I'm actually really dreading the Apple Arcade business model. The game developers are compensated by time spent in their game. This means that, similar to the current craze for open world games, shorter, more experimental games will simply earn less. Thus, meaningful content will be stretched even thinner to fill up more of the user's time. It's another nail in the coffin of single player narrative experiences.

Streaming services, like Google's recently announced Stadia will probably have similar compensation models.

A number of businesses have moved towards models where compensation is directly tied to time spent consuming: Kindle pays authors by the page, YouTube monetizes based on watch time.

I really think it harms the world by incentivizing creators to pad and fluff. Dickens is great, but you can really tell which of his works were published serially, because it affected how he wrote.

At the same time, paying a flat amount for each created work incentivizes creators to pump out a huge pile of small works. It's all singles and no albums, which I also think is bad.

The programmer part of my brain wonders if you could solve this by simply picking a function somewhere between O(n) (pay linearly by quantity consumed) and O(1) (pay a fixed price for the whole thing). The obvious middle point is O(log(n)).

I wonder how well it would work if creators were paid by time spent consuming but with a function that offerred diminishing returns the larger the quantity was?

In that case you incentivize sybil attacks, because publishing content across multiple identities is more lucrative than a single one.

Games like Rocket League are my favorite payment model. ~$20 to get in, with semi optional small transactions over time. $5 here and there. I've spent over $100 in my hundreds of hours in game. I guess that's close to your "O(log(n))".

The App store and Steam are certainly not the exception. The traditional model with geographic restrictions is not making more money. Do you have citations for that?

Your sentiment is great, but I think the world has moved far beyond where you are coming from and that isn’t where Play will differentiate. The subscription new games is neat though, but iOS will have that this summer.

Seasonality has been achieved in games like Magic the Gathering, League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Path of Exile.

I think the key factor is content leveraging. How much the game's core systems can leverage assets to create varied gameplay. Because with seasons you have to help your customers get excited about relatively small batches of content.

Through that lens you find that narrative driven single player games are the worst candidates for seasonal games. It's more suited to match-based multiplayer games with sensitive meta games.

I don't think this comment is very accurate.

The first party stores do not make more money than Steam and other third party stores combined with mobile

I also don't really know what business model you're describing. Subscription with a weekly game drop? PSN is the subscription for online Playstation services and it comed with several free games a month. There are a few existing "stream any game" services as well, PSNow, Origin's subscription etc.