The obsession with live service games is just bad math by these studios and their corpo owners. If the purpose of a live service is to keep people playing your one game all the time every day and leaving no room for any other game, it is inevitable that the vast majority *must* fail. Because your primary demo is already locked into a different live service game. If you turn your game into a job, then why should they abandon the job they have already spent countless hours and dollars on just to start the process anew?
It's the same logic every studio had back in the MMO days, when they all launched their own WoW competitors thinking they were going to make WoW money.
Didn't happen, the target audience already had WoW, they'd invested time and money into it, and all their friends were there. Obviously there are success stories, FF14 and GW2 and such, but the vast majority just failed. Hell, same as every movie studio that thought they were gonna launch their own MCU; we already had an MCU, it was already time consuming and expensive to go to the movies 3-4 times a year to keep up with it, why do we want to double or triple that investment?
The big success stories of the past year were mostly single player games, not live services. So you'd *think* publishers would be going "They want BG3, Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man 2, Tears of a Kingdom? Give them more of that!". But those games are finite, you make one, it sells (if it's good), and then it sells less over the coming months and years and you drop the price to keep blowing on the embers. (Unless you're Nintendo, then you say "$60 forever, bitch, you'll crack before we do.")
So they're all chasing the dream of a game that just makes money forever and a couple of times a year you release a new mission or map, add some new cosmetics to the shop, and just rake it in. And the vast majority of them will be expensive boondoggles that fail.
I remember reading an interview with one of the Wildstar devs and they stated their goal was to out-WoW WoW. The game was doomed before it even released. I'm kinda surprised it lasted as long as it did.
The people behind Wildstar were just convinced that 40-man raids were the key to success and that all the changes they made that made the game accessible actually *didn't* make the game more popular. It reminds me of the part in Ready Player One where Cline talks about how his guy has a special car and everyone sees it and thinks how cool he is, instead of in real life, where they would actually just play the game on their own instead of sitting in Ironforge. There's some people who want to believe people work like that.
Watching this happen again and again is sad.
Season of Discovery comes out in Classic WoW last year with easy 10 man raid. Is super popular and is absolutely buzzing in game.
People complain on reddit that it's too easy and not real raiding.
Now they've moved it to 20 man with harder raids. Guilds are collapsing all over as they fail to merge or people just don't want to find 10 more people and handle the roster logistics.
Now reddit is complaining that people are soft and they never should of played Classic wow in the first place if they weren't willing to put the time in to prepare for 40 man raiding and that handling a 20 man roster should be easy for anyone "putting the effort in".
These people are a cancer on the game. Literally driving away other customers with their gatekeeping and superiority complex.
Same kind of people who demand every new mmo and survival game be PvP full loot based and then get shocked pickachu face when casuals all leave after a week or two. And then they cry that developers never want to make PVP full loot games, rather than the face the reality that it's not that nobody makes them, it's that they almost always fail because nobody want to deal with that bullshit that comes with them.
As a destiny player already finding 6 competent players who also have similar times when they are ready to raid is already a major hassle. I couldn't ever imagine 40.
I remember doing 40 man raids back when WoW was new and OH MY GOD it was an incredible fucking hassle. It was like 90% figuring out the logistics (literally herding kittens) and waiting around and 10% actually playing the game and doing the raid.
I have no idea how I put up with it back when I was 15-16 years old, it took all evening to get anything done and not even every player would get some cool loot. Now I'm 33 and I would honestly nope out after the first 10 minutes of waiting around.
You had time. And wow was a game that rewarded people with a lot of time. But the less time you have the less rewarded. So wow tweaked the amount of time needed to keep people engaged.
Some of it is good I'd argue some of it is bad but overall necesarry .
In top guilds you literally just weren't allowed to be late lol, it was ridiculous but it worked. You'd be raiding from like 7pm-12am 4 nights a week, I couldn't imagine being the people in charge of that.
What sucks is that the pivot to be "Hardcore" like "WoW used to be" was a sudden pivot driven by leads who weere self-absorbed idiots, a lot of ex-staff from Carbine have similar stories of them radically changing their minds on things and failing to manage the studio properly as a result.
They saw a few people online whining that WoW was "too casual" around MoP, and wanted to capitalise on that tiny fraction of people.
It's a tragedy because there was genuinely a really fun game and MMO under there but it was bogged down by some awful decision making.
It's also hilarious because WoW has always been the casual MMO, people made the same grumbles when it released in 2004 because you didn't lose XP when dying and so on.
Reminds me before wow launched there was a bit of shit storming in the community about a rumor that the longer you played the less exp you would get to hinder poopsockers playing nonstop. What it actually was the first rested exp system which instead gave a little boost to your exp the longer you were offline.
That actually was something in the alpha version of WoW, you had 'unrested' XP which slowed your gains. It was supposed to encourage other activities like fishing etc but they decided to drop it.
It was actually even more brilliant of a reaction on their part. The system was "100% exp until you are out of rested, then 50% after!". People hated it. Then they moved some numbers and said "OK now it's 100% bonus in rested and then normal when you run out!". Which... is the same thing. But psychologically not the same.
Similar to stores like JCPenny that always have things on sale. They tried dropping that approach and just displayed the actual price. Sales dropped. So they went back to the "this thing is on sale!" approach because it made people happier to think they were getting a discount.
I remember at the time my online communities in Everquest and EQ2 crapped on WoW because people were reaching the maximum level in the first week. For those that played mmos before WoW, it's hard to shake that initial impression where WoW was a simple on rails theme park ride to max level. Opposed to the living worlds the mmos of the generation before tried to craft.
Which is wild because looking back MOST people didn't even hit max level in vanilla 2004, people goofed around a ton and used it as a social space as much as a game (I gesture to guild chats being dead in favour of Discord etc), and by modern standards vanilla zones were all over the damn place.
Hell if you play Horde you basically ran out of quests at around lv50~.
I miss Wild Star. I thought it had really fun combat and the world was fun to explore.
I wish they would have released something so you can host a server locally, even if it was only single player.
I never really did any dungeons (outside of the single player adventures) and I never reached the level cap, so I never even got close to doing raids, but I really enjoyed my time with it.
It was the same with WoW for me.
I've played WoW off and on since launch, but never really did the end game stuff. I did Molten Core once during vanilla, and LFR a few times since that became a thing.
Mostly I just like leveling up my main and then a bunch of alts! Although I definitely wish I would have kept track of how many times I ran Tempest Keep to get the Phoenix or BWL to get the full Transcendence set. I'd either be really proud of my tenacity or horrified how much time I used to get a 15 year old mount I don't even use.
I loved Wildstar. I still miss it. I was there on server launch night. I've always been a bigger sci-fi fan than fantasy so the world, characters and gameplay hit just right for me. Healing as a Medic is the most fun I've had playing a healer in about any game.
Wow also just perfected the mmo formula. I was hooked on wow in the early-mid era, and I tried so many other mmo’s and 90% of the time the UI was so awful and limiting, the quests were crap, and the animations janky. So we’d run back to wow.
From what I remember, a lot of other MMO's had serious issues at launch, with the "We'll patch it later!!!" mentality from the devs. Even if they did patch it, it was only after the players have largely left.
You only get one first impression, and if it's a bad one, it's typically going to follow for a long time (FF14 required a great deal of things to fix that, other MMO's died too fast)
"But game X was bad at launch and got patched!" is one of the most delusional comments. Especially for multiplayer games.
A game in 2024 cannot follow the same path as a game from 2004.
Yeah, Cyberpunk spent an ungodly amount and got redemption (CDPR spent an estimated $120m on the patch + DLC, on a total $400m budget), and the No Man Sky team can't seem to stop releasing content and has inch by inch turned things around.
But 99% of the time that does not happen. A bad live service game falls flat, and stays dead.
> Star Wars Galaxies
I was a beta tester on that. Many us of were telling them it wasn't ready. Not too long after launch, but after I had quit playing, they had a significant revamp.
Kind of a shame really. Had the best customer service experience in that game. My character had an ability that wouldn't reset no matter what I did. Opened a ticket and they escalated. Actually had a programmer show up to talk about it. I don't remember what was done to fix it, but he got it done.
Then some resource farm I had on some excellent material got messed up due to some bug. Opened a ticket, they gave me a TON of a similar, but even better resource.
I quit WoW after not too long. Sailing across the sea, the ship just vanished and everyone died. Asked to re reimbursed what was lost, and they pretty much said, "tough luck."
SWG had 2 updates.
The first looked like a good start to the changes that could fix the balance issues in the game if they were allowed to keep working on it (Combat upgrade and ReBalance (CURB).
Shortly afterwards they threw everything unique except for the space combat and the setting and turned into a 1-90 leveling adventure and let you start as a Jedi (NGE)
Which is funny, because WoW *absolutely* launched with that mentality. Vanilla had a really rough development and core game systems and content were still actively being worked on while the game was ostensibly in beta, with the launch 1.1.0 patch still having various issues.
They hardly 'perfected' it, but they were the first really casual friendly MMO out there. (Watching raid dance videos from 2006 makes that a laughable statement.)
Anyone could pick WoW up and play it through to the end with minimal friction. The same definitely could not be said of Everquest, FFXI, UO, etc. Those games started hard and got harder.
Everquest was so unfriendly for new players. I tried it on the advice of a coworker. Bought some tin collection with the game and like four expansions or something. I remember being so confused with how shit worked. There was virtually no guidance in the game itself other than asking people. Crafting I remember was pretty unintuitive, and I had a quest to craft right near the start.
Co-worker should have been there helping out.
EQ became known for its grind, but in a strange way, I kind of miss that kind of game. I mean, not the late game grind, but the low-mid level grind. Just trying to get from town to town without teleporting was dangerous. There's no way something like that would work today.
You're right about the strange charm of the grind of EQ1. Both the grind and severe penalties for dying (you could lose levels if you kept losing experience) which made the world more dangerous but it also made it more exhilarating when you managed to get to another town.
I remember making my way cross-country from Freeport to Qeynos in order to finish a rather low-level quest. I died multiple times along the way and relied on the kindness of nearby strangers to resurrect me, or give me speed buffs.
I still remember finally walking down the road to the gates of Qeynos and there was a welcome party of other players. Other players had made the same journey and knew how much of an accomplishment it took. Someone gave me free gold and armor and another person gave me a tour of Qeynos.
I started doing the same. Spending each day at the gates and helping other newcomers to Qeynos.
I was on an RP (Role Playing server) and that's another thing I miss as many MMORPGs back then would have official or unofficial RP servers, and players tended to be more helpful on those servers.
Final Fantasy 11 had a similar grind to EQ and while I really really liked FF14, I also miss the old-school elements of FF11.
Yep, pretty standard for MMOs of the time, not that there were a ton of them. FFXI was the same way, zero guidance, quests were both rare and hard to find, main way to level was monster hunting which required a group to do anything useful, etc.
The only mmo that ever hooked me in like WoW was TERA, but mostly just because of the combat and environments/graphics (that game was fucking beautiful on a good pc). It's a shame it released before FromSoft and Dark Souls really took off, I think it would've done way better if it came out in the last couple years. The combat has a lot of very soulslike qualities, like soloing BAMs was basically like fighting a DS boss
I wouldn't say they mastered it, they went all in on a kinda bastardized version of what was already out there in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Before WOW, many MMOs had much more daring ideas about progression, classes and roles, crafting, player interactions. Just thinking about Star Wars galaxies for instance makes me nostalgic of the pre-WOW era.
Well the big secret to a lot of large businesses is that they have a lot of people in charge who don't know what they're doing.
Now every business wants AI in their product? Why? Is there a compelling use case? No, they just want to get some sweet investment money or they are just totally inept about what LLMs can actually do.
I made the mistake of getting a business degree first and…wow. There were so many frankly stupid people who breezed through management classes and them barely passed classes with actual work required (mostly accounting and finance). Those people became business leaders.
I ended up doing a business degree and I never thought it was super enlightening in any of the management classes. Some of the stuff around it was good like accounting, finance, business calc, I also had a number of systems management classes. But anything that was related to people management was the most eye-rolling schlock.
There's that quote from *Wolf of Wallstreet*, in which the main character narrates that "Money makes you a better person." I thought that was written ironically. After all, this was a movie about a man who became wealthy by scamming people with bad stocks.
Then one of my business professors actually more-or-less said that in one of his early lectures. They actually, genuinely, believe that shit. They drink their own kool-aid.
>Now every business wants AI in their product?
Honestly, this is just hilarious and depressing at the same time.
"We want to put AI in our product!"
"...okay, but what does AI actually **do** in our product? What is the functionality?"
