Author: A.K.H.

In this video, I’ll be trying a different approach to presenting information, but there’s also a reason why there’s an old game playing in the background. I’ll get to that later. For now, let’s go into today’s topic, which is patient gaming.

I’ve been working on this video for a few days, and co-incidentally, it is coming out at the same time when there is a fresh debate happening in the industry about the feasibility of game subscriptions. But let me not get into that right now. The purpose of this video is not to talk about whether game subscriptions are good or bad. There’s no right or wrong answer, because every consumer has their own needs, and every developer has their own results from using these subscriptions. So let’s not spend time discussing that. This video is simply to list the sheer number of choices a consumer has in early 2024. Just one note before we start, since we already have a lot of subscriptions to cover, I won’t be going deeper into each tier of each subscription; most of the time I will just talk about the highest tier available for each subscription to look at the best value it offers.

I’m currently working on a video about the different video game subscriptions available in the market, and during my research, one subscription seemed quite interesting and also odd. The name of that subscription is GTA+, offered for $5 a month by Rockstar Games. I’ll speak a bit more about why this subscription is odd in the episode about subscriptions, but looking at it got me thinking about how Rockstar Games maintains a special status in the industry. As seen recently during the reveal of the GTA 6 trailer, if Rockstar announces something, the entire gaming world stops what it’s doing and pays attention. Rockstar releases games very rarely. They believe in bringing a game as close to perfection as possible before pushing it into the world. And very rarely do their games suffer from any of the issues that games by most other studios have at launch. The only exception was perhaps the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online in 2013, where there were a few bugs, but that was quickly forgiven because that was the first major online game released by Rockstar.

Buying video games is a luxury. There’s no other way to put it, because not buying a video game won’t have any negative impact in your life, apart from the fear of missing out. It is exactly this FOMO that publishers use to try and hype up the launch of their games, because all of them know that customers have way more choice today than they did in the old days, and even franchises like Call of Duty can see a dip in sales if they get a bad review at launch. That is why publishers use FOMO to try and get as many people as possible to pre-order the game or at least buy it at full price on day one. And to be honest, a lot of us have games that we would definitely buy on day one, no matter what the reviews say, because we are emotionally attached to them.