Children now want video game subscriptions instead of full-price games


 It's real children, not kidultes, who are the parents of these children.

ESA has commissioned a new survey on what young players want, and the results are once again very surprising.

As GameRant reports, the survey starts with the result that 73% of children surveyed wanted something related to video games. Video game subscriptions were at the top of the list of types of products really wanted by children, followed by dedicated game consoles. We break down the figures below:


➤ Video game subscriptions – 39%

➤ Video game consoles – 38%

➤ Video game accessories – 32%

 Game currency – 29%

 Retail physical games – 22%


So I don’t think people will question the popularity of things like video game consoles or game currency. So why are subscriptions so much more popular with children than anything else?

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Looking at the range of subscription services available, Apple Arcade is a low-cost service dedicated to mobile games, Switch Online serves a niche for fans of retro games, and there are a multitude of PC subscriptions that offer tons of games. These include GeForce Now from Nvidia, Ubisoft Plus from Ubisoft and EA Play from EA.

Above these options is clearly Game Pass, which can work natively on PC and Xbox consoles, and can work in the cloud on both platforms, as well as on mobile. Sony's PlayStation Plus offers many of the same options, but it just doesn't match Microsoft's features.

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But then the question arises; why is there an interest in one of these game subscriptions? Let us leave aside the question of which company is the best or most successful in this area, for that is the real question of the moment.

The value of subscription services goes well beyond access to online services for game consoles. It is more about the ability to access and try several video games at the same time. If the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 generation was full of game demos, now subscriptions make a lot more sense. Players can choose to pick up and deposit the games they are playing, as they please .

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The fact that subscriptions have revolving libraries also benefits gaming companies. Players who did not want to install a one-hour demo would have been more likely to play the main game for five hours with a subscription and then pay the full retail price to continue playing once the game was removed from the subscription.

Subscriptions are certainly not going to wipe out games at full retail price, but they are changing the way the industry sells games. We could see a future in which more games played would be rented rather than pre-purchased, but with more money injected into the industry as a whole.