Several big companies like Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft are all promoting their subscription services. These services are like Netflix for video games. You purchase a subscription monthly for a low cost and you get access to a massive library of games. While EA and Ubisoft might not have that much to offer, Xbox Game Pass by Microsoft surely does. Microsoft has been promoting the Pass like crazy and it offers a very good deal with tons of amazing games. However, not all companies are a fan of subscription services.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t think that subscription services are the future for games. The thing with these kinds of services is that you don’t own all of the items on the service, which means that any game from any service can go away whenever. Also, if you are a casual gamer that only plays a couple of games a year, then the Pass might not be very exciting for you.
Zelnick also thinks that the current prices for video games are cheap compared to how much they are played by a consumer. “That's because of the way people consume it, and the price point for owning a title, which is very reasonable and very low, actually, on a per-hour basis,” said Zelnick. “So I think it's unlikely that subscriptions supplant frontline videogame sales as the primary business model.”
Zelnick further went on to claim that Take-Two's games offer a great deal for a low price. According to him, their games are of top quality and Take-Two offers them at a cheap price. Take-Two takes less money than their games are actually worth.
While this claim might not be true for all Take-Two games, it is true for some of them, especially the games released by Rockstar. GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are massive compared to just about anything else in the market.
So what do you think? Do you agree with Take-Two Interactive's CEO? Or do you think that game subscription services are the way most players will play games in the future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
