I’ve been watching the Nvidia trainwreck, as publisher after publisher pulled games from their service. Publishers get itchy if someone starts running unlicensed copies of their games on servers, regardless of the situation, and Nvidia should have known that.
Humble with their Humble Monthly service, etc. too. Though they aren’t exactly like Netflix (nor are the game giveaways, which outside Epic’s store, are usually about promoting the latest game in a series).
Which is the bit that makes it not-like-Netflix. The significant thing, to me, is that the Netflix model represents a different kind of revenue model. Not a sale (which, anything with a download really is), but something more like a rental. The game industry has only had one revenue model until recently - selling games - compared to the movie industry that similarly started out with only ticket sales, but now has home video sales, video-on-demand, tv and now streaming broadcast revenue, which are the vast majority of their revenue.
Games (and the studios that make them) have entirely lived or died based on early sales, and although the tail for sales has gotten a lot longer (in the early days, if a game didn’t sell, it was gone within a few weeks), only real-money-transactions and subscriptions to online games have added to revenue streams. And those aren’t so much additional revenue streams as alternative ones, since games have to be designed around them.
Publishers would like to have an additional revenue stream from streaming games, but they don’t want it to cut into sales, so it can’t be games that are too new, too popular or too attractively priced. (Ideally they’d love to entirely replace game sales with zero-piracy streaming alternatives with similar revenue, but it’s not yet viable for numerous reasons.)
