Commerce - Subscription Based Services

How Has Subscription Based Services influenced Games Development?

Subscription based services are commonly known to be associated with large companies such as Netflix and Amazon Prime where a consumer can pay a monthly fee of access to what they are promised in the subscription. This service has moved into gaming where gamers can follow the routine of paying monthly for gaming related services such as a variety of different games to play depending on the company they subscribe to.

(Henderson, 2019) reports that Ubisoft has joined the marketing method of adding in a monthly subscription service to access a variety of different games you can play as long as you have the subscription, being called ‘UPlay+’. The base price of the service costs £12.99 per month (which is charged after using the free trial offered to new members) and it aims to compete with EA’s Origin Access and Xbox’s Game Pass which are also subscription services containing their own games (Henderson, 2019). It is clear that the subscription service is inspired by the success of EA’s Origin Access and the Xbox Game Pass, they saw it as an opportunity to make more money if players were to pay monthly for the access of their games. Looking at it, having subscription-based services in gaming means that players can have access to newly developed games (and old games) at a cheaper price which is payed monthly instead of at full price on release. Developers therefore will aim to make games to be suitable and convincing for the consumer to pay for a subscription to get access to their games at a cheaper price.