire to go back to them. Buying the DVD box set of a show like Battlestar Galactica just to watch it once seems wasteful, and while I could re-sell it afterwards, I wouldn’t get most of my money back. I could rent it – as we used to do in the days when Blockbuster and other video rental stores were in every small town… and that’s basically what streaming subscriptions are. Yes, you don’t own the media you consume when you subscribe to a platform. You pay to access it – i.e. you rent it.
For a lot of TV shows and films, that’s totally fine. Last year, for instance, I watched Ladybug and Cat Noir: The Movie. It was a decent enough film; a perfectly enjoyable superhero adventure for kids. But I don’t need to own a copy of Ladybug and Cat Noir: The Movie… because I’m almost certainly never going to watch it again. Paying £15-20 for a DVD, Blu-ray, or digital copy just seems wasteful.
And that mindset also applies to games. There are many, many games that I’ve played over the last thirty-plus years that were one-and-done affairs. These are titles I enjoyed but just see no need to revisit… such that owning them outright, either digitally or on a disc/cartridge, is unnecessary. So if a streaming service is going to come along and let me essentially rent the games that I want to play – while also giving me access to a library so colossal that I could never afford to purchase even one-tenth of the titles on offer – then heck yes. Sign me up!
When I first started talking about Microsoft’s Game Pass service in 2020, that was how I felt. And I will admit that subscriptions in the gaming space have some bugs and kinks to be worked out – in particular how DLC and expansion packs should be handled. But those are surmountable hurdles, and the benefits of the subscription model, particularly to low-income folks like myself, outweigh the disadvantages. If you asked me right now, in early 2024, what would be the most cost-effective route into current-gen gaming, I would say without hesitation that an Xbox Series S console and a Game Pass subscription is by far the best option for folks on a budget.
At present, there are no titles (of which I’m aware, at any rate) that are only available to people who sign up for an expensive subscription package. That means that players can still choose to purchase – and own outright – any game or games that they choose to. Some developers and studios, such as Baldur’s Gate 3 creators Larian, have indicated that they won’t put their games on any subscription service in the near future – and that’s okay, too. An independent publisher or studio will always have the freedom to choose whether to engage with subscription platforms – and which to sign on with, if any.
Permanently owning media is, if you think about it, a relatively new concept. When films came along in the first years of the 20th Century, they’d be shown in cinemas – but there was no way for the average person to own a copy of a film until really the late 1970s. The same applied to television shows: audiences would be entirely dependent on broadcasters to watch their favourite shows, with no way to purchase their own copy. This was even true of shows that eventually spawned long-running series and franchises: Star Trek, for instance, and Doctor Who, both started off in the 1960s, when viewers could only ever hope to re-watch their favourite episodes when television networks would do re-runs.
Even within my own lifetime, owning a copy of a film or television series was a relative rarity. When I was very young we didn’t have a video recorder at home, and it was only in the late ’80s that my parents purchased a Betamax system, and then later still a VHS recorder. I could count on my fingers the number of video cassettes I owned as an adolescent, and most of those were blank tapes used for recording programmes directly from the TV; even in the ’80s and into the ’90s, the idea of purchasing and owning a vast media library was far from the norm.
In gaming, too, this idea of permanent ownership hasn’t always been around. Games started in arcades, where players would have to pay to play a game that they didn’t own. And in the ’80s and ’90s, renting individual games and even entire consoles from rental shops was commonplace. I still remember the mad rush of trying to complete a game the night before it was due to go back to the shop!
With streaming and subscriptions growing in the music, film, and television spaces, their arrival in gaming was inevitable. And perhaps in the future we’ll look back on the period of media ownership from the 1980s through to the early 2020s as a bit of a blip; an outlier in a media landscape that has tended to favour a less permanent relationship with audiences. I don’t have a great track record at predicting the future… but that seems at least plausible to me, at any rate!
I could probably count on my fingers the number of films, television shows, and video games that I’d want hard copies of, because there really aren’t that many that I consider to be the kinds of masterpieces that I need to return to over and over again. There are a great many games that I’m happy to only play once, and that I don’t need to own outright because I’ll never play again. Paying the inflated asking price of £60/$70 for a game in that category feels wasteful… even more so to think that a physical copy of the game would just end up gathering dust on a shelf.
All that being said, I don’t expect to see “physical” copies of games disappear entirely. As we’ve surprisingly seen with the resurgence of the vinyl and cassette markets in music, there’s a hard core of collectors (and hipsters) who long for those slightly archaic formats – and the same will almost certainly be true of video games, too. Many games that began as digital-only products end up releasing a physical copy on a disc or cartridge – Hades, one of my favourite games of 2021, is one such example. And “collector’s editions” of games aren’t going anywhere, either. So for collectors and fans of games in boxes, I don’t think they’re going to entirely disappear. Whether they’ll remain affordable is another matter, of course!
Returning to the quotation that prompted all of this, though, here’s what I have to say: I’m totally fine with renting most of the games I play. I can think of several titles from just the past couple of years that I paid full price or close to full price for that 100% did not deserve it, and if I could’ve tried those games as part of a subscription package, I could’ve saved myself some money and bother! For the way I personally play games, subscriptions and renting are perfectly fine. And for those occasional once-in-a-generation masterpieces like Baldur’s Gate 3? I’m happy to splurge!
The way all of us engage with media has changed a lot over the past decade – and it changed in the decade preceding it, too. There will undoubtedly be more changes to come in the years ahead, and it’s entirely plausible that a return to one-off purchases and full ownership will be on the cards. But right now, subscriptions and renting are the way things are going. The transformation has already happened in music, it’s ongoing if a little unsettled in film and television, and gaming is just beginning to catch up. There are drawbacks, of course, and we mustn’t kid ourselves: corporations are doing this for their benefit, not ours. But as someone on a low income, and who remembers growing up as a gamer with literally a few pennies in my pocket, having access to a massive library of titles for one monthly price still feels like a great deal. And if I don’t own any of those titles and can’t replay them if they get taken off the service… well, that’s a trade-off I’m okay with.
All titles discussed above are the copyright of their respective studio, publisher, and/or developer. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 