My take on live service games has always been if you make it live service you should also make a retirement plan so people can still play the game they paid for after the servers are shut down.
I mostly wish that companies were upfront about how long the service will last.
From day of release can they guarantee at least 3 years of server time? 5 years? 10? It would factor a lot into whether or not I think a game is worth the purchase. Especially if you’re buying it 4-5 years after release and it can shut down any day.
Are there really that many games shutting down so soon after release? I know there’s a handful of games that basically just flopped out the gate and got canned soon after, but nearly everything I’ve encountered has run for 5+ years, or at least is in the position to do so if it’s not that old yet. Is it just that I’m over in the corner where the games don’t suck and I’m out of touch with how things are?
Why is this too much to ask? (I get the Capitalist why)
I feel like a lot of my grievances with live service games, outside of predatory mtx, is this inevitable endpoint of losing this game and all your achievements/ experiences/ progress.
This could also help solve a lot of Ross Scott’s (yt: accursed farms) lawsuits against live service games. In their case, The Crew
Let us host this ourselves if we wish. From a corporate perspective You can always lock the updated latest and greatest behind your currently supported game.
There are a couple of decent reasons. One is that your servers may be a network of services that can’t operate independently. Another is that they may rely on things you don’t have a license to distribute.
You make good points. I was not completely clear in my post.
There are situations where what you say is true. (Were they setup that way intentionally though, for this very reason? Don’t think we will ever truly know.) There are certain multiplayer focused games that could be destroyed by client side affirming. I get that there are legitimate situations that makes this difficult for corps.
There are licensing issues as well but so many games face this and many offer “streamer friendly” options where the licensing of the music isn’t an issue.
Many of these live service/ server dependent games are completely completable single player and they could disable any licensed music/ multiplayer licensed components? Most of them are P2P anyway like Helldivers 2.
These are the ones I draw issue with.
Edit: to your point of multiple servers; why couldn’t we host the required servers privately if they so wished?
The real reason that companies don't all do this is that it involves a nonzero amount of work to convert a game to work without the live service it originally depends on, and because there's no legal obligation to do so, most companies just... Don't care enough because they're onto the next thing. For example, Helldivers 2 chooses what missions and modifiers exist based off of the meta war decided by a lore master. To convert off of live service they'd have to program some intense stuff to get it to generate random possibilities that act like a meta war independently and such, which is not trivial.
It'll never be widespread until it's mandatory because it's asking the company to do work to allow players to continue playing a game when the company would reaaaally like it if you were just playing something else they make instead, something you might spend money on.
It’ll never be widespread until it’s mandatory because it’s asking the company to do work to allow players to continue playing a game when the company would reaaaally like it if you were just playing something else they make instead, something you might spend money on.
I wish Ross the best of luck in that, it's almost our only hope to getting this required legally, though separating games from licenses for a product into a service begins to get weird and means even if Ross wins it likely won't cover everything, but it'd go a lot further than we have already.
Mtx part doesn’t bother me as long as it is a f2p game, since they do need to make money somehow. But the attempts at it like Suicide Squad charging full price and shoving in monetization cheapens the experience, and makes you wonder what exactly the consumer is paying for when there are paid games that are a polished experience that doesn’t feel like an informerical experience.
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