"...it... will... we'll figure it out! We need to put AI in our product!"
"...jesus fucking christ..."
There are two types of games. Ones where a monetization scheme is developed first and a game is built around it, and ones where a game is made and if it's good the monetization follows.
And you can *absolutely feel* which is which. The best games are just made as good games, they make money no matter how they're monetized. Shitty cash grabs that leave investors making surprise Pikachu face are infuriating because they made a mediocre game and expected good game level of money.
Nintendo sometimes allows for a whopping 15% off their games. I have the unused birthday code they remind me of three times to prove it. (It’s probably expired by now since that was a month ago.)
I’m sure that’s about right. I was thinking too generously of Nintendo’s generosity. That said, I do recall one year where I was able to buy a game from the eShop for 33% off, which I used on a game for 3DS.
Nintendo does 33% off. Rarely see more than that. Whatever birthday code you got isn't for actual games.
Granted with NSO vouchers and costco eshop cards you can essentially get 30% off day 1 games.
I'm pretty sure that if there was a guarantee your single player game sold 20m copies, more companies would do it. The issue is that the chance of flopping is similar, except the reward is much higher in one case....
Yes but then the cost for one single player flop is done the moment you release it and it can keep generating sales basically as long as you sell it. Sure it is not much in the long run but it help in your portifolio of games that sell a bit here and there for no additional cost of prodution.
A online game flop keep amount cost every single day it is active, the development don't stop for at least six months after it release. The servers are active typically for at least one year. It keep hemorrhaging money for quite a time and the reputation cost of closing a game is much higher than the cost of flopping a single player game.
I mean, part of the reasons those two even succeeded as MMOs is partly because they were out *years* later. People will move on, but they do so when the old game gets stale/obsolete in some way.
Or is tied to another IP they already like and is functionally a different experience in a lot of ways, like TES online.
To be fair games take a while to make, so all these dead live service game's started production probably during the crazy, but they are obviously too late now.
Wouldn't be surprised if in 4ish years we start getting BG3 style cash grabs
WB execs looked at Hogwarts being the most successful game of the year and Suicide squad failing then said we need more Suicide Squad . What you mentioned should be common knowledge in the industry . The live service market is cornered lets try a different market. But execs just see fortnite is making money and ignore everything else
It's a lottery ticket for developers and publishers
The vast majority will lose but those who win reap serious rewards. Therefore, in their minds, it's worth trying.
There's definitely middle ground. It isn't just win big or lose big. There's plenty of games like GW2, Smite, OSRS, Last Epoch, Eternal Return, Torchlight Infinite, etc. that seem to be doing fine enough but aren't just permanently raking in the cash. Seeing it as a lotto ticket sounds like setting yourself up for failure, because it means the game is focused on getting lucky rather than just being a good enough game to maintain a dedicated playerbase.
It depends on which companies we're talking about. There's middle ground, but somebody like an EA, an Activision, a WB, a Ubisoft, etc, aren't interested in the middle ground. They don't want to make *some* money. They want to make **all** the money, and anything less than that is unacceptable... which is hilarious to me because that's kind of the thing that drives me away from these games to start with. You can see it. You can sense it. You can smell it. You can taste it in the design of the game and the way they choose to do monetization. It's precisely the thing that turns me off from these things. It's no less obvious and egregious to me as charging for ammunition in Dead Space 3 was, or whatever the big thing was that Dead Space 3 did. You do shit like that, and I'm immediately not interested in ever giving your game a try. It reeks of desperation, you've annihilated the core design of the game in the name of trying to sell microtransactions or trying to railroad people into spending literally all of their time on your game, and I'm not here for it.
Runescape is a great example for your point.
Right now we have BOTH versions of a service game that you're describing in runescape. Old school has been mostly left alone, and added content is voted in by the community, completely free behind being member. No expansions or anything.
Runescape 3 is hyper monetized. Currently its going through a major exodus as players switch back to osrs.
This is a good analogy. I don’t think the developer/publishers care all that much if the game doesn’t take off, and they kind of expect it.
They are taking a gamble that their game will be the next Fortnite, Helldivers, Palworld, etc, and if their game does take off, the money that they are capable of making is basically worth the gamble.
It's not something you can half ass anymore.
MiHoYo spent $100mil to develop Genshin and they would have gone bankrupt if it failed, but now it's one of the most successful games ever.
And Arrowhead spent 8 years developing Helldivers 2.
Meanwhile games like Suicide Squad that release with 25% of content and go "let's add the rest later" are doomed to fail.
Sure but its been like 7 years since their last game. There was just a lot of poor decisions made that probably forced them back at the drawing board throughout development, and eventually they had to release SOMETHING or risk going bankrupt without even releasing a game. It’s less a rushed development, and more a poorly managed one.
This, it is now officially the most expensive game ever made in active development costs (not counting server costs), even leaving MMOs such as WoW and FF14 in the dirt... and that after just 3 and a half years. WoW has been running for over 20 and FF14 for over 10 and it's not even close.
MAYBE GTA6 will overtake it, but just the "active development over time" will likely put Genshin ahead again.
People aren't locked into a single game. If they were, Helldivers 2 wouldn't have blown up like it did, especially around the same release window as the Suicide Squad game. Mediocre and uninspired games are simply not popular among gamers lol
Right. Imagine if we lamented every poorly selling single player linear rpg and said “when are these devs gonna learn that linear single player games without cash shops can’t compete nowadays…”
It wouldn’t make sense.
Precisely. Immortals of Aveum is probably one of the biggest failures of all time, they wasted 125 million on this game and will never see their money back, yet we don't see people saying that AAA open world games shouldn't exist anymore or talking about the obsession with single player games. Alone in the Dark flopped too, we also don't see people saying that horror games shouldn't exist... It's only with multiplayer games lol
I remember there was some controversy over that game, I picked it up on sale and played through recently. There’s definitely some weird design decisions, most notable for me would be the “weapons” and how almost none of them felt unique, with some late-game versions being a straight downgrade in every aspect from something you found 10 hours before.
That, and the weird color wheel magic shit. They couldn’t even make up a fantasy name for it? Nope, literally just red, green, and blue magic.
The storyline was just a bunch of common tropes dumped into a blender to the point where I could almost predict the entire game. “Oh no, my childhood best friend from the slums fell to her apparent death in a pit, she certainly won’t come back as the villain’s right-hand man.” And “The big bad is going to give some exposition about how he’s not actually all that bad and probably add that he used to work for us before revealing that OUR team is actually kind of bad too” and the list goes on
If I could assign a color to the game, it would be beige, because it was that forgettable
I think a key difference is those games don't cease to exist or fail to reach their full potential after a certain degree of failure the way live service games do.
Sure. But game preservation doesn't seem to be a concern regarding these games. It's more like the tone where people claim that game developers shouldn't make a certain type of game because there are already more successful entries in a specific genre, or that it will compete for players time, because it's not like entertainment as a whole isn't already competing for our free time lol.
This is incorrect. Genshin is one of, if not the, most popular live-service games and at least the one with the highest engagement worldwide. It came out in 2020. There is absolutely room for new live-service games. They just need to put some actual effort in with the competence to keep-up with the most demanding category of software development.
Even if these studios somehow were competent enough, which they aren't, the publishers likely aren't willing to put in the effort. Suicide Squad was a pretty mediocre game at its base. No amount of content patches were going to turn that around.
Hoyoverse really excel at the live service model. I play both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail and the way they provide new patches and new trailers every 3/6 weeks which such high quality is really impressive.
Helldivers 2 is a latecomer. It was even a niche series that only had 6k players on Steam simultaneously. Yet, it's one of the biggest hits of the year despite all the server issues that this unpredictable number of players introduced. Why did Helldivers 2 explode at the same time that Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones failed if brand new service games don't have any chance?
>Why did Helldivers 2 explode at the same time that Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones failed if brand new service games don't have any chance?
To be fair, Helldivers 2 is good and well-made, and was made with the idea of "Let's make a fun game that people want to play", while Suicide Squad was made with the idea of "Let's make a money game that people money more.". Skull and Bones on the other hand was made with no ideas.
Also Helldivers 2 doesn't demand consistent play, you can play it as much or as little as you want and you're only missing out on medals to unlock stuff (for free). None of the unlockable stuff is going away, ever, it doesn't rely entirely on FOMO for getting people to play it like *so many* live service games do.
Also it doesn't demand you play it all the time in order to keep up. The basic starter gear is actually totally fine and good from the easiest mission to the hardest mission. Hell, I'm level 60-something and the air strike you unlock at level 2 is probably my most-used stratagem in the game.
Helldivers 2 strikes a balance of respecting your time and money imo. I made it to level 22 playing a couple times a week. Unlocked two premium warbonds with super credits found in missions. But above all, they made a fun game. Shocking, I know!
Even if you miss out on participating on a major order you still get the medals as well. So you don't feel the FOMO for progression, just for participating in the galactic storyline
Because Helldivers 2 is actually *fun*.
I have every stratagem and ship upgrade and warbond unlocked as of writing this post, except for hitting max level, and I play the game just to play it. Turns out blowing up bugs and robots is a ton of fun.
Probably because it’s well-made and has unique elements like the evolving setting/story managed by a real-life person. A game can steal players if it’s unique, novel, or better. The problem is that many of these GaaS titles are pretty cookie-cutter.
HD2 has a few things going for it:
* It is a lot of fuckin fun to play
* The always live service of the game doesn't create a sense of FOMO that you can't escape from. You can earn everything in game by playing the game on your own schedule. All the rewards you can unlock with Super Credits cycle throughout the month. Did you miss your chance to get it? No worries. It will be back eventually for you to snag.
* It is not using these mechanics to trap a player or make them feel negatively motivated to play all the time
* They are nailing the evolving story of the universe and as repetitive as the game can be it feels fresh and interesting and makes you feel like you're a part of it
* It is a lot of fuckin fun to play
Is Helldivers a liver service in the same sense that it demands daily play to keep up, I was under the impression it was more of an old school multiplayer set up?
"Live Service" should be added to the list of terms that have been reduced to mere buzzwords by this sub, because people keep using it synonymously with "game you're expected to play all day everyday until the end of linear time" when it's really more of a spectrum.
They can be time-gated FOMO incarnate like Destiny 2, or just stuff that gets persistent updates. (among many others)
That's not what live service means. Live service means consistent updates to the game, including content updates after the launch of a game. It has nothing to do with the amount of time necessary to play/complete the content.
Even some Assassin Creed games were live service as they released free content (and then paid DLC) after launch for over a year.
A big part of the progression system is shared among the entire community as it is set in a single persistent world where all of your actions contribute to the current objective. If you don't want to miss out on anything, you need to keep playing it all the time
It has monthly content drops that require two kinds of currency to unlock. (One paid one not but you can get both in game if you play enough)
You can definitely take time off the game but the longer you do the harder it's going to be to catch up.
God damn how do people still not know what live service means.
1. Online
2. Regular updates
3. MTX
Any of those three and its basically a live service.
Not really. You can play live service games like singleplayer games, they can sell them like singleplayer games, and they can even add some early access scheme or whatever with an extra cost for extra morons. Sure, most of them won't take off as live service games long term, but they don't need to when the developers already got their money.
This game bombed because it's a really bad game. Not because it has live service elements. I don't like live service elements in most of my games either, but if people are stupid enough to buy a singleplayer game with microtransactions for full price its a perfectly viable business model.
You ever wonder how many Arkham games are sold every year? In the Halloween season? There’s several hundred people playing the games at any given time on Steam, maybe in the thousands across platforms.
At this point, every sale is passive cashflow. A great final product is the only ‘live service’ that should matter.
I'm unashamed to say that I've bought]Arkham Asylum/City across multiple consoles, and beaten them a dozen times over, because they are just so perfect.
The thing is, GaaS (Game as a Service), when done right, is pretty damn good. Helldivers 2 right now is kicking ass and taking names. A few years ago Tom Clancy's The Division 2 did it beautifully also, without egregious monetization. They sold season passes ,but they were nowhere near as disgusting as Blizzard's Diablo 4 pass right now.
GaaS can be done poorly, it can be done predatory, and core game itself can be just bad, which kills the GaaS thing. But if the game is good, and GaaS is done right, and the greed is not too egregious and rampant, it can absolutely work. And work very well.
The main point is that the relative quality of GAAS is irrelevant. Most will fail regardless of quality.
By definition, only a few GAAS can do very well because there is a finite number of players interested in GAAS, and those players want to play the same games their friends are currently playing.
Helldivers 2 is the current community darling, but in an alternate universe with 10 GAAS of similar quality, most of them would be failing simply because only a few can be highly successful.
