Free Trials

While ways to play free games are abundant all over the internet, those games are not normally the good quality ones designed to be played in console gaming. Once you’re paying out cash for a subscription service, the games are clearly not free.

Fortunately there is a way though to enjoy free gaming on a subscription service, and that’s through a free trial.

Now free trials are well known – they’re offered by many forms of companies as a hook to get you using their services or product, in the hope you’ll buy or subscribe. It’s a good tactic for the operators and has obvious benefits for Customers. 

Most of the operators in the lists you’ll find here offer these trials. Like any trial though you want to be sure what you’re getting and exactly what you’re signing up for. Many will have trial expiry dates after which you may automatically get charged. If you intend to do so, remember to cancel early enough.  

For a good example, you’ll need to look no further than a PlayStation Plus subscription. If you continue after their 14 day free trial, you’ll get access to two free downloadable games each month, plus access to exclusive content along with 100GB of cloud storage for saving games.

Comparing Subscriptions

Comparing subscriptions is not a particularly easy task. Depending on what you want from a service there are many aspects to consider including:

• Pricing

• What you need to be able to play/what you can or can’t play on

• Free trial (and how long it runs for)

• Any current special offers

• Range of games/Game Library

• Early access to newly released titles

• General subscription benefits

• Subscription length/cancellation options

• Any obvious or reported negatives

• Extra discounts

• Upgrade options

• Eligibility to play     

Types Of Games

The number of game genres available on subscriptions is pretty much the same as if you’re looking at a library of mobile games or discs. All of the popular genres are covered, including: 

Virtual World games

Exploration

Driving

Racing

Action

Adventure

Board

Card

Sports

Multiplayer

RPG 

Strategy

Puzzle

Hyper Casual 

And many more!

Internet/Broadband Requirements

One of the potential drawbacks of playing your games on a server that’s not right in front of you is that you need to connect to it over broadband.

And we all have experienced broadband speeds – if only at certain times – that don’t support being able to run resource hungry streaming or downloads.

So to get the best out of a subscription or cloud service you will need a connection that’s of reasonable quality. Google have stated that a minimum of 30Mbps is required to play games in 4K at 60fps on Stadia, and games running at 1080p would need a 20Mbps connection.

Plus it’s not just your own connection quality that paints the whole picture, the time for round trip between your device and the servers it’s connecting to also plays a part. This is sometimes referred to as latency, and affects the time difference between when you make a command to do something on your controller or keypad and that action actually taking place in the game. It’s unlikely to be a noticeable issue in single player games but might be more so in multiplayer.

Big firms with servers all over the world (examples include Google and Microsoft) have an advantage here and can offer round trip times at lower figures than a number of competitors. But even so, you probably won’t get the perfect experience if you’re playing a competitive online shooter game over a streaming service.

So you’ll need good broadband. Satellite internet probably won’t be good enough, and neither will some cellular networks. If you’re using a public or shared Wi-Fi connection and someone else started downloading big files you could experience interruptions. 

Benefits

These services are a great way of instantly getting access to new and interesting games and features on demand.

The main benefit or pro of a taking out a subscription is fairly obvious – if you currently regularly buy a wide number of game discs then subscribing is likely to save you money overall.  There’a proviso here though and it depends to an extent on where you live. We should spare a thought for our gaming friends in some European countries where the lack of any regional pricing means that the price of a subscription is well out of line when balanced against the cost of living. Turkey is an example, Romania another.

Equally you have the convenience of just logging in and playing whenever you want, plus the best subscriptions will put up some tasty titles for you to play. 

Some services will offer an option to play across different devices. Some will also let you stream from one device to another (for example a TV) so you can get a better visual experience. Plus there may be additional features of a service that could also give some other financial positives, such as discounted goods. 

And there’s a rather surprising benefit too, which turns a negative into a positive. I’m talking here about the desire to get new games as soon as they come out. If you’re subscribing then more often than not you’re going to have to buy them, but you might find that the need to get the newest games reduces given you’ll have potentially hundreds of great titles to play already.

