> Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones.

Pay-per-hour means developers have an incentive to build addictive games that keep you just engaged enough to keep playing for an extended time.

> Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.

Monthly subscriptions mean that the platform has to choose what games to include and promote based on what is most likely to make users find value in the platform—which means focussing on those with widest appeal, unless their recommender engine can get enough signal to reliably predict niche interest.

I don’t think this is true. It assumes people are economically rational and trying to optimize fun per dollar. But people already should be valuing their time and yet they don’t. If developers must now guarantee players not just try their game but play it for x hours to make a profit, I don’t think they will be pushing for shorter better games.

> Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones.

I'm not sure about that. Currently tons of people pay monthly for grindy MMO games. Expanding that sort of revenue scheme to single player games would encourage devs to create more Skinner boxes to keep players "engaged" over the long run.

MMO's are pay-monthly for unlimited hours, not pay-per-hour, that's a big difference. The marginal cost of an additional hour of play is zero.

Players aren't going to spend hours grinding if they know they're paying extra money for each of those hours.

I don't think it's that much of a difference to pay monthly to grind for a month.

Shorter games don't happen. We saw this with Steam when they added a no-questions-asked refund policy for short games. Devs get absolutely punished by making short games now so we're going to see them get longer, and the same will hold if Stadia pays by the hour. If Stadia pays a fixed amount per game we will probably see a proliferation of short games designed to bait people into playing.

> Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones.

Or it ties money directly to length, so you need your game to be 60+ hours to justify it's existence. Or people won't pay that much so we don't get any new dark souls or RDR2 length games.