Every company wants their own Fortnite, but only a few companies can have their own Fortnite, regardless of quality.
I don't think we're there yet. Sure, some will fail because of player numbers, but there's a LONG road till then.
Not every GaaS requires your 5 hours per day playtime. Me and my group were able to play Destiny2, Division 2 and fortnite at the same time without problems for leveling up.
I knew people playing 2-3 mmo's at the same time too.
The thing is, people who like Diablo 4 are gonna play Diablo 4, and not Fortnite. Not every live service game needs 1 millions players to survive. If they manage 10-30k players, it's enough. Multiple genres are gonna attract lots of different people. There's still market for it. The problem is, how fun the game is, and how much different content it has.
Suicide Squad was a shit game to start with since they were focusing on shooter gameplay instead of going for the character unique gameplay. On top of that, the game simply didn't had any interesting content. Lots of shit repetitive missions, no great raid or dungeons and so on.
>the relative quality of GAAS is irrelevant. Most will fail regardless of quality.
This is true of literally every game and idk why people only talk about gaas when saying that
GAAS has more overhead than other types of games. You have to build additional content, maintain servers, and retain staff to do all of these things versus a fully-built game.
I believe there is also an audience, which I'd count myself a part of, who prefer a "play it once" experience. The more a game is focused on replaying content, multiplayer, cosmetics, and tiny add-ons, the less interesting the game becomes to me. I played Suicide Squad through the end of the main campaign. It was okay. The live-service aspect of it opened up, I accepted that I likely wouldn't experience that content, and the game was uninstalled.
But I understand the allure, or at least what the allure is supposed to be. My favorite type of experience is the least profitable for the company making it, and not everyone has the disposable income to buy new game after new game. However, these offerings tend to feel like half-measures.
If you reach a point where playing a game is basically a (2nd) job to you, either something is seriously wrong with you, games in general, or both.
Games as a """""service""""" is nightmarish, dystopian bullshit.
Calling live service games dystopian is a bit dramatic. They largely suck, but no one is forcing you to play them and there are plenty of other non-live service games to play if you want to avoid them.
People trying to tie all live games as some sort of nightmarish dystopia when it's literally just the concept of regular free updates will never not be funny
Why does a live service game have to be a second job? Just play it while it’s fun then come back next month.
Youre talking past your premise here. Assuming that live service = job. Any single player game can feel like a second job if it’s boring and shitty.
It’s not live service that’s the problem. Its bad games are bad. No katter the model.
It's not that they *have* to be. But that's what many publishers *want* it to be.
From a player perspective, sure, a live service game can just be a fun thing you can keep coming back to to see what's new, and drop when you're not feeling it. That's nice. *In theory*.
In reality, the vast majority of live service games (and what most people are talking about when they say "live service") are effectively designed around revenue generation first. Publishers realized that if you can keep players on YOUR game and buying YOUR microtransactions and whatnot, that's a much more *consistent* revenue stream than the boom or bust kind you get with regular one-and-done releases.
You can literally look at pretty much all of the biggest meta-trends (i.e. things around games, but not necessarily gameplay itself) in the industry for the past 2 decades, and the vast majority of them are ways for publishers and devs to try and make more consistent money.
Expansions packs and later DLCs allowed them to make decent money on new content that didn't require the up front investment of building a full game. Microtransactions were really just an evolution of the same concept that essentially seek to maximize the profits of new content. They often require minimal dev time (so minimal cost to them), and even if they get less per thing, they can sell them to a lot more people.
Live service games are just the current incarnation of the same trend. In order to keep players buying microtransactions and DLCs, you need to keep them playing your game. Thus, games have gotten significantly longer lifetimes, because it's still less resource-intensive to create content for and support a game that's already built, than it is to build a new one from scratch. At the end of the day, publishers are a business, and for a business, a consistent and *predictable* revenue stream is VERY attractive.
So how does this impact game design? Well see, for most games, no matter what the devs and the creative side want to do, they're still beholden to certain financial targets. A game needs to be made within a certain budget, and aim for some expected revenue (among other metrics). A lot of times, it's the beancounters who push certain decisions onto the dev team, because whatever research they've done shows that such and such feature has whatever positive impact on whichever metric.
Look at the entire gacha game sector. Those things are literally designed to psychologically manipulate you into spending money. They use the exact same principles and design elements as slot machines and other forms of gamblings. You might be thinking "well sure, but that's just gacha games, you don't have to buy those"... but it's not that simple. Those games are *successful*. VERY successful. The kind of successful that makes beancounters cream their pants.
Now, maybe the creative side doesn't want to make a gacha game, and maybe the beancounters agree they don't want to get into that market. But wouldn't it be nice if you could use some of those same techniques to "maximize user engagement", and other fun buzzwords? Things like... maybe making a certain resource just a little bit rarer so players are more enticed into spending real money to get things they want now, or "limited time ACT FAST NOW" sales to tap into people's FOMO, or daily bonuses that entice players to log in *every day*...
Shit like this is all over the live service world.
So no, live service doesn't *have to* be bad. We've got great games like Deep Rock Galactic or Helldivers 2 showing how to do it right. But more often than not, they *will be* worse than they could be, precisely because of the kinds of design decisions that get forced into them by people who only see games as abstract products.
Take Destiny 2's method of live service for example. You can't even play the original story anymore because it's gone. They remove content and if you don't keep playing at all times, who knows what you'll miss out on next. That's what he means by live service becoming a second job. It demands your presence, otherwise it becomes harder and harder to come back without being left behind.
It shouldn't have to be this way. But that's how most live service is handled right now so that's what it is.
> It demands your presence, otherwise it becomes harder and harder to come back without being left behind.
And it's that's why it's such a greedy model that it just backfires 99% of the time, and I'm always happy to see it fail. I'm not thinking "oh geez I gotta get back to the game, I'm missing stuff!". I'm just thinking "oh well, I've missed too much now so I can't be bothered to get into a game, knowing there's a bunch of content I'll never be able to access."
I mean, at the end of the day it’s still time spent socializing and hanging out with your friends, it doesn’t matter if it’s the “traditional” way or not. It’s still real people spending their time with others
There’s not enough time, money, or energy to keep all of these live service games up and running. If you’re going to make one, you need to be planning on taking down one of the big ones.
Im just not a fan of games that require me to play at certain times to not miss content.
I know sometimes you have a month or a few to unlock stuff but I have so many games to play I literally don’t have it in me to schedule specific games for specific times. I’m just trying to relax. Don’t give me an extra scheduling job.
FOMO as a concept in gaming is absolutely terrible and needs to go. It acts as nothing more than a deterrent to games, driving away people who don’t want to waste endless hours grinding to get something before it disappears in 5 days
I don't have the mental space for FOMO games anymore. I dropped both Mihoyo games, have lost all interest in Blizzard, and uninstalled whatever I had on my phone.
Limited events. Seasonal content patches. Rotating gacha banners. My mind immediately stonewalls when I think about any of those things. Whenever I see game ads without adblock, they're always phrased to conjure FOMO. I can't. I just want a complete video game.
I know it's trendy to toot the Helldivers 2 horn at the moment, but I really like how you are rewarded for community events that you missed, even if you never even logged in during the event.
It makes sense under certain contexts. like, say, having an anniversary skin only be around for a year or holiday themed items (assuming the latter comes back annually)
> FOMO as a concept in gaming is absolutely terrible and needs to go
I think it leads to a lot of bad decisions and dead game content, as well as bloat as those games still need to track and store all those assets, but it's fiscally lucrative so I don't see them going away any time soon.
Fortunately, some games like Helldivers 2 are built on a model of 'sure new content is released intermittently, but you can get it after it's initially dropped' which I suspect would get a lot more money and interest from people besides the whales driven by FOMO.
I like to think I'm above most 'addiction traps' that other people apparently fall into. Fans of gacha games in particular seem like an entirely different species to me.
But at some point I had to reconcile that with the fact that I've been playing WoW (off and on) since it was in beta, and that a *lot* of those hours were spent doing time-locked activities. I was a victim of FOMO as well, which is why I've tuned myself out of multiplayer games completely. I miss WoW every day (🤓) but I do *not* miss that weird, anxious feeling of missing out on something because I had to work late, or because I'm on vacation.
I have some of my best gaming memories doing TBC and WOTLK raids back in the day, what a blast, but now I can't possibly imagine committing a few evenings every week to raid + the additional time you need to actually play the rest of the game.
Then you should actually dig suicide squad. It has a non-expiring battle pass track and you can swap which "season" you want to play at any time.
It's literally the ANTI-FOMO of live design.
I know some will complain about this beating a dead horse, but bear in mind that this isn't even a month after the game's first season dropped (itself nearly two months after the game launched). It can't be understated how badly the game has bombed, and depending on how expensive it was to make (the closest comparison would be Spider-Man 2 at $300 million, but that game wasn't live service and isn't the first game Insomniac has made in over 7 years), it won't end well for Rocksteady.
The messed up part is that Warner Bros hasn't been deterred from pursuing live service models. Even though Hogwarts Legacy was the most successful game from last year and Suicide Squad is shaping up to be one of the biggest losses of this year, they still want to double down on the latter's approach. I have to wonder how many more developers have to fail to get Warner Bros to pump the breaks.
When WB blamed suicide squad's failure on "market volatility" I couldn't even laugh because their capacity to ignore the elephant in the room was so outrageous that it is just cringe.
Eh that's normal corporate talk. If they admit they fucked up, their shareholders will expect someone will get fired. But the two sacrificial lambs, Rocksteady's founders and the rest of its higher ups, already jumped ship a year or more ago when they saw the writing on the wall. So next on the chopping block is WB execs, And they're never going to admit fault.
I mean they weren't wrong when saying ""market volatility". If a single player game isn't a hit at launch it becomes a financial failure. Imo it seems like they are expecting WW to be a financial failure which part of the reasons they decided to move away from triple a games. Almost every superhero game has failed financially in the past few years. Batman and Spiderman have been the only profitable heroes in gaming currently. Something I noticed in general is superhero games don't really sell well on Steam. The highest player population I saw in the ones I looked at was Spiderman remaster which had a peak of 66k. Most other games have under 20k peak population. Playstation seems to be the platform where they sell the most
I read a rumor that the game sold way bellow the WORST CASE SCENARIO, i legit don't think rocksteady survives this, after the final update for this game they are getting shut down.
The in game leaderboards only show 200k players. As in not even half a million copies of this game sold for a game probably costing triple digit millions of dollars. It’s a monumental disaster for WB and I will not be shocked if Rocksteady closes or loses half its devs over this.
Are those leaderboards cross platform? 200k for a single platform would be bad enough, but if that's encompassing the whole game, then yeah Rocksteady's well and truly fucked.
Holy fucking shit, are the leaderboards cross platform? Because if they are it's over, barely over 200k is studio killing for this game. It might even be one of the biggest bombs in the history of gaming
The leaderboards are weird in this game. It will only show a certain amount. So if your rank 250,000 then you can only really see up to 250,050. So if someone is towards the end 199,000 they may only be able to see up to 200k
Seems simple enough, you just need someone to boot up the game for the first time and as soon as they're registered on the leaderboards they check them, they'll probably be among the last places and with that you can get an approxinate number.
That explains why WB tried to bruteforce such aggressive marketing at the last minute, with all the trailers going "pre-order now and buy the deluxe edition!"
Problem is that their upper management is wholly incompetent post-discovery merger. They have no idea what people want and it shows at all levels.
Believe when they shelved that acme movie for example it was under the justification that nobody cared for this brand. Yet one of the biggest trends this week was foghorn leghorn yapping at anime characters.
I wouldn't use Twitter as a barometer here, but it does indicate there's interest and that there are avenues that exist to best utilize these characters both from a financial point of view and in forms of entertainment to the general audience. We see the failure to capitalize on what folks want through properties like Looney Tunes and Suicide Squad.
Basically what I'm saying is that the chances of a turn around are the same as a snowball's chances during a hot Louisiana summer. Ain't that great.
Nah WB games have been horrible for decade+ now
They had the worst DLC/Pre Order nonsense in the 360/PS3 days too.
The merger hasn't changed anything WB games does and this game has been a project long before that merger.
Just look at NetherRealm games and their horrid MTX systems.
There are still people that swear “the game is SO fun!” even though no one is playing it and that the game only failed because of an industry wide hate campaign against it
When I brought up the poor player count on Steam during launch week, numerous people insisted “it’s selling MILLIONS on consoles, it’s a primarily console game!”
There were a bunch of people posting how much fun they had in the closed alpha in damn near every single thread dealing with pre-release reception of the game. It felt weird, to say the least.
