The machine needs money to run, keep paying more and more, while you wonder how you’ll be able to afford a roof over your head, the managers are drinking champagne.
The entire business model is a scam. Just ban it. It costs almost nothing to add, it makes games objectively less enjoyable, and boycotts demonstrably cannot work. It’s unbeatable because it tricks people into paying for nothing.
Games make you want arbitrary worthless nonsense - that is what makes them games. Directly monetizing that is an exploitation of humanity’s predictable irrationality. Your brain cannot cleanly separate kinds of value. On some level you are wired to pursue cheeseburgers and enchanted scimitars in the same way.
This exploitation started in “free” mobile trash and is now in full-price flagship titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. It’s in single-player games. Publishers can shove it in after-the-fact.
This is the dominant strategy. You were never going to shop your way out of it. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
I don’t think live services need to be banned.
CSGO, Fortnite, Hunt Showdown, Apex Legends, etc are all long running multiplayer games that just don’t work outside of some version of the live service model. Only the top of the top games have the numbers to keep people buying a new version of basically the same game over and over again without fragmenting their player base to the point where the series dies.
Live service games (when done right) effectively let those that have more money pay for stuff they want and people that don’t want to pay more than an initial entry fee (if anything at all) don’t have to pay.
I think the better thing to legislate is that if you have a live service game (like Hunt Showdown) if you shut it down, you must make it possible for third parties to continue to offer service. i.e. you must at least provide a server browser, private server executables, and disable any anti tampering software that prevents the game from being modified.
That would be pro-consumer in that it would keep the game (in some form) working for many many more years. For game developers that do run successful, profitable, live service games that people like, they can keep doing what they’re doing for years to come. For game developers that keep pumping out live service as a way to milk extra money from players that already bought a full priced game … they might think twice.
Counter-Strike existed for over a decade before this business model was even feasible. Mostly by doing… what you’re suggesting… immediately. Like, as part of the software you bought. When people like the game enough, they’ll host their own communities and keep playing.
Only the top of the top games have the numbers to keep people buying a new version of basically the same game over and over again without fragmenting their player base to the point where the series dies.
Good.
Not every game deserves to become an undying zombie, buoyed by shark testicle cards or whateverthefuck. Especially not if what those slouching relics deliver for their billions upon billions of dollars are tiny changes to exactly one map, or an endless parade of stupid hats, or deleting the entire game and replacing it with Game 2: Pay Harder.
This business model is an abuse. There is no tolerable form of it. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. The obscene examples, the $400 special pants, the $50,000 purple drops, are the exact same con as any $1 pack of “gems.” Only the number is different. And nobody has to “like” it. Your preference is not asked. This infection has hit every genre, platform, and price point. It is in $70 single-player games. It has been added to games people already bought. The skeeze factor does not matter, because of how much money this abuse makes. Calling it “extra money” is bewildering. This is the only reason most of these games exist. The games were developed to funnel people toward these systems. This is the hook - you play the bait.
K (I’m uninterested in talking to ideologues that don’t actually care what anyone else thinks).
boycotts don’t work
How would you know? Nothing has truly been boycotted.
… if your standard for the term is that literally nobody buys it, boycotts do not exist.
If not, yes they’ve obviously happened, including over this specific issue, and even the biggest and loudest only dented the obscene profits from doing this shit.
My standard would be having enough people behind it to actually make a difference and not just a handful of angry people on a forum who may or may not actually stick to their guns.
Boycotts have worked for things. But only when they had enough people actually boycotting the thing that it hurt someone’s bottom line. I’ve not seen this happen with any video games since the crash of '82.
With a game like GTA, that at one point was the most sold video game in history, you’re gonna need a lot more people on board with a boycott than the entirety of Reddit to actually make a dent.
“Why buy expensive shit games?” Should be the question.
There are a ton of underwhelming and outright predatory single player games too. I think the biggest takeaway is that live service is the new hotness for over monetized live service games using popular IP and players should be extra wary of those games just like they should be for single player games.
There are still a few live service games that are not predatory. I picked up Helldivers 2 for the $40 standard price and have unlocked all the warbonds and bought a chunk of the stuff off the super store with super credits earned in missions. While you can spend more money on the game if you want, it is not in your face or predatory at all. And they are keeping the living world changing on a constant basis.
It can be done, just have to watch out for the worst offenders like Multiversus.
God, helldiver’s is a little intimidating with the constant updates to the game.
Lol I am on the opposite side of the spectrum. I’ve unlocked everything possible with medals and am constantly looking for them to add new content for me to spend them on.
It has a lot of bugs that are not due to the live service approach, and they are improving their patching process.
The live service part about new missions and storyline can be joined at any time, no more complicated then when released.
It’s slowed down now, and either way you can feel free to run missions at any difficulty you’re comfortable with to get equipment for viable builds.
But the legitimately nice thing about Helldivers is you can look through all of the updates, and decide which you want over time.
I don’t care if it’s predatory; the server requirement means they can change that at any time. It also means that it’s not built to last like thousands of other quality games are. Helldivers 2 will be completely unplayable in 30 years, but we’ll still be able to play Baldur’s Gate 3 no matter what happens.
Not every game needs to be playable forever. Yes, BG3 should be playable indefinitely and with mods it would probably be worth it too!
