Games are an art form like any other, I don’t see people complaining there’s too many songs or too many movies, and it’s easier than ever to make one thanks to all the free engines, hobbyists make something, push it to itch.io and move on with their lives.
A strong, cogent argument can be made for having a wide variety of game developers. I don’t see ANYONE saying, “we need more companies like EA, Activision or UbiSoft.”
He has some points but the main one, mentioned in the headline, is shite.
There are plenty of gamers to go around for just about any game, if it’s worth playing.
If we wanna talk about soulless AAA bullshit like live service, or making trash out of a popular existing IP, that’s a different convo. Taking shareholders out of gaming would benefit everyone.
I don’t think private business is the issue. I think publicly traded business is the issue. In a private business, you don’t have quarterly shareholder meetings with the expectation of continuous growth, and then shareholders demanding you fuck everything up.
Many private businesses are also fucked up, but so many others work just fine. Many work great, particularly small business or employee owned business or coops or similar.
Obviously there are a lot of large privately held companies, many of them owned by billionaires, some of whom are very public assholes. Forbes maintains this US-only list (Twitter is 149th and falling): www.forbes.com/lists/largest-private-companies/ But, Twitter notwithstanding, most of these giant companies just quietly go about their business. Some of them become conspiracy theory targets (Koch) due to the flex their owners exhibit on the public sphere. And some of this is clearly incorrect in their table (ie: Cargill is not making $1M in revenue per employee – they probably used US employee count, but global revenue).
Large private companies should be paying more taxes, imo, but are not strictly the problem. Large public companies are evil almost across the whole spectrum. The large private companies don’t typically fire 25% of their staff at Christmas just to massage numbers for the quarterly report.
When you look at small companies though (for example, my company is two people, both owners, no employees), I hope you’ll see that we’re just trying to make a living :)
What’s wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO’s are a live service and many are good games (if MMO’s are your thing).
All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn't have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it's going to be live service, because of these incentives.
Or they don’t disappear, servers are released or reverse engineered and the community takes over. Yeah, in many cases it doesn’t happen and companies often try to prevent that, but then that’s the shitty thing. The fact the game was live service didn’t prevent preservation in itself or require the developer to make a bad game. It often goes together, yes, but it’s not an inherent property of it.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of dead live service games have had pirate or reverse engineered servers come in to save the day, but my gut feeling is that it's a very, very low number.
I got slowly beaten out of Destiny by their live service model.
I play Hearthstone, but I’ve had a full collection for 4+ years now and I recognize spending ~$300/year on a single game isn’t for everyone, I also recognize in 5 or 6 years they’ll close the game down and nothing will remain, and then in 20 or so years even websites and YouTube videos mentioning it will become scarse.
The same is not true for games like Mario 64, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, even Tetris.
Any multiplayer game will die once its community moves on. Whether it’s live service or not and one could argue live service helps prolong a game’s time in the spotlight.
007 Agent Under Fire came out in 2001, and you can still play it in multiplayer as long as you have a single friend handy. Same goes for Quake, even older. Live service games offer you no way to play them once their servers are turned off.
I see lots of MMOs that become ran by the community on private servers after the developer stops supporting it. It’s crap when companies try to stop that, but the game being a live service isn’t a problem in itself.
Not servers offered by the developers/publishers (as far as I know, with the one exception of Knockout City), which makes it an unreliable option at best. You can't exactly spin up a private server for Rumbleverse.
I'm still playing Unreal Tournament 2004 just fine with bots. I don't need a community to play Project Zomboid with my SO. Your claim is factually incorrect.
It replicates it well enough for me to still be playing it regularly 20 years later and well enough to debunk the myth that every multiplayer game must automatically become unplayable with time ("die") solely due to the fact that it's multiplayer.
I can also still play UT2K4 with my friends, should I want to. I can't do either of these with a "live service" game where there is no offline mode or self-hostable servers.
Also, you ignored my mention of PZ, which is a multiplayer-enabled game which also won't die when the developer dies (or abandons the game).
Elite: Dangerous is all right. Buy once, no subscription or other crap, really cool in VR. Or World of Warcraft (I played it over 10 years ago, so not sure about now), had a really good time, don’t remember any bullshit from the devs.
Yeah, my point boils down to “nowadays live service games tend to contain lots of antifeatures and bullshit practices”, but the concept of a live service game is not inherently bad.
"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.
This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.
The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.
Back in the day, so many studios tried to unseat wow with a fantasy mmo of their own. Seems an unwise strategy when playing an mmo is nearly a full time occupation. Very few players will have the time for more than one. Bad strategy. Which is why nearly every wow killer died.
Its clear the industry learned nothing when they started pushing perpetual live service games. Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
Now the big thing is the battle pass, that demand tens of hours to complete. Same issue there. Can most players justify more than one battle pass subscription? Probably not.
Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
There's a big reward for being second or third to market, but not too much beyond that. A few MMOs saw plenty of success despite WoW. League of Legends and Dota are massively successful, but Smite did well too. Minecraft is huge, but so is Terraria and Starbound. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone are huge, but Hyperscape couldn't cut it.
There is always a market for smaller more focussed experiences. They are cheaper to make, so easy to make profit on. But, they want to turn every game into open world, microtransaction laden shit fest. A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious. Throwing hundreds of millions on a single massive game shouldn’t be a standard.
I love open world games, but I wouldn’t mind playing smaller games like older CoD campaigns too.
I'm not fluent in Diablo parlance, but essentially it makes it harder to work toward the gear you want because they don't give you as much storage for the items you can't fit on your person?
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