Once again, the opposite of “live service” is not “single player”.
Digital Extremes and Bungie were the first formerly singleplayer-focused studios to find major success making MMOs with more action-heavy gameplay
Both companies were known for making multiplayer games before making live service games. BioWare made plenty of multiplayer games before Mass Effect 3.
If you want a term for something that means “not a live service”, “single player” is a bad way to do it.
Once again, the opposite of “live service” is not “single player”.
Thank you. As someone who loves multiplayer games, I like that I have had a lot of options lately. But, this whole “live service” crap needs to die. Sell me a game and then go away. If you want to release an expansion and sell me that, great, I’ll take a look. But, quit trying to sell me a subscription.
Like anything else, live service does have a place in gaming but it absolutely does not need to be forced into everything.
I am really enjoying Helldivers 2 and it is a live service that is doing a great job of avoiding the FOMO aspect of most live service games while providing the benefits of a worldwide, changing campaign that has content added slowly over time to encourage continued engagement. It also offers daily challenges, but also rewards everyone for group efforts so it doesn’t punish for not playing every day.
The recently did an oopsie by going too high with the in game price on the collab with Killzone that would be the road to being predatory, but they listed to the response and handled it well enough. Sadly, this is the exception and not the rule.
One might argue (I might argue) that live service is just a worse version of some other form that game could take, like the old model of expansion packs, self-hosting servers, and such. They’re going to inevitably turn up the dial on monetization, just like Apex Legends did, once one line crosses another line and their current trajectory is no longer sustainable. Live service games have ongoing costs in a way that non-live service games do not, so they need more incoming revenue to justify it. When that revenue doesn’t make up for their spend, they shut the servers off, and the game is gone forever.
Yeah, I feel like all of those games would be better with community ran dedicated servers instead of this modern matchmaking crap. Matchmaking really killed communities and smaller clans.
I like matchmaking. I never once found a “community” on a server browser and instead was just frustrated by teams changing rosters mid-match and such. Years later, I’d find that kind of community building in Discord servers and not the likes of de_dust 24/7. But regardless of personal preferences, it’s just about mathematically impossible that matchmaking will sustain a player base forever, so the player-hosted servers need to be there.
Agreed. Matchmaking + Dedicated server would be the gold standard.
While I agree there is a high chance that any particular game tends to go down the monetization path, not all do.
It really is ridiculous to reference bungie in that article, they had arguably the biggest online multiplayer games with 2 and 3. And halo 1 had to be up there with LAN games at the time.
Maybe it was just bad autocorrect and they meant single payer.
It’s so strange to me that so many of these got made. Anyone could see they were going to be terrible and die on their arses and yet they continued to plough time and talent into them. What a waste of everyone’s time.
Yeah but have you considered Fortnite makes money. We should make a Fortnite
Also, people have infinite time, right?
Surely they have room for a couple more unfinished games wasting their time as a feature while they expect “the good shit” to drop in several months.
Oh wait, we’ve not sold enough. Sorry people, we’re killing that roadmap. See you for the next one!
Studio execs look at the mountains of money which have come from online games like WoW or Fortnite and get gold fever. They dream of having a permanent siphon attached to their customers’ wallets and so will ignore any warning signs that their ideas suck and keep chasing the subscription model. And, in the end, it’s not the execs who really suffer when these things don’t pan out. They blame “market forces” and “soft demand”, fire the development team and then spin up the next stupid idea, either at the same company or at a new one.
The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they’ll end up high up somewhere else.
Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.
The people in charge are, genuinely, not human. They don’t have basic reasoning skills nor the human experience that label requires. A decapitated chicken could make better decisions than the average suit, the suit just has enough money to force it.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
I personally agree, but there’s always a whale that fucks it up for the rest of us.
That’s why the business model must be banned entirely. We were never going to shop our way out of it. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
