Yeah. It really depends on how many subscribers and how much they are actually paying for the subscriptions. I just can’t see a subscription service working well for something like GTA6 or Witcher 4 unless like you said, there’s a plethora of subscribers. For the publishers, I would imagine selling games for $20-$70 would be more profitable as opposed to a subscription service, but then again subscription services could be more profitable for certain games that don’t have mass appeal. I think there’s room for both.
There could be, even now with gamepass there is a split between the purchase customers and the subs.
The one huge thing about companies like MS and Sony, is that if they can get and maintain enough subs, a lot of the risk on the AAA games disappears.
Before - say you fund 10 games at a cost of $80 Million each, that's $800 million in costs. With the traditional model, you have to cover these cost with sales, sometimes great, sometimes not so great.
After - with a sub service, you already know you are bringing in lets say 3 billion a year (supposedly this is what MS brought in in 2021 for gamepass), you know these cost are covered. The only thing you need to maintain is quality to a point where gamers still want to subscribe. (so there is still incentive to create great games, think Netflix or Disney plus, if they have no great shows, they lose subs.......)
That's why I don't buy the notion that quality would suffer. Poor quality will equal lost subs in the long run. Some people like to think this would be ignored, MS would have been our of business years ago if they thought poor quality games would drive any business, purchase or subscriptions based. Even if they
failed at times, the goal of great games was still there. In fact it's why they are trying to buy more developers, to bring more AAA games to both sales and subscriptions.