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Subscription flood and indie dying: How will we play in five years?
Game subscriptions are the holy grail for us developers – and at the same time their biggest fear. That’s what Maik Reichelt from the Berlin indie studio Byterockers’ Games says when Micha addresses him in the CAGGTUS live talk on Game Pass, Apple Arcade and PlayStation Plus.
What’s more: Maik fears that the trend towards flat rate games could trigger a veritable indie death in the coming years: 99 percent of the studios could go under.
In the live talk from CAGGTUS 2023 in Leipzig, Micha discusses why that is, what glimmers of hope there are and how gaming will change in the next five years with Maik Reichelt and Konrad Kunze, the managing director of the Leipzig studio Fusionplay.
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Fusionplay is exciting in two respects: on the one hand, because the studio is also active in indie publishing itself. On the other hand, because Fusionplay is currently developing virtual reality games, most recently the “Farm Job Simulator” Across the Valley for PlayStation VR2 and Steam VR.
That brings us to the next topic: will the market for virtual reality games grow noticeably in the next few years? Konrad sees potential, but also has to make restrictions. Because VR games will not replace classic gaming, but can complement it.
Maik cannot disagree, on the contrary: The Byterockers have also tried a virtual reality game, but unfortunately without success. Now they prefer to stay away from other realities and instead work on Beat Slayer, a top-down rhythm action game in which you have to time attacks on the music.
The question that will play a decisive role for the next few years is: What is Steam doing?
Valve’s platform still has tremendous market power on PC – but will Steam remain the dominator? Is Valve even thinking about changes, keywords subscription or cloud gaming (or both)?
Maik and Konrad are surprisingly hopeful about the topic of AI. It shouldn’t cost any jobs, but should even make things significantly easier for indie studios, for example when building prototypes.
And then there is the new, old trend topic of User Generated Content (UGC), i.e. content created by players. Is this just new hype, or will UGC be even more important in five years?
You can see our talk as a video above or listen to it as a podcast:
link to Podcast Content
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