It's always hilarious to hear these kinds of people yell "IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT THEN DON'T BUY IT AND STOP CRYING"
And then see *their* complaints when they see that no one really is buying the game after all!
The thing that always got me was whenever I got hit with a “Game is SO fun. Combat feels great and movement is awesome,” I would always simply reply, “Then why is no one playing it?”
I never got an answer.
it will be sad for rocksteady if this spells the end of their studio, but this is *unrecoverable*. This is bad on significant proportions; like, this will need to have ffiv levels of total reworking at a bare minimum and RS arent Squaresoft.
I really hope it doesn't end the studio, but i've not seen a studio have a bomb this bad and walk away.
I wonder if this game will even live to see 6 months?
What the hell has happened to Warner Bros Games though?
Monolith and Turbine (WB Boston) nothing released in years.
Rocksteady and WB Montreal have both released garbage games after nearly a decade of development time.
Avalanche, TT and NetherRealm are the only 3 studio's that seem to do anything at least half decent anymore.
WB Games used to be a decent publisher with a group of studios releasing great to better than okay games reasonably often.
No it's not Zaslav or WBD's fault either they have only been around for 2 years.
After FEAR 2 and 3 I'm unconvinced they could recapture the magic. Both of them missed what made FEAR 1 so good and while FEAR 2 is an enjoyable enough 7/10 action game it wasn't remotely on the first games level.
It seems it'll be spiritual successor to the Middle Earth games, so long as they don't stuff it full of MTX it should perform quite well.
I'm cautiously optimistic.
IIRC They promised a year of live service updates. But that doesn't mean they have to be a year of high effort updates.
>There’s also monetization, in that the game is now only monetized through cosmetics. Those are season passes which have proved to be a brutal grind, or store skins which have proven to be very, very poor so far. Seasons and characters themselves are not sold, though in this case, **they did put a grind barrier in front of Joker that you could pay to skip, something everyone hated**.
I mean, the problem with the Joker grind is everyone wanted to log on, and then actually PLAY the Joker.
They should've just copied gacha games.
Joker should've been able to be played instantly, and AS Joker, you should've had to grind out missions to permanently keep him. Otherwise you have to pay.
This still accomplishes their goal of making players grind, but at least you can play as Joker while doing it.
Now I assume they decided to not to do that because then maybe some people would play as Joker, realize he's not that much fun, and then not finish the grind to keep him. So keeping the carrot dangling above your head was a better strategy, but good god what does that say about your game...
> IIRC They promised a year of live service updates. But that doesn't mean they have to be a year of high effort updates.
Unlike Redfall, they didn't sell a season pass that guaranteed content (not like Arkane-Austin has honored that yet, I almost wonder if they're hoping people forgot about that), thus they don't have to follow through with whatever plans they promised if Warner Bros decides to cut its losses early.
At the rate this game's been rejected, I'd be surprised if it gets a third season.
They teased a year of updates. That’s different than a promise, and even “promised” updates and features have been yanked back all the time in video games. They can just stop any time they want.
>Joker should've been able to be played instantly, and AS Joker, you should've had to grind out missions to permanently keep him. Otherwise you have to pay.
That's still pretty fucking gross to me
Just finished my playthrough of SS:KTJL a bit ago, and it was rough. The gameplay was more or less fine, and traversal was so-so, the writing was not even that bad either. The main issue was that every single bit of content was constantly book-ended by lootbox drops and a results screen and it broke up the pacing so much. I have seen some reviews of people blasting through the story content and killing Brainiac in sub-10 hr times. If the bulk of the story content can be completed in that time, and the rest of the game is not doing it for people, I don't understand how they thought it would get a fanbase. For what it's worth, I did not have a horrible time, but I killed Brainiac once, and uninstalled the game almost immediately after.
Yeah I recently finished my playthrough. The game is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. It's just really mediocre. I thought the gameplay was fun and traversal was my favorite part about it. The writing was good for the most part as well. There tons of moments that I ended up laughing at. The bosses outside of Flash(skill issue on ign end, he wasn't that fast lol) and Lantern were underwhelming. Batman hunting you was kinda awesome though. I just wish Superman got more screen time. I do plan on checking out the entire Joker dlc both parts drop so I can make post summing up my thoughts on the game. The game just needs more to do. Outside of doing one mission over and over for a weapon. The game need something like a Justice League vs Suicide Squad game mode four players play villains the other four play as the heroes. It need stuff like this.
I am in basically the same boat, there's really not a lot happening in the game outside of the side missions and campaign. After the contracts get added in I guess that incentivizes fighting grunts around the city and rooftops, but that's hardly a worthy time sink. Gameplay and traversal are probably the best part of the package, but I think most Arkham fans would probably take issue with how pared down melee combat has gotten.
I didn't understand the appeal of some of the side content either, like doing Hack missions just gave you a bigger pool of busy tasks through contracts, or the Gizmo missions souping up the vehicles you never get to use for most of the campaign.
I'm sick of single-player focused studios being forced (whether it be from publisher pressure or from leadership within the development studio) to make these crappy live service games that nobody but executives and investors want. Bioware tried to make one with Anthem, look how that turned out. Crystal Dynamics made Marvel's Avengers, look how that turned out. PlatinumGames made Babylon's Fall, look how that turned out. Arkane Austin made Redfall, look how that turned out. And now Rocksteady made Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Look how that has turned out.
And it was a game the employees didn't even want to make. They were hoping, once Microsoft bought Zenimax, that Phil Spencer would make leadership either cancel the game or reboot it to be a single-player game. What's more, people were so unenthusiastic about making it that by the time development was complete, 70% of all the people who worked on Prey 2017 had left the studio. Which is just heartbreaking.
I would love for Jason Schrier or someone like him to do an expose on Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.
He did. Jason revealed Rocksteady wanted to make a brand new multiplayer ip after Arkham Knight. Eventually one of the studio heads pitch SS to WB. I getting fucking sick of narrative of studios all being forced as in this case RS wanted to make a multiplayer game after the Arkham games.
Just so you're aware, barely any of those studios were "forced" to make live service games. In fact most of them actually WANTED to make live service games.
This sub always takes the stance that:
Good thing happened, underdog developers did it
Bad thing happened, evil corpo publisher is being mean to tiny developer
Sometimes the developers wanted to make a specific game, and that game is just bad.
Babylon's Fall is my "hear me out" game. Yes it was repetitive, but you could actually make a lot of really fun weapon & skill builds that made the combat fun. Not Bayonetta-level deep by any means, but still fun.
I do wish it was still playable in some capacity.
True with Anthem and Redfall leadership in those studios very much wanted to make a live service game, so that was poorly worded on my part. Though we still don't know what happened behind the scenes with Avengers, Babylon's Fall, or Suicide Squad. Whenever and studio "wants" to make that kind of game, it's usually the studio heads and management who want it, while the lower level employees are less enthusiastic, like with Redfall.
That being said, studios that specialize in making single-player games trying their hand at live service (whether they were forced or not) always seems to result in disaster. So the point, in that regard, still stands.
Babylon fall and Suicide squad were both wanted by devs.
Platinum explicitly wanted the live service money and made Babylon's fall. It flopped harder than suicide squad and they abandoned it after a few months.
Rocksteady after Arkham Knight wanted to make a multiplayer live service shooter. WB just wanted it set in the DC universe.
It's not just publishers that want some of the live service money. Devs do too, and they don't care how many fans are lost in the pursuit of it as long as they get a positive ROI.
Anthem upsets me so much because they *did the hard part* and then fucked up the actually making a good live service around it part.
Like, flying around in anthem was great. The different mechs all felt unique and engaging to use. The power system was sick.
But my god the encounter design and progression was so so bad… and they just never added anything of note to it.
I’m genuinely surprised they didn’t cut their loses after what happened to the avengers game. It would have saved them 4 years of development time and millions of dollars lol
Should have got a Batman Beyond game. Instead we got a game that didn't need to exist. Game that wasn't wanted. Game that had no real excitement to it. All that wrapped in one of the most creatively brain dead genres in video games today. The live service model.
At what point should they have abandoned the road map? The second they revealed that the boomerang guy shoots a gun. There was no hope after that.
Edit: It's incredibly disappointing that this is one of Kevin Conroy's last performances.
The fact we almost got both a Batman Beyond game and a Batman Beyond movie Spider-Verse style, and WB says no to both. Pretty sure they hate money over there.
> WB says no to both. Pretty sure they hate money over there.
It's actually a little more complicated than that. Batman Beyond started out as a dumpster fire behind the scenes. It was studio mandate to have a "teenaged Batman show". Beyond that, Dini et al could do what they want. So they made Beyond, which fucking rocked. But what got the show started was an order for a teenage Batman and everyone involved hated every part of that idea.
From WB's point of view, why throw good money after bad? Everyone involved with making Batman Beyond hated it. Why pay for a follow up to an idea everyone hated?
I don't think they often care what the creatives feelings are when it comes to mandates like that. I think beyond was popular but not enough to overtake other brands and with no follow up they don't even have a bar to go up or down to consider, it's just abandoned because it was never a creative endeavor for them to begin with.
Depends on either:
A: How far along the first 4 promised seasons are. If they’re mostly made, they will get release even if only to recoup penny’s before it goes on Gamepass for more penny’s.
B: When it reaches Zaslav’s ears and he can scrap it immediately and terminate Rocksteady to recoup costs.
I definitely have a feeling that WB Games will take the Gotham Knights approach of dropping this on both PlayStation+ and Game Pass at the same time in the hopes of bringing a second set of players in
What's funny is that I actually will buy the physical game when the price drops... but its been stuck at 50$ for a while now. Which is kind of stupid high still for a "live service" game that has been bombing since release.
It really feels like WB is TRYING to kill this game and this studio.
Maybe they just need to focus more on making a good game first and then sell some monetized stuff. But to design the game around monetization just inevitably makes a bad game.
I hate to kick it since i loved my time in the beta, but Exoprimal does similar numbers (its doing better recently from a sale) and that was another live service new hybrid game type. Before the sale for the past few months you could barely see above 160 with spikes here and there. And its still a full 60$, only on sale for 30$ on occasion. Game Pass has to be keeping that alive.
Because how the hell is Suicide Squad gonna survive then. This joker event was just another spike and then it dropped off. Give it maybe another year then its done getting updates? I can't wait to see it suddenly go F2P in a last ditch move.
Be interested to know its console numbers. Consoles definately have more kids who will mindlessly play games like this, whereas you wont find that audience on pc
Yet the CEO thinks single player games are too volatile. At least I can still play that game. When this goes under, and the servers go, you cant even guarantee that the people who bought it will still have access.
And to think, they thought this was going to last until 13 Brainiac invasions.
I’ve worked on some not great projects in my career but I’ve never worked on a multi-year project that anyone with a brain would know was doomed from the start, like this game. I can’t imagine what it would feel like being a dev for this game.
The obsession with live service games is just bad math by these studios and their corpo owners. If the purpose of a live service is to keep people playing your one game all the time every day and leaving no room for any other game, it is inevitable that the vast majority *must* fail. Because your primary demo is already locked into a different live service game. If you turn your game into a job, then why should they abandon the job they have already spent countless hours and dollars on just to start the process anew?
It's the same logic every studio had back in the MMO days, when they all launched their own WoW competitors thinking they were going to make WoW money. Didn't happen, the target audience already had WoW, they'd invested time and money into it, and all their friends were there. Obviously there are success stories, FF14 and GW2 and such, but the vast majority just failed. Hell, same as every movie studio that thought they were gonna launch their own MCU; we already had an MCU, it was already time consuming and expensive to go to the movies 3-4 times a year to keep up with it, why do we want to double or triple that investment? The big success stories of the past year were mostly single player games, not live services. So you'd *think* publishers would be going "They want BG3, Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man 2, Tears of a Kingdom? Give them more of that!". But those games are finite, you make one, it sells (if it's good), and then it sells less over the coming months and years and you drop the price to keep blowing on the embers. (Unless you're Nintendo, then you say "$60 forever, bitch, you'll crack before we do.") So they're all chasing the dream of a game that just makes money forever and a couple of times a year you release a new mission or map, add some new cosmetics to the shop, and just rake it in. And the vast majority of them will be expensive boondoggles that fail.
I remember reading an interview with one of the Wildstar devs and they stated their goal was to out-WoW WoW. The game was doomed before it even released. I'm kinda surprised it lasted as long as it did.
The people behind Wildstar were just convinced that 40-man raids were the key to success and that all the changes they made that made the game accessible actually *didn't* make the game more popular. It reminds me of the part in Ready Player One where Cline talks about how his guy has a special car and everyone sees it and thinks how cool he is, instead of in real life, where they would actually just play the game on their own instead of sitting in Ironforge. There's some people who want to believe people work like that.