But there is also space for games that have a design for a shared group experience with a changing world that will result in a limited lifespan. If the world in HD2 didn’t chsnge and there wasn’t an evolving setting it would probaably grow stale a lot faster as the gsme play itself is repetitive. Events like wiping the automatons off the map and them reappearing are only clever once, and wouldn’t hold up on a replay. Without major orders there is less community engagement with the fantastic setting leading to more multiplayer dives once all the unlockable stuff has been unlocked.
It is a different kind of game and there is space for that alongside the other replayable games that don’t have a limited lifespan. It isn’t like all the games similar to BG3 are going to hold up nearly as long as BG3 either, it stands out as one of the best of its genre.
Not every game needs to be playable forever.
Yes it does! To not allow for that is purposely delivering you a worse product than they ought to, not to mention destroying the history of our medium. It would be a damn shame if your favorite movie from 30 years ago didn’t survive long enough for you to see it. That these games are designed to disappear is completely unnecessary. If the game gets repetitive after a while, that just means it’s the same as every other video game. You had your fun, now put it down and play something else. In a world where your game lives on forever, words like “engagement” are meaningless. People will play a game as long as it’s fun. You can play a game multiplayer as long as you have a handful of people who want to play it with you. And if it takes decades for you to boot it up again, that’s fine too, as long as you’re able to run the server yourself.
Summer sports leagues are bullshit because they don’t last forever!
Summer sports leagues aren’t a computer program that’s capable of being copy and pasted ad infinitum. You can play baseball forever without someone’s permission. You can play chess forever without someone’s permission. Live service games are basically like putting an expiration date on chess.
Sports are able to be replayed indefinitely.
Summer sports leagues are specificly set up for a limited time engagement based on how the games play out and respond to the player base. It is a perfect comparison to well executed live service games.
Not all gsmes need single player or long term playability just like not all games need online multiplayer.
No, it’s not. Because the sport doesn’t disappear when the league is over. If you want to run a league for StarCraft: Brood War, you can do that with a Discord server. If you want to run a league for Hyperscape, the game is fucking gone.
Why not? Surely after some time, HD2 would be fun to replay, even if the content was the same as the last time. Not every game needs to be continually played forever, but games should be replayable forever. I still replay very linear games periodically even though I’m not seeing anything new, because I want to relive my memories of the game.
Another option is procedural generation, which would work really well for HD2. That’s a pretty good stand-in for constantly evolving content.
The HD2 maps are procedurally generated so that they are not identical each time you play.
The overall storyline is set, but they craft how it plays out in response to community engagement, which isn’t possible with random generation. We never would have had the mines vs orphans set up in random generation.
Sure, but once the storyline is played out, it could certainly be made available offline, no?
The shared mutiplayer experience available offline?
Ok.
LAN and direct IP connections allow for network multiplayer games to work when official servers are no longer operational.
Lost Planet, there’s plenty of examples of this working??
Games as a service has always been a scam.
Multiversus is the strangest one. It came out like gangbusters, hotter than Salsa Picante de Mama Funkystein, then they shuttered it for over a year before releasing it again, at which point everyone had moved on. Why did they shutter it when it was hot?
Someone wanted to use it as a tax writeoff and didn’t expect people to actually like it.
They were woefully unprepared to handle as many players as they got, because that game is built with a very small team. But if it wasn’t a live service, they wouldn’t have had to shutter it at all.
Literally why I won’t touch most of them. At least shit like Helldivers is instanced, mostly designed around rando play, and Co OP encouraged. I hate all the other live service crap.
Gotham Knight was another where it was like… Almost good? But they made it an RPG with levels. Nah.
“Well you pay a lot of money for movies that go away after you watch them, so this is the same, right?” -richoids, probably
Destiny 2.
Never again. They literally deleted story and forced everyone to buy expansions if they wanted anything more than plinking at random bad guys around the map.
This and linux compatibility killed it for me. Which is so sad cuz i love the aesthetic and gameplay of destiny
Same. I loved the first one when I had a PS4 and was so excited when the 2nd came to PC then stadia. I thought that meant for sure it’d run on Linux. But nope
I never even touched Destiny 2 after they blocked off content in Destiny 1 for people who didn’t buy DLC. I wasn’t gonna pay more to play content I used to be able to.
I don’t disagree with you here. In fact we paid and got content removed and Aztecross spelled it out on their predatory methods for generating income.
However, their plink-plink game has arguably some of the best gun play out there. And a cornered Bungie makes great content!
I just wish they stopped with the yo-yo of drought and flush.
Yeah it’s a damn shame. They had something great. And they shit all over it.
Well my friend, It simply shows that a perfectly crafted single-player experience can offer just as much, if not more, fun than a live-service solution.
We really need to stop phrasing it this way. It is not “live service” or “single player”. You can be multiplayer and not live service; you can be single player and live service. If I’m not playing live service games, it’s not because I don’t enjoy multiplayer. I love multiplayer games. I just hate games that are designed to self-destruct.
True, it’s a curse that the hitman reboot trilogy is one of my favorite “games” of all time. Simply nothing can match it for me, not even the older titles in the same franchise. And it’s always online. If they don’t offer a contingency plan for end of life down the line my favorite experience will eventually disappear.
This is not a pass for IO Interactive, but fans have reverse engineered the server and made a bootleg one, to my understanding.
That’s good to know! I am a bit tied to my true account, I’m at some ungodly multiple hundreds of levels and have challenge hunted more than I do in most games, but if I can still play all the maps and freelancer mode etc. with server emulation down the line that would be absolutely amazing.
That’s the best part, I don’t. Most of them are mediocre and expensive for no reason.
