See now, I’ve been warning you for years
(Visited 4502 times) Game talk
Nov 142008
“The holy grail is taking a business, already a very large and successful business that’s focused on packaged goods that you sell once and then are occasionally resold by others with new benefit to us, and turning that into a subscription business or a semi subscription business where we have an ongoing relationship with consumers, giving them products that they want,” he said. “Who’s better positioned to do that than the company that has the top franchises.”
— Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two’s executive chairman
Is Take Two Thinking of Subscription-Based GTA and BioShock?
8 Responses to “See now, I’ve been warning you for years”
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He’s right. You wouldn’t want to pay $5 a month for access to a particular game, but $50 a month for all of Take2’s or EA’s catalog? That’s something you’d really have to think about.
When they get the prices down under $25 a pop(netflix level) I think we’ll start to see a switch.
There’s a few pieces of software that could be offered this way, though games outside of MMOs seem to me to not fit the model well. I haven’t played GTA IV in four months and the thought of having to pay monthly for something I do not use is hard to swallow.
On the other hand, I’ve been saying for the past three years that Microsoft is missing out on a huge opportunity to offer a subscription based bundle of its software to residential users. I enjoy the Action Pack for my company and it’s a great value at $299 per year. 10 licenses of Office 07, Windows Vista, a few server licenses and more. There has to be a residential package that could be offered to individuals that gives 3 – 5 licenses of things like Windows Home Server, Vista Ultimate, Office 07, etc etc… Something I’d use every day and could see a value in paying for monthly to avoid the many thousands that would have to be spent up front for the same software. That’s where there’s value in pure software without all the social interraction a MMO provides.
I think it’s hard to charge a subscription without a steady stream of content or social content(ie friends and such) included with it. GTA IV has bare minimum social content and the DLC has been promised for nearly a year meaning the DLC is not coming fast enough. Games have to be more than just games in order to use a subscription model because subscribers require more attention for their virtually unending revenue stream.
Well, who wouldn’t play an MMO GTA? But how long would we not hear about it if it were really happening?
As long as these franchises bring in the big bucks, I don’t expect much innovation from the giants.
Well, who wouldn’t play an MMO GTA? But how long would we not hear about it if it were really happening?
*raises his hand*
Honestly, I’d rather they (in general, not Take2 in specific) do subscriptions than sequels.
Well, there’s APB, currently in friends and family beta. I dunno that we need a MMOG with the GTA brand 😛
And I think that the whole idea fails miserably if we’re talking 2-4 year spans between major content releases. You’d need to have a huge back catalog that people don’t already have that they want, and Take2 most definitely does not have that. In fact, Take2 has such a narrow set of titles, that attempting to do this means they have to go the MMOG route, or at least provide huge amounts of free DLC spaced no more than a month or two apart if they want to see any form of success here.
You can’t replace sequels with subs. You can replace expansion packs with subs, but not sequels. You can use the money to fund sequels, but you need to do the whole regularly occurring free expansion pack thing first, with the emphasis on regularly and free.
Derek Licciardi:
Sparing my literalist criticism of “games have to be more than just games,” Derek is right. When you want to play in the subscriptions/memberships business, a services orientation is necessary.
Yeah …
I’m 40. It’s probably time to stop playing with toys anyway.