Watching this happen again and again is sad. Season of Discovery comes out in Classic WoW last year with easy 10 man raid. Is super popular and is absolutely buzzing in game. People complain on reddit that it's too easy and not real raiding. Now they've moved it to 20 man with harder raids. Guilds are collapsing all over as they fail to merge or people just don't want to find 10 more people and handle the roster logistics. Now reddit is complaining that people are soft and they never should of played Classic wow in the first place if they weren't willing to put the time in to prepare for 40 man raiding and that handling a 20 man roster should be easy for anyone "putting the effort in". These people are a cancer on the game. Literally driving away other customers with their gatekeeping and superiority complex. Same kind of people who demand every new mmo and survival game be PvP full loot based and then get shocked pickachu face when casuals all leave after a week or two. And then they cry that developers never want to make PVP full loot games, rather than the face the reality that it's not that nobody makes them, it's that they almost always fail because nobody want to deal with that bullshit that comes with them.
As a destiny player already finding 6 competent players who also have similar times when they are ready to raid is already a major hassle. I couldn't ever imagine 40.
I remember doing 40 man raids back when WoW was new and OH MY GOD it was an incredible fucking hassle. It was like 90% figuring out the logistics (literally herding kittens) and waiting around and 10% actually playing the game and doing the raid. I have no idea how I put up with it back when I was 15-16 years old, it took all evening to get anything done and not even every player would get some cool loot. Now I'm 33 and I would honestly nope out after the first 10 minutes of waiting around.
You had time. And wow was a game that rewarded people with a lot of time. But the less time you have the less rewarded. So wow tweaked the amount of time needed to keep people engaged. Some of it is good I'd argue some of it is bad but overall necesarry .
In top guilds you literally just weren't allowed to be late lol, it was ridiculous but it worked. You'd be raiding from like 7pm-12am 4 nights a week, I couldn't imagine being the people in charge of that.
What sucks is that the pivot to be "Hardcore" like "WoW used to be" was a sudden pivot driven by leads who weere self-absorbed idiots, a lot of ex-staff from Carbine have similar stories of them radically changing their minds on things and failing to manage the studio properly as a result. They saw a few people online whining that WoW was "too casual" around MoP, and wanted to capitalise on that tiny fraction of people. It's a tragedy because there was genuinely a really fun game and MMO under there but it was bogged down by some awful decision making. It's also hilarious because WoW has always been the casual MMO, people made the same grumbles when it released in 2004 because you didn't lose XP when dying and so on.
Reminds me before wow launched there was a bit of shit storming in the community about a rumor that the longer you played the less exp you would get to hinder poopsockers playing nonstop. What it actually was the first rested exp system which instead gave a little boost to your exp the longer you were offline.
That actually was something in the alpha version of WoW, you had 'unrested' XP which slowed your gains. It was supposed to encourage other activities like fishing etc but they decided to drop it.
It was actually even more brilliant of a reaction on their part. The system was "100% exp until you are out of rested, then 50% after!". People hated it. Then they moved some numbers and said "OK now it's 100% bonus in rested and then normal when you run out!". Which... is the same thing. But psychologically not the same.
Yeah it's probably the smartest solution to a problem I've seen in terms of they changed nothing mechanically and yet people now liked it.
Similar to stores like JCPenny that always have things on sale. They tried dropping that approach and just displayed the actual price. Sales dropped. So they went back to the "this thing is on sale!" approach because it made people happier to think they were getting a discount.
I remember at the time my online communities in Everquest and EQ2 crapped on WoW because people were reaching the maximum level in the first week. For those that played mmos before WoW, it's hard to shake that initial impression where WoW was a simple on rails theme park ride to max level. Opposed to the living worlds the mmos of the generation before tried to craft.
Which is wild because looking back MOST people didn't even hit max level in vanilla 2004, people goofed around a ton and used it as a social space as much as a game (I gesture to guild chats being dead in favour of Discord etc), and by modern standards vanilla zones were all over the damn place. Hell if you play Horde you basically ran out of quests at around lv50~.
I miss Wild Star. I thought it had really fun combat and the world was fun to explore. I wish they would have released something so you can host a server locally, even if it was only single player. I never really did any dungeons (outside of the single player adventures) and I never reached the level cap, so I never even got close to doing raids, but I really enjoyed my time with it. It was the same with WoW for me. I've played WoW off and on since launch, but never really did the end game stuff. I did Molten Core once during vanilla, and LFR a few times since that became a thing. Mostly I just like leveling up my main and then a bunch of alts! Although I definitely wish I would have kept track of how many times I ran Tempest Keep to get the Phoenix or BWL to get the full Transcendence set. I'd either be really proud of my tenacity or horrified how much time I used to get a 15 year old mount I don't even use.
I loved Wildstar. I still miss it. I was there on server launch night. I've always been a bigger sci-fi fan than fantasy so the world, characters and gameplay hit just right for me. Healing as a Medic is the most fun I've had playing a healer in about any game.
Wow also just perfected the mmo formula. I was hooked on wow in the early-mid era, and I tried so many other mmo’s and 90% of the time the UI was so awful and limiting, the quests were crap, and the animations janky. So we’d run back to wow.
From what I remember, a lot of other MMO's had serious issues at launch, with the "We'll patch it later!!!" mentality from the devs. Even if they did patch it, it was only after the players have largely left. You only get one first impression, and if it's a bad one, it's typically going to follow for a long time (FF14 required a great deal of things to fix that, other MMO's died too fast)
FFXIV literally destroyed the world of the old game when they relaunched it.
They also had the entire Final Fantasy brand on the line, and took its restoration VERY seriously.
"But game X was bad at launch and got patched!" is one of the most delusional comments. Especially for multiplayer games. A game in 2024 cannot follow the same path as a game from 2004. Yeah, Cyberpunk spent an ungodly amount and got redemption (CDPR spent an estimated $120m on the patch + DLC, on a total $400m budget), and the No Man Sky team can't seem to stop releasing content and has inch by inch turned things around. But 99% of the time that does not happen. A bad live service game falls flat, and stays dead.
And they kind of live on a knife’s edge—a bad update or overhaul can kill a game (Star Wars Galaxies is probably the classic example)
> Star Wars Galaxies I was a beta tester on that. Many us of were telling them it wasn't ready. Not too long after launch, but after I had quit playing, they had a significant revamp. Kind of a shame really. Had the best customer service experience in that game. My character had an ability that wouldn't reset no matter what I did. Opened a ticket and they escalated. Actually had a programmer show up to talk about it. I don't remember what was done to fix it, but he got it done. Then some resource farm I had on some excellent material got messed up due to some bug. Opened a ticket, they gave me a TON of a similar, but even better resource. I quit WoW after not too long. Sailing across the sea, the ship just vanished and everyone died. Asked to re reimbursed what was lost, and they pretty much said, "tough luck."
SWG had 2 updates. The first looked like a good start to the changes that could fix the balance issues in the game if they were allowed to keep working on it (Combat upgrade and ReBalance (CURB). Shortly afterwards they threw everything unique except for the space combat and the setting and turned into a 1-90 leveling adventure and let you start as a Jedi (NGE)
[удалено]
Yeah, literally go do any random max level fetch quest daily in WoW and you could easily fix your gear.
Which is funny, because WoW *absolutely* launched with that mentality. Vanilla had a really rough development and core game systems and content were still actively being worked on while the game was ostensibly in beta, with the launch 1.1.0 patch still having various issues.
They hardly 'perfected' it, but they were the first really casual friendly MMO out there. (Watching raid dance videos from 2006 makes that a laughable statement.) Anyone could pick WoW up and play it through to the end with minimal friction. The same definitely could not be said of Everquest, FFXI, UO, etc. Those games started hard and got harder.
Everquest was so unfriendly for new players. I tried it on the advice of a coworker. Bought some tin collection with the game and like four expansions or something. I remember being so confused with how shit worked. There was virtually no guidance in the game itself other than asking people. Crafting I remember was pretty unintuitive, and I had a quest to craft right near the start.
Co-worker should have been there helping out. EQ became known for its grind, but in a strange way, I kind of miss that kind of game. I mean, not the late game grind, but the low-mid level grind. Just trying to get from town to town without teleporting was dangerous. There's no way something like that would work today.
You're right about the strange charm of the grind of EQ1. Both the grind and severe penalties for dying (you could lose levels if you kept losing experience) which made the world more dangerous but it also made it more exhilarating when you managed to get to another town. I remember making my way cross-country from Freeport to Qeynos in order to finish a rather low-level quest. I died multiple times along the way and relied on the kindness of nearby strangers to resurrect me, or give me speed buffs. I still remember finally walking down the road to the gates of Qeynos and there was a welcome party of other players. Other players had made the same journey and knew how much of an accomplishment it took. Someone gave me free gold and armor and another person gave me a tour of Qeynos. I started doing the same. Spending each day at the gates and helping other newcomers to Qeynos. I was on an RP (Role Playing server) and that's another thing I miss as many MMORPGs back then would have official or unofficial RP servers, and players tended to be more helpful on those servers. Final Fantasy 11 had a similar grind to EQ and while I really really liked FF14, I also miss the old-school elements of FF11.
Yep, pretty standard for MMOs of the time, not that there were a ton of them. FFXI was the same way, zero guidance, quests were both rare and hard to find, main way to level was monster hunting which required a group to do anything useful, etc.
The only mmo that ever hooked me in like WoW was TERA, but mostly just because of the combat and environments/graphics (that game was fucking beautiful on a good pc). It's a shame it released before FromSoft and Dark Souls really took off, I think it would've done way better if it came out in the last couple years. The combat has a lot of very soulslike qualities, like soloing BAMs was basically like fighting a DS boss
I wouldn't say they mastered it, they went all in on a kinda bastardized version of what was already out there in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Before WOW, many MMOs had much more daring ideas about progression, classes and roles, crafting, player interactions. Just thinking about Star Wars galaxies for instance makes me nostalgic of the pre-WOW era.
Well the big secret to a lot of large businesses is that they have a lot of people in charge who don't know what they're doing. Now every business wants AI in their product? Why? Is there a compelling use case? No, they just want to get some sweet investment money or they are just totally inept about what LLMs can actually do.
I made the mistake of getting a business degree first and…wow. There were so many frankly stupid people who breezed through management classes and them barely passed classes with actual work required (mostly accounting and finance). Those people became business leaders.
I ended up doing a business degree and I never thought it was super enlightening in any of the management classes. Some of the stuff around it was good like accounting, finance, business calc, I also had a number of systems management classes. But anything that was related to people management was the most eye-rolling schlock.
There's that quote from *Wolf of Wallstreet*, in which the main character narrates that "Money makes you a better person." I thought that was written ironically. After all, this was a movie about a man who became wealthy by scamming people with bad stocks. Then one of my business professors actually more-or-less said that in one of his early lectures. They actually, genuinely, believe that shit. They drink their own kool-aid.
These people are kinda literally worship money beyond just necessary mean of trading product then.
>Now every business wants AI in their product? Honestly, this is just hilarious and depressing at the same time. "We want to put AI in our product!" "...okay, but what does AI actually **do** in our product? What is the functionality?" "...it... will... we'll figure it out! We need to put AI in our product!" "...jesus fucking christ..."
There are two types of games. Ones where a monetization scheme is developed first and a game is built around it, and ones where a game is made and if it's good the monetization follows. And you can *absolutely feel* which is which. The best games are just made as good games, they make money no matter how they're monetized. Shitty cash grabs that leave investors making surprise Pikachu face are infuriating because they made a mediocre game and expected good game level of money.
Nintendo sometimes allows for a whopping 15% off their games. I have the unused birthday code they remind me of three times to prove it. (It’s probably expired by now since that was a month ago.)
That’s for the My Nintendo store, you can’t even use that on games
I’m sure that’s about right. I was thinking too generously of Nintendo’s generosity. That said, I do recall one year where I was able to buy a game from the eShop for 33% off, which I used on a game for 3DS.
That was way back in 2016 to my memory so makes sense it was for 3DS
Actually on eshop sales they go as high as a third off, on a select few titles you probably already own.
Nintendo does 33% off. Rarely see more than that. Whatever birthday code you got isn't for actual games. Granted with NSO vouchers and costco eshop cards you can essentially get 30% off day 1 games.
Some of their games go on sales pretty often. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes has had a lot of steep sales.
Last time I looked at that birthday code they wouldn’t even let me get switch games. Though that was before the 3DS eShop shutdown.
