Hellgate and the Unavoidable Future of Video Games

Subscription and fee-based is the direction games are trending. At its core, I suppose there are some benefits to paying a team of designers a monthly fee to generate content for me rather than buying a game, giving it 50-80 hours and moving on, but that does not mean I endorse the change without reservations.

And the lines are getting blurrier. Hellgate London (made by the Diablo 2 team) was supposed to be the herald who would proclaim that good games (with online support and communities) need not be subscription/monthly fee-based. And then this. The lure of the cash cow is just too great. Generating content for an already existing game is probably a more lucrative business model than taking a chance on making new games. There's this thing called innovation that will surely suffer. Or the disparity will make the game unplayable for those who don't give in to the monthly fee.

I'm not sure I'm going to buy Hellgate now. Which puts my hope for the future of video games pretty solidly on Spore.