I love how people like the one who wrote the article act as if PS Now doesn't exist when it's the market leader.
Right now they are something relatively small, but if they grow these subscription services will damage badly the gaming industry as happened with cinema or music before.
I think it can benefit devs if it continues as a tiny portion of the total gaming market where you can put your game to get an extra revenue when it doesn't sell anymore in the stores after a year or so of being discounted and price cutted, so to get some extra revenue from it it's better than zero revenue. But to put there your brand new game is a suicide because if right now publishers cut+platform holder 30% revenue cut+taxes and transaction fees+refunds & chargebacks already keep a small revenue for the dev in digital games (and way less in retail), in this case if even worse when you're getting paid a tiny amount of money depending on downloads or hours played, which in a shop of hundreds/thousands of games means that only a tiny portion of games may do good business.
As of now Microsoft pays the dev a fair certain amount of money on advance to the devs, but they do this with only some few cool guys. But they do this now because they want to grow userbase and to build catalog. But once they build a decently big enough userbase, and they stop charging $1 for it, I assume they will pay less to put a game there or will switch to the other toxic payment related to hours or downloads,
In any case, subscriptions are also a place where only a few games are added each month. Which means most devs aren't allowed to put their game there even if they want. So if in a future these subscripition systems dominate the market and continues being the same, means that that the game revenue is going to be almost zero.
"Executives" yeah sorry I'm not going to worry that Bobby kotick made 27 million this year when he made 28 million last year. Or andrew Wilson only made a mear 35 last year.
Kotick is the boss if the top 1 console publisher, they make a lot of money elsewhere. But it isn't the case of other dozens thousands of gaming companies. Top AAA publishers are less than 0.1% of all the game developer or publishers companies.