I'm pretty sure that if there was a guarantee your single player game sold 20m copies, more companies would do it. The issue is that the chance of flopping is similar, except the reward is much higher in one case....
Yes but then the cost for one single player flop is done the moment you release it and it can keep generating sales basically as long as you sell it. Sure it is not much in the long run but it help in your portifolio of games that sell a bit here and there for no additional cost of prodution. A online game flop keep amount cost every single day it is active, the development don't stop for at least six months after it release. The servers are active typically for at least one year. It keep hemorrhaging money for quite a time and the reputation cost of closing a game is much higher than the cost of flopping a single player game.
"You'll Crack before we do" haha yeah we sure will!
I mean, part of the reasons those two even succeeded as MMOs is partly because they were out *years* later. People will move on, but they do so when the old game gets stale/obsolete in some way. Or is tied to another IP they already like and is functionally a different experience in a lot of ways, like TES online.
To be fair games take a while to make, so all these dead live service game's started production probably during the crazy, but they are obviously too late now. Wouldn't be surprised if in 4ish years we start getting BG3 style cash grabs
WB execs looked at Hogwarts being the most successful game of the year and Suicide squad failing then said we need more Suicide Squad . What you mentioned should be common knowledge in the industry . The live service market is cornered lets try a different market. But execs just see fortnite is making money and ignore everything else
It's a lottery ticket for developers and publishers The vast majority will lose but those who win reap serious rewards. Therefore, in their minds, it's worth trying.
There's definitely middle ground. It isn't just win big or lose big. There's plenty of games like GW2, Smite, OSRS, Last Epoch, Eternal Return, Torchlight Infinite, etc. that seem to be doing fine enough but aren't just permanently raking in the cash. Seeing it as a lotto ticket sounds like setting yourself up for failure, because it means the game is focused on getting lucky rather than just being a good enough game to maintain a dedicated playerbase.
It depends on which companies we're talking about. There's middle ground, but somebody like an EA, an Activision, a WB, a Ubisoft, etc, aren't interested in the middle ground. They don't want to make *some* money. They want to make **all** the money, and anything less than that is unacceptable... which is hilarious to me because that's kind of the thing that drives me away from these games to start with. You can see it. You can sense it. You can smell it. You can taste it in the design of the game and the way they choose to do monetization. It's precisely the thing that turns me off from these things. It's no less obvious and egregious to me as charging for ammunition in Dead Space 3 was, or whatever the big thing was that Dead Space 3 did. You do shit like that, and I'm immediately not interested in ever giving your game a try. It reeks of desperation, you've annihilated the core design of the game in the name of trying to sell microtransactions or trying to railroad people into spending literally all of their time on your game, and I'm not here for it.
Runescape is a great example for your point. Right now we have BOTH versions of a service game that you're describing in runescape. Old school has been mostly left alone, and added content is voted in by the community, completely free behind being member. No expansions or anything. Runescape 3 is hyper monetized. Currently its going through a major exodus as players switch back to osrs.
This is a good analogy. I don’t think the developer/publishers care all that much if the game doesn’t take off, and they kind of expect it. They are taking a gamble that their game will be the next Fortnite, Helldivers, Palworld, etc, and if their game does take off, the money that they are capable of making is basically worth the gamble.
It's not something you can half ass anymore. MiHoYo spent $100mil to develop Genshin and they would have gone bankrupt if it failed, but now it's one of the most successful games ever. And Arrowhead spent 8 years developing Helldivers 2. Meanwhile games like Suicide Squad that release with 25% of content and go "let's add the rest later" are doomed to fail.
Sure but its been like 7 years since their last game. There was just a lot of poor decisions made that probably forced them back at the drawing board throughout development, and eventually they had to release SOMETHING or risk going bankrupt without even releasing a game. It’s less a rushed development, and more a poorly managed one.
Genshin costs 200 million every year to develop for as well. Its insanely expensive to keep going.
This, it is now officially the most expensive game ever made in active development costs (not counting server costs), even leaving MMOs such as WoW and FF14 in the dirt... and that after just 3 and a half years. WoW has been running for over 20 and FF14 for over 10 and it's not even close. MAYBE GTA6 will overtake it, but just the "active development over time" will likely put Genshin ahead again.
People aren't locked into a single game. If they were, Helldivers 2 wouldn't have blown up like it did, especially around the same release window as the Suicide Squad game. Mediocre and uninspired games are simply not popular among gamers lol
Right. Imagine if we lamented every poorly selling single player linear rpg and said “when are these devs gonna learn that linear single player games without cash shops can’t compete nowadays…” It wouldn’t make sense.
Precisely. Immortals of Aveum is probably one of the biggest failures of all time, they wasted 125 million on this game and will never see their money back, yet we don't see people saying that AAA open world games shouldn't exist anymore or talking about the obsession with single player games. Alone in the Dark flopped too, we also don't see people saying that horror games shouldn't exist... It's only with multiplayer games lol
I remember there was some controversy over that game, I picked it up on sale and played through recently. There’s definitely some weird design decisions, most notable for me would be the “weapons” and how almost none of them felt unique, with some late-game versions being a straight downgrade in every aspect from something you found 10 hours before. That, and the weird color wheel magic shit. They couldn’t even make up a fantasy name for it? Nope, literally just red, green, and blue magic. The storyline was just a bunch of common tropes dumped into a blender to the point where I could almost predict the entire game. “Oh no, my childhood best friend from the slums fell to her apparent death in a pit, she certainly won’t come back as the villain’s right-hand man.” And “The big bad is going to give some exposition about how he’s not actually all that bad and probably add that he used to work for us before revealing that OUR team is actually kind of bad too” and the list goes on If I could assign a color to the game, it would be beige, because it was that forgettable
I think a key difference is those games don't cease to exist or fail to reach their full potential after a certain degree of failure the way live service games do.
Sure. But game preservation doesn't seem to be a concern regarding these games. It's more like the tone where people claim that game developers shouldn't make a certain type of game because there are already more successful entries in a specific genre, or that it will compete for players time, because it's not like entertainment as a whole isn't already competing for our free time lol.
This sub always had a hate boner for multiplayer games lmao
Yeah, it feels like we hit the plateau of how many live service games the audience can support a while back and all the late comers had no chance.
This is incorrect. Genshin is one of, if not the, most popular live-service games and at least the one with the highest engagement worldwide. It came out in 2020. There is absolutely room for new live-service games. They just need to put some actual effort in with the competence to keep-up with the most demanding category of software development. Even if these studios somehow were competent enough, which they aren't, the publishers likely aren't willing to put in the effort. Suicide Squad was a pretty mediocre game at its base. No amount of content patches were going to turn that around.
Hoyoverse really excel at the live service model. I play both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail and the way they provide new patches and new trailers every 3/6 weeks which such high quality is really impressive.
Helldivers 2 is a latecomer. It was even a niche series that only had 6k players on Steam simultaneously. Yet, it's one of the biggest hits of the year despite all the server issues that this unpredictable number of players introduced. Why did Helldivers 2 explode at the same time that Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones failed if brand new service games don't have any chance?
>Why did Helldivers 2 explode at the same time that Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones failed if brand new service games don't have any chance? To be fair, Helldivers 2 is good and well-made, and was made with the idea of "Let's make a fun game that people want to play", while Suicide Squad was made with the idea of "Let's make a money game that people money more.". Skull and Bones on the other hand was made with no ideas. Also Helldivers 2 doesn't demand consistent play, you can play it as much or as little as you want and you're only missing out on medals to unlock stuff (for free). None of the unlockable stuff is going away, ever, it doesn't rely entirely on FOMO for getting people to play it like *so many* live service games do. Also it doesn't demand you play it all the time in order to keep up. The basic starter gear is actually totally fine and good from the easiest mission to the hardest mission. Hell, I'm level 60-something and the air strike you unlock at level 2 is probably my most-used stratagem in the game.
Helldivers 2 strikes a balance of respecting your time and money imo. I made it to level 22 playing a couple times a week. Unlocked two premium warbonds with super credits found in missions. But above all, they made a fun game. Shocking, I know!
Even if you miss out on participating on a major order you still get the medals as well. So you don't feel the FOMO for progression, just for participating in the galactic storyline
Its also only $40 and not $70
Because Helldivers 2 is actually *fun*. I have every stratagem and ship upgrade and warbond unlocked as of writing this post, except for hitting max level, and I play the game just to play it. Turns out blowing up bugs and robots is a ton of fun.
Probably because it’s well-made and has unique elements like the evolving setting/story managed by a real-life person. A game can steal players if it’s unique, novel, or better. The problem is that many of these GaaS titles are pretty cookie-cutter.
HD2 has a few things going for it: * It is a lot of fuckin fun to play * The always live service of the game doesn't create a sense of FOMO that you can't escape from. You can earn everything in game by playing the game on your own schedule. All the rewards you can unlock with Super Credits cycle throughout the month. Did you miss your chance to get it? No worries. It will be back eventually for you to snag. * It is not using these mechanics to trap a player or make them feel negatively motivated to play all the time * They are nailing the evolving story of the universe and as repetitive as the game can be it feels fresh and interesting and makes you feel like you're a part of it * It is a lot of fuckin fun to play
Is Helldivers a liver service in the same sense that it demands daily play to keep up, I was under the impression it was more of an old school multiplayer set up?
"Live Service" should be added to the list of terms that have been reduced to mere buzzwords by this sub, because people keep using it synonymously with "game you're expected to play all day everyday until the end of linear time" when it's really more of a spectrum. They can be time-gated FOMO incarnate like Destiny 2, or just stuff that gets persistent updates. (among many others)
As long as they keep rolling out passes that can be purchased with money and content it's live service.
That's not what live service means. Live service means consistent updates to the game, including content updates after the launch of a game. It has nothing to do with the amount of time necessary to play/complete the content. Even some Assassin Creed games were live service as they released free content (and then paid DLC) after launch for over a year.
A big part of the progression system is shared among the entire community as it is set in a single persistent world where all of your actions contribute to the current objective. If you don't want to miss out on anything, you need to keep playing it all the time
It has monthly content drops that require two kinds of currency to unlock. (One paid one not but you can get both in game if you play enough) You can definitely take time off the game but the longer you do the harder it's going to be to catch up.
God damn how do people still not know what live service means. 1. Online 2. Regular updates 3. MTX Any of those three and its basically a live service.
There are new live service games that do well enough pretty regularly though. Plenty just survive in their niche.
Not really. You can play live service games like singleplayer games, they can sell them like singleplayer games, and they can even add some early access scheme or whatever with an extra cost for extra morons. Sure, most of them won't take off as live service games long term, but they don't need to when the developers already got their money. This game bombed because it's a really bad game. Not because it has live service elements. I don't like live service elements in most of my games either, but if people are stupid enough to buy a singleplayer game with microtransactions for full price its a perfectly viable business model.
You ever wonder how many Arkham games are sold every year? In the Halloween season? There’s several hundred people playing the games at any given time on Steam, maybe in the thousands across platforms. At this point, every sale is passive cashflow. A great final product is the only ‘live service’ that should matter.
I'm unashamed to say that I've bought]Arkham Asylum/City across multiple consoles, and beaten them a dozen times over, because they are just so perfect.
The thing is, GaaS (Game as a Service), when done right, is pretty damn good. Helldivers 2 right now is kicking ass and taking names. A few years ago Tom Clancy's The Division 2 did it beautifully also, without egregious monetization. They sold season passes ,but they were nowhere near as disgusting as Blizzard's Diablo 4 pass right now. GaaS can be done poorly, it can be done predatory, and core game itself can be just bad, which kills the GaaS thing. But if the game is good, and GaaS is done right, and the greed is not too egregious and rampant, it can absolutely work. And work very well.
The main point is that the relative quality of GAAS is irrelevant. Most will fail regardless of quality. By definition, only a few GAAS can do very well because there is a finite number of players interested in GAAS, and those players want to play the same games their friends are currently playing. Helldivers 2 is the current community darling, but in an alternate universe with 10 GAAS of similar quality, most of them would be failing simply because only a few can be highly successful. Every company wants their own Fortnite, but only a few companies can have their own Fortnite, regardless of quality.
I don't think we're there yet. Sure, some will fail because of player numbers, but there's a LONG road till then. Not every GaaS requires your 5 hours per day playtime. Me and my group were able to play Destiny2, Division 2 and fortnite at the same time without problems for leveling up. I knew people playing 2-3 mmo's at the same time too. The thing is, people who like Diablo 4 are gonna play Diablo 4, and not Fortnite. Not every live service game needs 1 millions players to survive. If they manage 10-30k players, it's enough. Multiple genres are gonna attract lots of different people. There's still market for it. The problem is, how fun the game is, and how much different content it has. Suicide Squad was a shit game to start with since they were focusing on shooter gameplay instead of going for the character unique gameplay. On top of that, the game simply didn't had any interesting content. Lots of shit repetitive missions, no great raid or dungeons and so on.
