Video games are a big deal.

In fact, I’ll bet they’re a bigger deal than you realize.

It’s always tricky comparing the size of different industries, but at this point it feels pretty safe saying that the video game industry is bigger than the movie and music industries combined, and the gap is projected to only increase in the coming years. Major esports events already draw more viewers than the Super Bowl. Read Dead Redemption 2 had a bigger opening weekend of sales than Avengers: Infinity War (although that record was later smashed by Avengers: Endgame). Netflix (NFLX) considers Fortnite to be a bigger competitor than HBO and Activision Blizzard (ATVI) spent more money to acquire the maker of Candy Crush than Disney (DIS) spent to acquire the Star Wars franchise.

So yeah, video games are kinda a big deal.

I’ve loved video games for as long as I can remember. I had an Atari 2600 as a kid, and then later an NES which got an incredible amount of use. In college, the most popular pastime when hanging out with friends was playing the Nintendo 64 and since then it’s been the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. It’s not been just consoles, either. I got hooked on computer games like Warcraft 2, Alpha Centauri, X-Com, Knights of the Old Republic, and many more.

While I don’t play video games nearly as much as an adult now that I have a job and a family, I do still count it as one of my favorite hobbies. I have very fond memories of saving Clementine, surviving a suicide mission, and saving Earth from an alien invasion. I’m thrilled to see video games grow in acceptance and no longer be considered a niche activity that are only done by geeks (something that I proudly consider myself).

However, while the industry would appear to be healthy when looking at things like revenue growth and the increasing popularity of esports, there are some dark clouds hovering over it that has had me concerned about the future of the industry and if it can survive.

Many articles have been written about how incredibly difficult it can be working in the video games industry and how commonplace burnout can be. The increased cost of developing games has led to a push to find new ways to monetize them, such as through lootboxes, downloadable content, micro-transactions, and others. It has gotten to the point where some decry that it feels like incomplete games are being sold, with new maps and functionality added later (for an additional cost).

Additionally, those higher production costs make creating non-sequel / original / new IP games an even riskier proposition than before. And if the game doesn’t easily lend itself to becoming a franchise (like Call of Duty or Madden), then it puts additional pressure on that single game to perform. Bioshock Infinite was an amazing game that I wish there were more of, but it didn’t seem to sell enough copies to offset the high production costs. So despite getting critical acclaim and being by all accounts a hit, the developer had to shut down. Yes, there was some well received DLC, but despite the name, the game didn’t lend itself to new versions coming out every year.

Those same high production costs lead to another problem: Loads of filler content will be added to games so that publishers can claim hundreds of hours of playtime in order to justify the price of the game.

Filler content has become a bigger issue for me in recent years, although it’s hard to tell if that’s just because I’m more sensitive to it due to valuing my free time more, or if it’s because changes in the gaming industry have made it a bigger issue. Either way, I’m not the only one to notice. I don’t agree with everything from this Kotaku article, but I do agree with the idea behind the headline of wishing that more games respected my time, especially these days now that I have so little of it. I prefer concentrated content versus dilution. I love the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, but it feels like each subsequent iteration gets filled with more and more meaningless fetch quests. In many ways, I respect and enjoy games like Firewatch that have a specific story to tell and wastes no time telling it.

So there are some dark clouds over this otherwise very promising industry. What’s the solution? Could the industry be ripe for disruption?

It certainly seems like it.

Google Stadia launched just this week, largely to negative reviews. For those who don’t know, Stadia is Google’s (GOOG) cloud gaming service which effectively does away with expensive gaming consoles in favor of doing the processing in the cloud and streaming the resulting video back to you. While the technology behind it is neat, and I’m amazed how far internet speeds have come in my lifetime, it also struck me as a solution in search of a problem. Full priced games and monthly subscription cost didn’t seem to offer much savings over buying a console, and performance is generally worse. In fact, given how eagerly Google has been shutting down various services lately, there is also a very real risk of buying a game and not being able to play it if/when they shut the service down. In fact, if I was a betting man, I would take the under on the service still existing 3 years from now.

But that’s just one of many disruptive efforts underway.

Not too long ago, Apple (AAPL) launched their new Apple Arcade service. Google has its own gaming subscription, as does Microsoft (MSFT) with their game pass. Even publishers like EA (EA) are getting into the subscription game with EA Access. In the case of the latter two, those efforts are trying to capitalize on the shift from purchasing physical media from a third party to buying (or renting) digital copies straight from the source. One only has to look at the five year chart of Gamestop (GME), which has lost nearly 90% of its value during that time, to see how powerful that trend has been. But the shift from physical copies to digital copies is part of an even larger shift away from the idea of owning games and instead subscribing to a gaming service.

In other words: the Netflix model.

Netflix helped to accelerate the shift away from movies being something physical that you bought and owned (a DVD or Blu-ray disc) to something more ethereal that people pay a fee to access and once they stop they no longer can watch it. Video games are already part of the way there. Xbox Live Games with Gold kick-started the idea that you pay a monthly fee for a service which will give you access to certain games for free each month. Now, Game Pass seems like the final culmination in Microsoft’s attempt to move to a Netflix model.

So what changes? I honestly think the shift to a subscription model could be good for the industry and for gamers. Businesses often prefer subscription revenue because it turns something that is “lumpy” (ie, the business gets a ton of money when it releases a new game, or movie, or piece of software but makes little to no money between releases) into something that is more consistent and reliable.

For a game developer, getting revenue based on subscriptions instead of big releases might help smooth out a few issues. Maybe it makes it easier for more developers to have the patience of Blizzard and release their games “when it’s done” instead of rushing an unfinished product out the door. Or maybe there’s less of a need to keep going back to “crunch time” to get that new release out to keep the lights on. Perhaps there is less pressure to artificially create a type of subscription revenue by having loot boxes or other in-game purchases. In fact, maybe the subscription services themselves at some point ban (or heavily discourage) in-game purchases outright in an attempt to garner goodwill from the gaming community.

Perhaps more importantly, I wonder if this could help encourage companies to take a chance on games that have passionate, but smaller, target audiences instead of always going for as broad a market as possible. Right now, in order for a game to be a financial success it has to appeal to a broad enough group of people to sell enough copies. But what if there was a way to measure the depth of people’s interest in addition to the breadth?

Imagine a game that appeals to a small, but very passionate fan-base. Perhaps if the game was sold through traditional channels, it would sell 1 million copies, which isn’t quite enough to recoup costs and turn a profit. However, imagine those fans are so passionate that they would sign up for a subscription service just to play that game. It’s not unreasonable at all to think that a company like Microsoft might pay the developer more than a million copies would’ve netted them in order to have exclusive rights to that game and acquire those million subscribers. We’ve seen something similar happen with Netflix where they have revitalized things like comedy specials and brought back cult hits (but not ratings darlings) like Arrested Development. Not every Netflix show has to appeal to everybody, as long as for each subscriber they have a handful of shows that really appeal to them.

Done right, this new era of subscription video game services has the chance to really unleash a bunch of niche games catered to more specific audiences with creative new game-play and original IP. Or, it could all go wrong and lead us to a new hellish gaming dystopia. The truth will no doubt be somewhere in between, but I choose to believe it will lean more towards the former. Time will tell.