First bite as Apple fishes for iPad games subscriptions The first subscription game service for the iPad has been approved by Apple, allowing iPad owners to pay $7 a month for access to games from Big Fish. Seattle-based Big Fish is the first company to take the Cupertino shilling and agree to hand over 30 per cent of its subscription revenue every month, Bloomberg reports, but for …
You're still screwed if you loose internet unexpectedly.
My broadband has been down for weeks now (thanks BT) and in the whole time I've been unable to play any Steam games. Sure I can use my mobile or 3G dongle to get internet but Steam is blocked so I can't login to "go offline"..... *sigh*
(yeah, I felt like a rant :)
That Steam also has been around the block more than BigFish has been when it comes to gaming, has a tried and true method of distribution, better sales, need I keep going? Steam in this case is a far better alternative than say BigFish....Hell Gamtap is a better alternative than BigFish is and THAT follow a subscription service....
Subscription gaming like this Big Fish approach is an attempt at lock in. They want to corral their customers away from their competitors.
I'm sure that's a dream come true for many control freak bosses, as is their endless need to maintain control via cloud gaming.
But I find all that control freakery very offputting. I don't want my gaming ruled by the control freaks and I don't want my games streaming all data to and from a server, plus eating my bandwidth and suffering latency and failing whenever I can't get Internet access on my phone. (For example, try sitting on a train going through a tunnel with this cloud gaming. It would be instant fail at just the kind of time a lot of people want to play a game on their phone).
Plus I want to be free to choose from all games available to play for my phone, not limited to some control freak company's own small walled garden (within an already walled garden!).
Plus if I buy a game, I have that game to own, as it should be. Whereas with this cloud gaming, if they take the game off their servers, that's it, I've lost that game.
Yet for all these down sides they expect us to pay them $84 per year!.
The control freaks never learn, they just think the answer is adding ever more ways to control. :(
This app highlights exactly why they do it.
If Apple took a lower cut of subscriptions - or as some of you have suggested none at all - Developers would simply make the apps free and require you to subscribe to get any use out of it.
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