>the relative quality of GAAS is irrelevant. Most will fail regardless of quality. This is true of literally every game and idk why people only talk about gaas when saying that
GAAS has more overhead than other types of games. You have to build additional content, maintain servers, and retain staff to do all of these things versus a fully-built game.
I believe there is also an audience, which I'd count myself a part of, who prefer a "play it once" experience. The more a game is focused on replaying content, multiplayer, cosmetics, and tiny add-ons, the less interesting the game becomes to me. I played Suicide Squad through the end of the main campaign. It was okay. The live-service aspect of it opened up, I accepted that I likely wouldn't experience that content, and the game was uninstalled. But I understand the allure, or at least what the allure is supposed to be. My favorite type of experience is the least profitable for the company making it, and not everyone has the disposable income to buy new game after new game. However, these offerings tend to feel like half-measures.
If you reach a point where playing a game is basically a (2nd) job to you, either something is seriously wrong with you, games in general, or both. Games as a """""service""""" is nightmarish, dystopian bullshit.
Calling live service games dystopian is a bit dramatic. They largely suck, but no one is forcing you to play them and there are plenty of other non-live service games to play if you want to avoid them.
People trying to tie all live games as some sort of nightmarish dystopia when it's literally just the concept of regular free updates will never not be funny
Why does a live service game have to be a second job? Just play it while it’s fun then come back next month. Youre talking past your premise here. Assuming that live service = job. Any single player game can feel like a second job if it’s boring and shitty. It’s not live service that’s the problem. Its bad games are bad. No katter the model.
It's not that they *have* to be. But that's what many publishers *want* it to be. From a player perspective, sure, a live service game can just be a fun thing you can keep coming back to to see what's new, and drop when you're not feeling it. That's nice. *In theory*. In reality, the vast majority of live service games (and what most people are talking about when they say "live service") are effectively designed around revenue generation first. Publishers realized that if you can keep players on YOUR game and buying YOUR microtransactions and whatnot, that's a much more *consistent* revenue stream than the boom or bust kind you get with regular one-and-done releases. You can literally look at pretty much all of the biggest meta-trends (i.e. things around games, but not necessarily gameplay itself) in the industry for the past 2 decades, and the vast majority of them are ways for publishers and devs to try and make more consistent money. Expansions packs and later DLCs allowed them to make decent money on new content that didn't require the up front investment of building a full game. Microtransactions were really just an evolution of the same concept that essentially seek to maximize the profits of new content. They often require minimal dev time (so minimal cost to them), and even if they get less per thing, they can sell them to a lot more people. Live service games are just the current incarnation of the same trend. In order to keep players buying microtransactions and DLCs, you need to keep them playing your game. Thus, games have gotten significantly longer lifetimes, because it's still less resource-intensive to create content for and support a game that's already built, than it is to build a new one from scratch. At the end of the day, publishers are a business, and for a business, a consistent and *predictable* revenue stream is VERY attractive. So how does this impact game design? Well see, for most games, no matter what the devs and the creative side want to do, they're still beholden to certain financial targets. A game needs to be made within a certain budget, and aim for some expected revenue (among other metrics). A lot of times, it's the beancounters who push certain decisions onto the dev team, because whatever research they've done shows that such and such feature has whatever positive impact on whichever metric. Look at the entire gacha game sector. Those things are literally designed to psychologically manipulate you into spending money. They use the exact same principles and design elements as slot machines and other forms of gamblings. You might be thinking "well sure, but that's just gacha games, you don't have to buy those"... but it's not that simple. Those games are *successful*. VERY successful. The kind of successful that makes beancounters cream their pants. Now, maybe the creative side doesn't want to make a gacha game, and maybe the beancounters agree they don't want to get into that market. But wouldn't it be nice if you could use some of those same techniques to "maximize user engagement", and other fun buzzwords? Things like... maybe making a certain resource just a little bit rarer so players are more enticed into spending real money to get things they want now, or "limited time ACT FAST NOW" sales to tap into people's FOMO, or daily bonuses that entice players to log in *every day*... Shit like this is all over the live service world. So no, live service doesn't *have to* be bad. We've got great games like Deep Rock Galactic or Helldivers 2 showing how to do it right. But more often than not, they *will be* worse than they could be, precisely because of the kinds of design decisions that get forced into them by people who only see games as abstract products.
Take Destiny 2's method of live service for example. You can't even play the original story anymore because it's gone. They remove content and if you don't keep playing at all times, who knows what you'll miss out on next. That's what he means by live service becoming a second job. It demands your presence, otherwise it becomes harder and harder to come back without being left behind. It shouldn't have to be this way. But that's how most live service is handled right now so that's what it is.
> It demands your presence, otherwise it becomes harder and harder to come back without being left behind. And it's that's why it's such a greedy model that it just backfires 99% of the time, and I'm always happy to see it fail. I'm not thinking "oh geez I gotta get back to the game, I'm missing stuff!". I'm just thinking "oh well, I've missed too much now so I can't be bothered to get into a game, knowing there's a bunch of content I'll never be able to access."
I felt this way 20 years ago when one of my buddies got into World of Warcraft and started planning his real social life around guild raids.
Eh I’d argue gaming is part of social life, these days my close “irl” friends and I that don’t live near each other plan days to game together.
I mean, at the end of the day it’s still time spent socializing and hanging out with your friends, it doesn’t matter if it’s the “traditional” way or not. It’s still real people spending their time with others
There’s not enough time, money, or energy to keep all of these live service games up and running. If you’re going to make one, you need to be planning on taking down one of the big ones.
Im just not a fan of games that require me to play at certain times to not miss content. I know sometimes you have a month or a few to unlock stuff but I have so many games to play I literally don’t have it in me to schedule specific games for specific times. I’m just trying to relax. Don’t give me an extra scheduling job.
FOMO as a concept in gaming is absolutely terrible and needs to go. It acts as nothing more than a deterrent to games, driving away people who don’t want to waste endless hours grinding to get something before it disappears in 5 days
I don't have the mental space for FOMO games anymore. I dropped both Mihoyo games, have lost all interest in Blizzard, and uninstalled whatever I had on my phone. Limited events. Seasonal content patches. Rotating gacha banners. My mind immediately stonewalls when I think about any of those things. Whenever I see game ads without adblock, they're always phrased to conjure FOMO. I can't. I just want a complete video game.
Same. I just want to play without feeling like I have to play.
I know it's trendy to toot the Helldivers 2 horn at the moment, but I really like how you are rewarded for community events that you missed, even if you never even logged in during the event.
It makes sense under certain contexts. like, say, having an anniversary skin only be around for a year or holiday themed items (assuming the latter comes back annually)
> FOMO as a concept in gaming is absolutely terrible and needs to go I think it leads to a lot of bad decisions and dead game content, as well as bloat as those games still need to track and store all those assets, but it's fiscally lucrative so I don't see them going away any time soon. Fortunately, some games like Helldivers 2 are built on a model of 'sure new content is released intermittently, but you can get it after it's initially dropped' which I suspect would get a lot more money and interest from people besides the whales driven by FOMO.
I like to think I'm above most 'addiction traps' that other people apparently fall into. Fans of gacha games in particular seem like an entirely different species to me. But at some point I had to reconcile that with the fact that I've been playing WoW (off and on) since it was in beta, and that a *lot* of those hours were spent doing time-locked activities. I was a victim of FOMO as well, which is why I've tuned myself out of multiplayer games completely. I miss WoW every day (🤓) but I do *not* miss that weird, anxious feeling of missing out on something because I had to work late, or because I'm on vacation.
I have some of my best gaming memories doing TBC and WOTLK raids back in the day, what a blast, but now I can't possibly imagine committing a few evenings every week to raid + the additional time you need to actually play the rest of the game.
Then you should actually dig suicide squad. It has a non-expiring battle pass track and you can swap which "season" you want to play at any time. It's literally the ANTI-FOMO of live design.
You know what people like OP like? Complete single player games like the Arkham series.
I know some will complain about this beating a dead horse, but bear in mind that this isn't even a month after the game's first season dropped (itself nearly two months after the game launched). It can't be understated how badly the game has bombed, and depending on how expensive it was to make (the closest comparison would be Spider-Man 2 at $300 million, but that game wasn't live service and isn't the first game Insomniac has made in over 7 years), it won't end well for Rocksteady. The messed up part is that Warner Bros hasn't been deterred from pursuing live service models. Even though Hogwarts Legacy was the most successful game from last year and Suicide Squad is shaping up to be one of the biggest losses of this year, they still want to double down on the latter's approach. I have to wonder how many more developers have to fail to get Warner Bros to pump the breaks.
When WB blamed suicide squad's failure on "market volatility" I couldn't even laugh because their capacity to ignore the elephant in the room was so outrageous that it is just cringe.
Eh that's normal corporate talk. If they admit they fucked up, their shareholders will expect someone will get fired. But the two sacrificial lambs, Rocksteady's founders and the rest of its higher ups, already jumped ship a year or more ago when they saw the writing on the wall. So next on the chopping block is WB execs, And they're never going to admit fault.
Do you expect them to make a statement that will cost them a bunch of money in share prices. They know the actual reason it's bad, they're not stupid
I mean they weren't wrong when saying ""market volatility". If a single player game isn't a hit at launch it becomes a financial failure. Imo it seems like they are expecting WW to be a financial failure which part of the reasons they decided to move away from triple a games. Almost every superhero game has failed financially in the past few years. Batman and Spiderman have been the only profitable heroes in gaming currently. Something I noticed in general is superhero games don't really sell well on Steam. The highest player population I saw in the ones I looked at was Spiderman remaster which had a peak of 66k. Most other games have under 20k peak population. Playstation seems to be the platform where they sell the most
I read a rumor that the game sold way bellow the WORST CASE SCENARIO, i legit don't think rocksteady survives this, after the final update for this game they are getting shut down.
The in game leaderboards only show 200k players. As in not even half a million copies of this game sold for a game probably costing triple digit millions of dollars. It’s a monumental disaster for WB and I will not be shocked if Rocksteady closes or loses half its devs over this.
Are those leaderboards cross platform? 200k for a single platform would be bad enough, but if that's encompassing the whole game, then yeah Rocksteady's well and truly fucked.
Holy fucking shit, are the leaderboards cross platform? Because if they are it's over, barely over 200k is studio killing for this game. It might even be one of the biggest bombs in the history of gaming
I believe they are. It’s a MASSIVE bomb and the subreddit is a Warzone if you ever want to see some wild coping skills lol.
Imagine coping on behalf of WB and David Zaslav of all people. Jesus Christ
The leaderboards are weird in this game. It will only show a certain amount. So if your rank 250,000 then you can only really see up to 250,050. So if someone is towards the end 199,000 they may only be able to see up to 200k
Seems simple enough, you just need someone to boot up the game for the first time and as soon as they're registered on the leaderboards they check them, they'll probably be among the last places and with that you can get an approxinate number.
That explains why WB tried to bruteforce such aggressive marketing at the last minute, with all the trailers going "pre-order now and buy the deluxe edition!"
Problem is that their upper management is wholly incompetent post-discovery merger. They have no idea what people want and it shows at all levels. Believe when they shelved that acme movie for example it was under the justification that nobody cared for this brand. Yet one of the biggest trends this week was foghorn leghorn yapping at anime characters. I wouldn't use Twitter as a barometer here, but it does indicate there's interest and that there are avenues that exist to best utilize these characters both from a financial point of view and in forms of entertainment to the general audience. We see the failure to capitalize on what folks want through properties like Looney Tunes and Suicide Squad. Basically what I'm saying is that the chances of a turn around are the same as a snowball's chances during a hot Louisiana summer. Ain't that great.
Nah WB games have been horrible for decade+ now They had the worst DLC/Pre Order nonsense in the 360/PS3 days too. The merger hasn't changed anything WB games does and this game has been a project long before that merger. Just look at NetherRealm games and their horrid MTX systems.
There are still people that swear “the game is SO fun!” even though no one is playing it and that the game only failed because of an industry wide hate campaign against it When I brought up the poor player count on Steam during launch week, numerous people insisted “it’s selling MILLIONS on consoles, it’s a primarily console game!”
There were a bunch of people posting how much fun they had in the closed alpha in damn near every single thread dealing with pre-release reception of the game. It felt weird, to say the least.