Added to all of this, there’s a big benefit to the industry overall that comes from the game variety in subscriptions. Microsoft are reportedly seeing a trend for their Game Pass members to try out games in different genres, which implies they’re playing titles they perhaps wouldn’t have played before. This can serve to increase interest across the board and encourage development of games in these different genres.  

Basically any gamer on the lookout for a lower cost method of accessing games stands to benefit in a number of different ways.

Benefits For Developers

Drawbacks

We’ve already covered the potential issues over broadband speed and internet connection in general, but there are a  handful of other items to consider.

If you’re thinking you can get a one stop shop for all the games you want, unfortunately that’s not going to be the case. Games houses, content owners, game publishers, and even the subscription providers themselves can all decide where and when they want games to appear. For example, you can’t play a lot of Sony’s games unless you have access to a PS4, while Microsoft games are often limited to an Xbox or PC. 

The only answer to getting every game you want will be to subscribe to multiple services, and note that newly released games often won’t be available. Sony have already stated they wouldn’t put new games – which can often cost millions of dollars to create – into their subscription services.

Of course another problem is the risk that you sign up and don’t like the service, though this is offset somewhat by the option to take a free trial first. 

Along with these, there are a few extras to think about:

• You don’t actually own the games anymore. The provider could remove one of your favourites from a library. 
• You might find your data usage skyrockets, resulting in increase broadband or mobile data costs. 

This article published by McKinsey.com does a great job of exploring why the subscription gaming model may not end up as the industry-changing event its been made out to be.

Best Subscriptions 

With the list of game subscription options now an extensive one, it can be difficult to work out which one is best for your needs. So where to start?

First it’s worth considering what ‘best’ means. When we talk about the best of anything, we need to think about it from different perspectives. Do we mean the best on price? The best quality? The best for range of games? The overall best deal?

All are applicable to subscription services, and because we’re not always comparing like for like it’s not so easy to make a definite statement on which one earns the label.

 At time of writing though, one does stand out – Microsoft Xbox Game Pass.

With access to a formidable library of games to download and play, a streaming option, good value deals, and all delivered at a great price Microsoft are leading the way. 

Competition is always good for subscribers, and they’ll need to work hard to stay ahead. There will be others looking to take a bigger piece of the action for sure. But they’ll have to work just as hard to get ahead of Microsoft’s deal at $10 to $15 per month for access to over 100 games on Xbox and PC.

The Future

We may be a little guilty here of writing about the future when we’re still in the early stages of the present. But it’s always worth knowing what’s coming up, right?

So one of the big developments could be the recent announcement from Sony on a possible development of a cloud based Playstation 5 console, which if it does see the light of day could effectively remove entirely the need to buy physical console hardware. Until 5g becomes widely available though it’s unlikely this would be a good solution for heavy duty gamer’s.    

Resources

This page on SubscriptionGames.com gives a pretty in depth view into our subject, however there is plenty of other info published online that goes into equal depth. This can found on video sites, tech news type sites, forums, gaming websites, and the main sites of the subscription operators themselves.

For sensible discussions on game subscriptions the best place to start is Reddit. 

Here are a few news/technology site articles worth taking note of:

• An investigation into the myths of cloud vs console gaming debates from The Fool.com

• An explainer article around what cloud gaming is and how it works from TheVerge.com 

• What to consider before you choose a game subscription from CNET

You might see the subscription gaming model referred to as Games As A service. The Wikipedia page on GaaS covers this terminology.

And a few on the best subscriptions…….. 

• IGN.com – which video game subscription is right for you

• CulturedVultures – 9 best gaming subscriptions

• Medium.com – best gaming subscriptions for a lockdown

• DigitalTrends – best game streaming services 

Summary

The ways to play games are widespread, and paying a subscription to play is becoming ever more popular. The options include:

• Playing games provided as part of a subscription service (either virtual or physical)
• Playing your own games on a virtual PC in the cloud
• Subscribing to a mobile games app