~The Game Pass Thread~

TV streaming is very different. You can’t just have an indie director produce a show out of nothing, as you can for indie games. You have to have the backing of a giant studio, like Netflix or Amazon. In fact, what you see in TV streaming is differentiation of content – each streaming service taking/making its own content. That model could take off on PC as well. Each streaming service could become a publisher for its own content, which would be exclusive to that service. Basically what Epic is trying to do. Except with a store, exclusivity has little meaning other than getting you mentally used to seeing it as a legitimate store. It’s not worth it for Epic to subsidize content beyond its store’s establishment. A streaming service is different – every exclusive game is an incentive to keep paying the monthly cost. Games are even more effective at this than TV shows, as a single game can take months or years to finish. So I can definitely imagine a future where all PC games are mutually exclusive services provided on different streaming platforms, much like the video streaming platforms of today. Few true Indies would thrive in this future, and the money for investment in games would come from services competing against each other. That’s a very different future from one where streaming services don’t differentiate themselves with exclusive games and all have similar services.