It's interesting - for music this has basically been solved because the industry was under tight financial pressures and many companies including Spotify, Apple and Google were able to work out large scale licensing deals. Heck, most music can be obtained legally for free on YouTube these days.
Compare with video where the market is fragmenting beyond repair and I get asked to pirate things for family and friends several times a week. In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too.
I hope more of these near-zero margin goods will go the cheap subscription route in the future. It makes this a much simpler time for consumers. Right now, I don't know what service even has a given TV show so it's easier to just click the button in Sonarr and watch it show up on my NAS a few minutes later.
> In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too.
Haven't they, though? In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction. For PC/console, Steam and Origin are doing a good job too. Most games on Steam cost less than $50, and that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
> In mobile, free-to-play model has solved most of the friction.
Not really, this model is pretty awful as it creates motivations for developers to make the game repetitive or overly difficult in order to convince people to pay for stuff. Just look at the recent mobile Lemmings game, they lock you out of the game with a timer, offering only temporary timer bypasses in the store. A few developers sell a simple "get out of bullshit and ads pass" which does solve it though.
Overall though in the mobile world this hasn't been an issue as the expectation of prices for paid games is far lower.
> Most games on Steam cost less than $50
AAA titles are still $60 and in recent years often include "season passes" and similar, doubling their costs.
> that's weeks if not many months of entertainment.
I get over 50 hours out of probably 1/20 games.
So overall, I'd say far from solved still. Origin has attempted a subscription model but it's expensive and offers only trials of recent releases and significantly older titles. Humble Bundle actually has a decent subscription service going on, but it's not on the sort of "all access" model you get with music or movies.
Perhaps streaming game services will change this, but I do worry that they're a move in the wrong direction in other ways.
Compare with video where the market is fragmenting beyond repair and I get asked to pirate things for family and friends several times a week. In the gaming world, they never really got the subscription thing worked out decently, the titles are extremely expensive and now fragmentation is annoying consumers there too.
I hope more of these near-zero margin goods will go the cheap subscription route in the future. It makes this a much simpler time for consumers. Right now, I don't know what service even has a given TV show so it's easier to just click the button in Sonarr and watch it show up on my NAS a few minutes later.