Xbox One Charge $10 a month, Play All Games Free

[Damnlag]

So I had this idea that I've said in the past on a blog I had. What if Microsoft Xbox were to charge you $10 a Month, and you were able to stream games and play them free on your Xbox console over the month? Kind of like a Netflix service, but for games. The price would be fair if we didn't have to pay $60 for games and you would have more games to play.

This would require you to have an online connection to be able to download and stream the game though. So when I heard always online rumors, this came to mind. Because they won't allow the game to be downloaded most likely, or you won't be able to play it without the online connection.

It could mean that Multiplayer and Campaign games could be separated and designed differently with unlimited cloud storage for the games. Updates could be easily added and you wouldn't have download and wait times would be shortened.

Some day, we'll see the end of the disc games and say hello to nothing but digital downloads. However, I don't see that happening completely because that would mean the loss of many jobs at stores such as GameStop. I don't think Microsoft is that evil.

 

[cliverederson]

I would be into that idea, hell Xbox Live is $5 a month now and they barely give you anything with it. Before I built my PC, I was considering a service like GameFly, I've thought about this a lot because if you average out the cost of games, like say Skyrim was $60 new, at $10 a month I'd have to stay into it for six months for that not to be a good deal. Even Skyrim that I was pretty into, I don't think I played it a full six months, I would guess maybe three or four months. Most games I get less time out of, maybe revisiting here and there. I wonder if that would be as profitable as selling games though, at $10 a month, that's only the cost of two games per year, I bet most 360 owners buy that or more, wouldn't you think? Although, I can't say I have this year.

 

[Jmoney707]

I think that would be AMAZING. Sadly, I don't think they would bite. From a business perspective, this isn't the best move due to revenue loss. There's plenty of gamers that spend easily over $120 a year. It would be an awesome solution for those who don't quite have a lot of money. I would definitely have to subscribe for that.

 

[BlackSolaris]

Wait, stream the games? Are you planning on a new OnLive console? Because we all know how that went. If you mean i can pay 10$ a month to download games to my console and play them, then sure, that might be something good.

 

[sc_shark]

it would be a killer idea... unfortunatly no publisher would develope quality games with only getting a cut of a cut of a cut of 10 dollars. its hard enough getting microsoft to allow indie games on their system... now i cant think of any indie game i want or care about but still.

with the budget microsoft gives to trey arc or activision,turn 10 to develope their games(exclusives) even tho they are publishers for xbox i cant see them taking a hit like that.

 

[ozadin]

Interesting idea, but I feel $10 is very cheap, and overall, Microsoft will lose more revenue if they actually decided to implement this. It's highly unlikely for someone to stick to a game for more than a month, and if they do, they would mostly buy it for $50 instead of paying $10 each month for it. It would be worth it for the users, but not for Microsoft, or the game developers.

 

[cliverederson]

Wait, stream the games? Are you planning on a new OnLive console? Because we all know how that went. If you mean i can pay 10$ a month to download games to my console and play them, then sure, that might be something good.

Isn't that how the Xbox One's library of your games stored online will be? I thought they've said you don't need to store games you buy on your local harddrive, and instead they'd be stored in the cloud. So I don't see any way around streaming them to play them anyway, so it wouldn't really be any difference if it was a service that streamed the games.

I think at the end of the day though this would be a pretty hard system to implement since games are made by different developers, what would be a game company's motivation to really invest in making a great game if at the end of the day they still get the same cut of everyone's $10 a month revenue? Would really popular games earn a higher cut? Who would decide that?

 

[Vortimous]

I actually had something like this in college back in the mid 90s. The cable company in my area had what was called Sega TV if I remember it correctly. You had a device that you would hook into the sega genesis, just like a cartridge. The device was plugged into the cable jax and you had a menu of about 20-30 games that you could play over and over for one price a month. I think it was about $30 or so. Each month they would change out about half of the games. We got it for about a year. I am surprised no cable or direct TV has done something like this. If they can do it back for the sega genesis, I cant imagine they could not do it today....

Anyone else had this or remember it in your city????

 

[8bitpenguin]

This is sort of what people where hoping the OnLive cloud gaming platform was going to be. It's an interesting business model, one that has proven extremely successful when it comes to TV and Music, although much more difficult and expensive in execution when it comes to gaming.

 

[Medza]

That is basically what OnLive , I can see the appeal but there are two sides to every coin:

• Continuity/DLC - Games like COD and Battlefield constatnly have new map packs coming out for them, buying those extra bits lets them keep the servers up and running even years after the release of the game, I udnerstand that you have a monthly fee here, but if you have a thousand titles on offer , the percentage that each one gets will be very low
• Available Games - Netflix very rarely has new stuff on it, everything there is at least 1 or 2 years old, some people only want to play the latest games as they come out a $10 a month service simply isn't going to be able to provide them soon enough
• Spreading the costs - This also has to be profitable for game developers and publishers. With something like Netflix , you can easily put on a load of old movies because they don't loose their value, but game developers are constantly fighting with new stuff, and whilst they could bring back some classics, ultimately people want to play new games

 

[Nymph]

I think this is a splendid idea, especially if you are looking to try out games without being harsh on your wallet. This way, even though you don't "own" the game, which is incentive enough to go out and buy it so you don't have to pay $10 every month, you can get a good idea of what the game is like. It is not so much that the price is cheap, it seems cheap, but when you compare it to something like Netflix whose service goes for $8 per month, and they rake in tens of millions of dollars from it (with revenue share between each movie company opting in) it can be quite profitable in numbers. That said, I do not think enough people who own these consoles have Live for it to be profitable. Then again, there might be more than enough. I don't have their statistics to tell.

 

[vertigo1]

I could see something like daily rental working out. Pay $2, you get 24 hours to play as much as you want for that period. I don't see $10 a month unlimited working for devs unless it was only for older titles.

 

[WorkingGamer]

That idea reminds me either of Gamyfly most but also brings Onlive to mind aswell. While it would certainly be nice but I can't see them doing it quite for $10 a month, $15 kind of seems like the minimum for a service like that because that kind of service would be pretty darn expensive. Also as Medza said it would be hard to actually pull off as people need to make money and other people want to play the newest games as they come out not wait a months to see it online. For now you're best deal would just have to be whatever games they have digitally or stick with a PC distributor such as Steam or Onlive.

 

[LALucien]

On first read it does sound like a decent ideas but, when you think of it like a few of you have said in that, you would have to pay for a game every month you wanted to pay for it, which could be a whole year, then it doesn't seem too good.
I guess you wouldn't only download one game at a time though so potentially you could have a library of games for only £10 a month which, is great.
Tricky one I guess.