PC Gaming Weekly - Subscription based gaming

Twitter can certainly be a hellscape of bots, schmucks, and trolls. I’ve been lucky — I don’t end up dealing with many schmucks and trolls. So I see a lot of interesting and smart thoughts on the platform.



Such as this one from indie game maker JF LeBreton. Wednesday, he made a smart point about subscription-based gaming that may be coming from Apple and Google that I hadn’t thought much about.



“Whatever good you think might come of cloud-based game streaming, you cannot deny that it will fully consolidate platform holders’ power over both creators and audience and I believe it is highly irresponsible to put any other argument in favor of it above that concern,” LeBreton tweeted.



In the market research firm Newzoo’s rankings of the top 100 revenue-generating companies in gaming, Apple is No. 4 and Google is No. 6. And this is before they roll out Apple Arcade and Google Stadia. All this money comes from the 30 percent chunks they take from people buying games and in-app transactions on the Apple App Store and Google Play. If successful, could Apple and Google overtake Microsoft and Sony?



Or, more important, would they start to exert even greater control of the gaming market, having a bigger say in who wins and who loses? Or what sort of games find traction on their services?



We have a lot of questions about pricing, about whether American broadband (and its providers, who in my opinion often promise more than they deliver for an exorbitant price) can handle the load. But maybe we should be more worried about what damage these tech giants could wreak on the game industry, especially among indie developers.