Whether Game Subscriptions Beat Buying Keys
Over twelve months, the answer comes down to a single number that almost nobody has counted: how many games you finish in a year.
The subscription pitch is that you get a large library for a monthly fee instead of buying games individually. Whether that’s good value is entirely arithmetic, and the arithmetic hinges on one number most people have never counted: how many games you finish in a year.
The twelve month figures
Taking a premium tier at around €20 a month, a full year costs roughly €240. Prices vary by region and tier, and there have been changes in both directions over the past year, but that’s a reasonable working figure.
Now the other side. Games bought outside the launch window, using ordinary seasonal sale pricing rather than day one prices:
- A recent AAA title six months after release: around €35
- The same title a year out: around €25
- An older AAA title: €10 to €15
- A well-regarded indie: €8 to €15
So €240 buys roughly seven recent AAA games at six-month pricing, or around ten if you buy a year behind release, or a mix of maybe four recent titles and ten smaller ones.
The break-even
If you finish more than six or seven substantial games a year and you’d have bought them anyway, the subscription wins clearly. If you finish two or three, buying is cheaper and you keep them.
Most people fall between those, which is where it gets interesting, and where two adjustments matter.
You wouldn’t have bought most of them
This is the honest complication. Subscription libraries encourage trying things, which is genuinely valuable, but a game you played for two hours out of curiosity doesn’t count as €35 of value. It counts as an evening.
Count only the games you’d have paid for. That’s usually a much smaller number than the number you installed.
Day one releases
This is where the subscription case is strongest. If a service includes titles you’d otherwise have bought at full price on release, the maths changes sharply. Two day one purchases avoided covers roughly half the annual cost.
Worth checking against the actual release calendar rather than assuming, though. The volume of day one first party content varies considerably year to year.
What the subscription doesn’t give you
It doesn’t give you permanence. Games leave catalogues regularly, often mid-playthrough, and for a forty hour RPG that’s a real risk with no way to insure against it beyond finishing quickly.
It doesn’t give you ownership. Stop paying and you have nothing. Twelve years of subscription is €2,900 and no library at the end; twelve years of buying is a permanent collection.
It doesn’t give you everything, either. No catalogue includes every major release, and publishers outside the service’s owner mostly don’t put their biggest titles in it, or do so long after launch.
And it costs you the option to wait. Buying keys means you can hold out for a 75% sale on anything, and that option disappears once you’ve paid a flat fee.
The hybrid most people should run
Subscribing continuously is rarely optimal. Subscribing in bursts usually is.
Take one or two months a year, timed to when several things you want are in the catalogue, and play through them intensively. That’s around €40 for a concentrated run at six or eight games. The rest of the year, buy the specific titles you want during seasonal sales and keep them.
This captures most of the subscription’s value at a fraction of the cost, and it avoids the trap that makes subscriptions profitable for the companies selling them, which is people paying every month for a service they use heavily in three of them.
The number to check
Before deciding either way, look at your play history for last year. Steam, Xbox and PlayStation all show hours per game. Count the titles you put more than ten hours into.
If that number is above seven, subscribe. If it’s two, buy. Most people are surprised by how low it is, and that surprise is the useful part of the exercise.