This is an example of a service, while the food itself is closer to a product.

Hello, and welcome to another one of my articles. Today I’ll be talking about Software as a Service and how that affects the various mediums we all know and enjoy today. Before we begin properly, does anyone know the difference between a product and a service?

*Crickets Chirp*

Okay, silly question asking someone in my own article.

Basically a product is defined specifically as a tangible and/or discernible item(s) that someone might offer to sell you. For instance a product might be those crisps you purchased for lunch or as a cheeky little snack after everyone’s gone off to bed.

A service is defined as the production of something that is intangible, either by itself or as a part of another tangible product. For instance, if I provide you technical support in identifying, locating and removing a virus, that is in fact a service. As there were no physical goods provided outside my own knowledge of how to search for such issues, this is the rule of thumb for identifying the difference between the two.

Time is pretty much immaterial in defining if something is a product or service, as there are services such as repairing cars that have a fixed start and end date.

Now that we’ve got the basic definitions out-of-the-way, let’s begin.

Software as a Service

If you are the customers, the servers are more like the software companies hoping to serve you.

Software is traditionally speaking, a product. It normally has services built-in, such as technical support but on the whole it’s a fixed term product that is bought by a user. Software as a Service changes the model a bit; instead of purchasing a fixed product you buy a service.

The easiest way to showcase the difference is office 2010 and office 365 (or 2013). Office 2010 was your bog standard suite of office tools. With spreadsheets, databases and word processing software, but that was it. Once you bought it, you bought it. You might get support for a while, but it’s fixed and is generally tied into the next release of software.

Software as a Service (SaaS) does away with this by treating you like a MMO player. Office 365, in theory anyway, won’t ever be out of service because you are paying a subscription fee to ensure that support is maintained over the long-term.

Aside from support over the long-term, you are also paying to ensure that you receive the next upgrade to the software, so a theoretical Office 2016 would be free to those who are already paying a subscription fee.

This kind of approach is generally very useful for software that you might need quite a bit of support for by default, or software most people consider so critical as to always have a market (Hint, Office software for businesses is pretty much considered this) but for other items it doesn’t always suffice or meet the needs of normal users outside businesses.

Application to Gaming

You know with a rig like this, you can’t be mislead! ./s

Applicability, as they say, is perhaps the most important part. Why should this model matter to the gamer that either doesn’t much care, or perhaps even uses more open source software?

Games are a prime area for SaaS tactics.

Recently, EA announced  a service known as EA Access (http://www.ea.com/news/ea-announces-ea-access-on-xbox-one) is the first example of a mainstream attempt to offer games as a service rather than a product with service elements, the first being OnLive, which is a cloud based gaming service which has more or less disappeared into the ether of gaming minds.

EA Access would in theory allow for a user to access a selection of games for free from something called the vault. Aside from free games, it also offers demos (Author Note: – I miss the days when demos were something given away for free) and discounts on other EA digital products. Truth be told, the initial value isn’t amazing. I’ve seen better offers, but the future, now that’s a little less easy to write off.

If EA pulls this off, a big ask from EA of all companies, then it opens up the doors to some rather interesting prospects. Games would become as much a service as they would be a product. One might choose to instead buy access to a gaming catalogue via a subscription service rather than purchasing and owning such titles for one’s self.

The process itself isn’t something new, but such a large change in dynamics is actually quite interesting, especially considering as I personally enjoy using Spotify for my music enjoyment. The potential to just pick up a monthly subscription to 4x and RTS gaming monthly, and gain access to all the games of that genre, is really rather appealing.

And I actually quite like owning physical copies of the things I own.

The Pros and Cons of SaaS in Gaming

There’s plenty of both.

As I mentioned, this isn’t a new phenomenon (I mean steam is essentially this, but with less subscription models) but this is the first time one of the larger 3^rd party publishers has even considered, let alone going ahead with, such a subscription model.

One question that you might ask yourself is, why now? Why not sooner? Or later?

The question can be answered fairly easily, though the proper explanation is a bit wordy. Sufficed to say, SaaS has some flaws in its setup which make it a less than palatable option for most other publishers.

In order of importance, they are, File size of downloads, unreliability of servers and technical savviness.

The first one is fairly self-explanatory, the file size of games has only gotten bigger and bigger, but the average speed hasn’t really matched. Outside of a few areas blessed with the presence of Google Fiber (Author’s Note: – I pray that they introduce such a thing over in Britain soon, I’m so tired of having to leave downloads overnight) the speeds have remained fairly average in the western world.

Unless developers want to stop dumping everything and the kitchen sink into triple A games, something that’s not likely to happen soon, and with the knowledge that most forms of compression are lossy to some degree or another, file size remains a black mark against the more widespread use of such a service.

This, incidentally, is why Spotify currently works. Most mp3 files remain around 4-6 megabytes for an average music file, bigger if you enjoy more high quality music. With the average speed in Britain being around 14.7 as of May 2013, that’s quick enough to more or less rival the radio but without the downside of the Radio playing the same 3 songs over and over again.

Unreliability is the next issue; I think Sim City more or less sums this one up for me quite nicely. Consistent internet connection is a battle most companies are simply not ready for. Even MMO’s mess this up and their entire model is based around constant connectivity. The amount of money required to ensure that such a service works 100% of the time, 24/7 is simply not money anyone is willing to spend unless they can get their money back from it.

Finally, the technical savviness of gamers, on the bell curve of the planet, would trend further towards the right hand side than that of the left. Most gamers, due to prior experience with DRM schemes and the like as well as a large dose of professional experience, know that if you choose such a service then you risk losing everything you have there if the company goes belly up.

Save games, access to gaming titles, friend’s lists. All that would be gone if the company providing them goes belly up, and it’s a prospect that most of us know is all too likely in the gaming industry. Physicality offers security, my copy of Homeworld still runs to this day, but it’s highly unlikely that my copy of Wolfenstein: The New Order, will run if steam dies.

Conclusion

40 Gigabytes in size, but only 28 of it is on a disk. Fuck that.

There are more reasons, of course, but generally speaking most publishers are at least smart enough to know that the market such a thing isn’t there, EA gets an exception to this for basically producing the same games year after year, where there might actually be a small niche market for it and also, I think it still wants to kill the used game market with an actual gun than say, a bar of butter that it was using.

Until the internet infrastructure improves to the point where I can regularly download 40 gig games in a few hours, or developers learn to clean up the junk files after themselves and learn moderation. Such services aren’t likely to turn up in abundance, though that might take longer if EA messes up.