The thing about Netflix is you can download, but the usual user experience is just turning on the TV and there it is. For games, that represents a significantly different experience when games, even those distributed on disk, have to have downloads and AAA games are getting in excess of 100 gigs. You can’t turn on a game, try it a bit, then switch to another new game.
(Also: not having anything to download makes games impossible to pirate without hacking a server, and if the games are built to run on highly idiosyncratic, highly specific server set-up, it could be very difficult to run them locally…)
Well yeah, but I meant that kind of revenue model is new for games. The all-you-can-eat for a monthly price thing. Of course, what we’re seeing with show streaming is content disappearing from Netflix and migrating to a million different competing services run by the various studios. I expect something similar for games, once this takes off - X dollars a month, but to play Ubisoft games only (with another subscription required for EA, another for Activision…).
Most games don’t have mechandise or spin-offs (whereas all theatrically released movies have various secondary revenue streams). I’m not sure how many games make significant amounts of money on merch and spin-offs that do have them - I suspect it’s largely the biggest selling games only that see significant revenue. Film and television are a lot more mass-market than all but a handful of games are, still. They can effectively exist as ads for merchandise, but for games it often works the other way around. I worked on a game that had a series of novels, high-end figurines (made by Weta workshop), etc. I’m pretty sure they were all money losers; certainly their intended function was for marketing, rather than revenue.
If they sold well, they did. Games that didn’t sell well were off the shelves. This created huge disparities in how well games did. A game that was successful would be a big hit, able to fund the development of a number of games. Games might only sell a million copies a year - but a game like Doom or Diablo could last long enough to sell 2 or 3 million copies. (Or six to nine million copies for the more extreme outliers.) Things aren’t that different now, for the most part (leaving aside the biggest games that get all the attention). It’s a bigger market but much more fragmented. The sales tail now works at all levels, though - one-person developers can release niche games that continue to provide a stream of revenue that might significantly increase years after release. (And yeah, a handful of monster hits like Minecraft or GTA V continue to sell copies such that sales increase exponentially over the years.)