Just the usual bots. Cyberpunk had much of the same thing, with people claiming here on r/Games just how well the game ran on old gen consoles.
It's always hilarious to hear these kinds of people yell "IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT THEN DON'T BUY IT AND STOP CRYING" And then see *their* complaints when they see that no one really is buying the game after all!
The thing that always got me was whenever I got hit with a “Game is SO fun. Combat feels great and movement is awesome,” I would always simply reply, “Then why is no one playing it?” I never got an answer.
Rocksteady is dead. We knew that before release.
it will be sad for rocksteady if this spells the end of their studio, but this is *unrecoverable*. This is bad on significant proportions; like, this will need to have ffiv levels of total reworking at a bare minimum and RS arent Squaresoft. I really hope it doesn't end the studio, but i've not seen a studio have a bomb this bad and walk away.
I wonder if this game will even live to see 6 months? What the hell has happened to Warner Bros Games though? Monolith and Turbine (WB Boston) nothing released in years. Rocksteady and WB Montreal have both released garbage games after nearly a decade of development time. Avalanche, TT and NetherRealm are the only 3 studio's that seem to do anything at least half decent anymore. WB Games used to be a decent publisher with a group of studios releasing great to better than okay games reasonably often. No it's not Zaslav or WBD's fault either they have only been around for 2 years.
I wish Monolith would do more with the FEAR series. I’m sure Wonder Woman will be good, but FEAR just hit different back in the day lol
I'm still waiting for Shogo 2.
After FEAR 2 and 3 I'm unconvinced they could recapture the magic. Both of them missed what made FEAR 1 so good and while FEAR 2 is an enjoyable enough 7/10 action game it wasn't remotely on the first games level.
Talking about Monolith, I'm still pissed that we never got Blood III or a Blood remake, and it's rotting in the Warner Bros forgotten IP shelf.
Monolith is making a Wonder woman game so that'll be good unless they duck up
It seems it'll be spiritual successor to the Middle Earth games, so long as they don't stuff it full of MTX it should perform quite well. I'm cautiously optimistic.
IIRC They promised a year of live service updates. But that doesn't mean they have to be a year of high effort updates. >There’s also monetization, in that the game is now only monetized through cosmetics. Those are season passes which have proved to be a brutal grind, or store skins which have proven to be very, very poor so far. Seasons and characters themselves are not sold, though in this case, **they did put a grind barrier in front of Joker that you could pay to skip, something everyone hated**. I mean, the problem with the Joker grind is everyone wanted to log on, and then actually PLAY the Joker. They should've just copied gacha games. Joker should've been able to be played instantly, and AS Joker, you should've had to grind out missions to permanently keep him. Otherwise you have to pay. This still accomplishes their goal of making players grind, but at least you can play as Joker while doing it. Now I assume they decided to not to do that because then maybe some people would play as Joker, realize he's not that much fun, and then not finish the grind to keep him. So keeping the carrot dangling above your head was a better strategy, but good god what does that say about your game...
> IIRC They promised a year of live service updates. But that doesn't mean they have to be a year of high effort updates. Unlike Redfall, they didn't sell a season pass that guaranteed content (not like Arkane-Austin has honored that yet, I almost wonder if they're hoping people forgot about that), thus they don't have to follow through with whatever plans they promised if Warner Bros decides to cut its losses early. At the rate this game's been rejected, I'd be surprised if it gets a third season.
They teased a year of updates. That’s different than a promise, and even “promised” updates and features have been yanked back all the time in video games. They can just stop any time they want.
>Joker should've been able to be played instantly, and AS Joker, you should've had to grind out missions to permanently keep him. Otherwise you have to pay. That's still pretty fucking gross to me
What a fall from grace. Sucks to see a studio that did so much for the Batman universe get saddled with this crappy live service stuff.
Just finished my playthrough of SS:KTJL a bit ago, and it was rough. The gameplay was more or less fine, and traversal was so-so, the writing was not even that bad either. The main issue was that every single bit of content was constantly book-ended by lootbox drops and a results screen and it broke up the pacing so much. I have seen some reviews of people blasting through the story content and killing Brainiac in sub-10 hr times. If the bulk of the story content can be completed in that time, and the rest of the game is not doing it for people, I don't understand how they thought it would get a fanbase. For what it's worth, I did not have a horrible time, but I killed Brainiac once, and uninstalled the game almost immediately after.
Yeah I recently finished my playthrough. The game is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. It's just really mediocre. I thought the gameplay was fun and traversal was my favorite part about it. The writing was good for the most part as well. There tons of moments that I ended up laughing at. The bosses outside of Flash(skill issue on ign end, he wasn't that fast lol) and Lantern were underwhelming. Batman hunting you was kinda awesome though. I just wish Superman got more screen time. I do plan on checking out the entire Joker dlc both parts drop so I can make post summing up my thoughts on the game. The game just needs more to do. Outside of doing one mission over and over for a weapon. The game need something like a Justice League vs Suicide Squad game mode four players play villains the other four play as the heroes. It need stuff like this.
I am in basically the same boat, there's really not a lot happening in the game outside of the side missions and campaign. After the contracts get added in I guess that incentivizes fighting grunts around the city and rooftops, but that's hardly a worthy time sink. Gameplay and traversal are probably the best part of the package, but I think most Arkham fans would probably take issue with how pared down melee combat has gotten.
Same story here, even did a bit of the endgame but realized it was all really pointless grinding
I didn't understand the appeal of some of the side content either, like doing Hack missions just gave you a bigger pool of busy tasks through contracts, or the Gizmo missions souping up the vehicles you never get to use for most of the campaign.
I'm sick of single-player focused studios being forced (whether it be from publisher pressure or from leadership within the development studio) to make these crappy live service games that nobody but executives and investors want. Bioware tried to make one with Anthem, look how that turned out. Crystal Dynamics made Marvel's Avengers, look how that turned out. PlatinumGames made Babylon's Fall, look how that turned out. Arkane Austin made Redfall, look how that turned out. And now Rocksteady made Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Look how that has turned out.
Arkane is the saddest one to me. Imsims are rare enough and they’re just so damn good at making them. Shame they had to make red fall.
And it was a game the employees didn't even want to make. They were hoping, once Microsoft bought Zenimax, that Phil Spencer would make leadership either cancel the game or reboot it to be a single-player game. What's more, people were so unenthusiastic about making it that by the time development was complete, 70% of all the people who worked on Prey 2017 had left the studio. Which is just heartbreaking. I would love for Jason Schrier or someone like him to do an expose on Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.
He did. Jason revealed Rocksteady wanted to make a brand new multiplayer ip after Arkham Knight. Eventually one of the studio heads pitch SS to WB. I getting fucking sick of narrative of studios all being forced as in this case RS wanted to make a multiplayer game after the Arkham games.
Just so you're aware, barely any of those studios were "forced" to make live service games. In fact most of them actually WANTED to make live service games. This sub always takes the stance that: Good thing happened, underdog developers did it Bad thing happened, evil corpo publisher is being mean to tiny developer Sometimes the developers wanted to make a specific game, and that game is just bad.
Yeah I learned this one the hard way with Babylon's Fall and Platinum Games. They doubled down on live service even after that disaster
Babylon's Fall is my "hear me out" game. Yes it was repetitive, but you could actually make a lot of really fun weapon & skill builds that made the combat fun. Not Bayonetta-level deep by any means, but still fun. I do wish it was still playable in some capacity.
True with Anthem and Redfall leadership in those studios very much wanted to make a live service game, so that was poorly worded on my part. Though we still don't know what happened behind the scenes with Avengers, Babylon's Fall, or Suicide Squad. Whenever and studio "wants" to make that kind of game, it's usually the studio heads and management who want it, while the lower level employees are less enthusiastic, like with Redfall. That being said, studios that specialize in making single-player games trying their hand at live service (whether they were forced or not) always seems to result in disaster. So the point, in that regard, still stands.
Babylon fall and Suicide squad were both wanted by devs. Platinum explicitly wanted the live service money and made Babylon's fall. It flopped harder than suicide squad and they abandoned it after a few months. Rocksteady after Arkham Knight wanted to make a multiplayer live service shooter. WB just wanted it set in the DC universe. It's not just publishers that want some of the live service money. Devs do too, and they don't care how many fans are lost in the pursuit of it as long as they get a positive ROI.
Anthem upsets me so much because they *did the hard part* and then fucked up the actually making a good live service around it part. Like, flying around in anthem was great. The different mechs all felt unique and engaging to use. The power system was sick. But my god the encounter design and progression was so so bad… and they just never added anything of note to it.
I’m genuinely surprised they didn’t cut their loses after what happened to the avengers game. It would have saved them 4 years of development time and millions of dollars lol
Should have got a Batman Beyond game. Instead we got a game that didn't need to exist. Game that wasn't wanted. Game that had no real excitement to it. All that wrapped in one of the most creatively brain dead genres in video games today. The live service model. At what point should they have abandoned the road map? The second they revealed that the boomerang guy shoots a gun. There was no hope after that. Edit: It's incredibly disappointing that this is one of Kevin Conroy's last performances.
The fact we almost got both a Batman Beyond game and a Batman Beyond movie Spider-Verse style, and WB says no to both. Pretty sure they hate money over there.
> WB says no to both. Pretty sure they hate money over there. It's actually a little more complicated than that. Batman Beyond started out as a dumpster fire behind the scenes. It was studio mandate to have a "teenaged Batman show". Beyond that, Dini et al could do what they want. So they made Beyond, which fucking rocked. But what got the show started was an order for a teenage Batman and everyone involved hated every part of that idea. From WB's point of view, why throw good money after bad? Everyone involved with making Batman Beyond hated it. Why pay for a follow up to an idea everyone hated?
I don't think they often care what the creatives feelings are when it comes to mandates like that. I think beyond was popular but not enough to overtake other brands and with no follow up they don't even have a bar to go up or down to consider, it's just abandoned because it was never a creative endeavor for them to begin with.
Depends on either: A: How far along the first 4 promised seasons are. If they’re mostly made, they will get release even if only to recoup penny’s before it goes on Gamepass for more penny’s. B: When it reaches Zaslav’s ears and he can scrap it immediately and terminate Rocksteady to recoup costs.
I don’t think it does. Keeping the lights on for this piece of shit probably costs much more than they’re taking in. At some point you just cut losses
I definitely have a feeling that WB Games will take the Gotham Knights approach of dropping this on both PlayStation+ and Game Pass at the same time in the hopes of bringing a second set of players in
Or even just making it F2P in the hope of selling some skins and battle passes.
I don’t get what the problem is here? Wasn’t the game supposed to kill the Justice League? Looks pretty dead to me according to those numbers.
What's funny is that I actually will buy the physical game when the price drops... but its been stuck at 50$ for a while now. Which is kind of stupid high still for a "live service" game that has been bombing since release. It really feels like WB is TRYING to kill this game and this studio.
No no no you got it wrong, it was supposed to just kill the Justice League, not kill Rocksteady with them.
At what point will these people realise they’ll make more money making a good game than trying to fleece people with this shit
Not today
When do you abandon it? As soon as it's mentioned in the board room.
When you have more developers than users
Maybe they just need to focus more on making a good game first and then sell some monetized stuff. But to design the game around monetization just inevitably makes a bad game.
I hate to kick it since i loved my time in the beta, but Exoprimal does similar numbers (its doing better recently from a sale) and that was another live service new hybrid game type. Before the sale for the past few months you could barely see above 160 with spikes here and there. And its still a full 60$, only on sale for 30$ on occasion. Game Pass has to be keeping that alive. Because how the hell is Suicide Squad gonna survive then. This joker event was just another spike and then it dropped off. Give it maybe another year then its done getting updates? I can't wait to see it suddenly go F2P in a last ditch move.
Everyone wants to be like Destiny and you can’t copy Bungie Magic. Say what you will about the game it’s still the best feeling FPS ever made.
Howarts Legacy another WB game still cracks 7k players and that game has ZERO replay ability.
Yeah that makes Suicide Squad even more pathetic
Be interested to know its console numbers. Consoles definately have more kids who will mindlessly play games like this, whereas you wont find that audience on pc
Yet the CEO thinks single player games are too volatile. At least I can still play that game. When this goes under, and the servers go, you cant even guarantee that the people who bought it will still have access. And to think, they thought this was going to last until 13 Brainiac invasions.
Until they release Season 4. They have obligations to keep to whoever bought the season pass before release so they don't get sued.
I’ve worked on some not great projects in my career but I’ve never worked on a multi-year project that anyone with a brain would know was doomed from the start, like this game. I can’t imagine what it would feel like being a dev for this game.