Report: 95% of studios are working on or aim to release a live service game

Sony released recently that people are playing more single player games.

Yet live service multiplayer skinnerbox microtransaction bonanza is probably more lucrative, so..

And this is why indie games have been having such a good time of it. Sure, we might get the decade long "Early Access" of 7 Days to Die, or "We resemble but are legally distinct from Pokemon" Palworld, but we get fun games with a lot of obvious passion behind them. I do wish we would see more Baldur's Gate 3 style large productions which aren't designed around micro-transactions. But, I also realize that big name studios are run by folks with business degrees and not gamers; so, I should expect major games to be after my wallet like a meth addict.

Did anybody in the comments read the article? Rhetorical question

The article defines “live service game” as a game receiving regular updates for years, a definition which includes worldwide favourites like the Witcher 3 or BG3.

Sucks to be them because I aint playing that shit.

And I’ll be playing 0% of them.

Laughs in indie games

Well, if we're talking Path of Exile live service style, it's completely fine. The game is perfectly playable and enjoyable for free and wallet opens you cosmetics and some nice to have features (like bigger stash etc.), basically nothing gamebreaking. I played it quite a lot on a casual level, waiting for new Diablo (not necesarilly blizzard Diablo, just the essence of the original 2). It is fun and I played it mostly for free, when I decided to spend about AA level game of money to support the devs. Nithing forced me to do so, I just enjoyed the game and wanted to support the company. And I still think it's a great game and am looking forward to sequel.

But there's also another live service other than this one. Like that Diablo Immortal one. I haven't played it myself (and won't ever do it), but the drama around it was quite a big one. And no wonder it was! Holy hell, they're squeezing those balls hard. Even if the game was all fun and games I wouldn't touch it with its style of microtransactions, loot gambling and other bullshittery.

If studuos are working on this second style live service, then they should probably go bankrupt straight away.

This is not /that/ complicated.

Who plays video games these days?

Children, and adults who are basically working shit jobs and have little disposable income, but theyre generally likely to get hooked into a game that offers microtransactions of some kind.

Ok, so, we all know AAA studios are more or less led by extremely money hungry bullies who see games as a product to sell to consumers for the purposes of maximizing shareholder profit, and they know they have to mainly compete against other games, and movies and tv (netflix hulu fucking whatever).

Gamers also basically expect high quality graphics and the production value of basically a blockbuster movie, if you go by sales data.

Sure, other games with less astounding graohics and actually unique or novel gameplay exist, thats neat, they have teensy tiny draws, excepting the essentially totally unpredictable break out hit thats popular for maybe a month, maybe literally days.

So, we need huge studios for huge production values, and then the only way to possibly make profits on that is exploitative games as a service with microtransactions and season/battle passes.

Their brains are stuck in a loop state basically, and going by their logic, it makes sense from their position and with their motives and personalities.

Theyre following corpo logic basically perfectly.

You can say theyre the bad guys, and I can say go rewatch V for Vendetta and replay the part where V says 'you only need look into a mirror' multiple times.

How does this situation actually change?

Either, somehow, not one but a number of basically indie games somehow become huge successes with massive regular player counts, and most importantly they somehow have to draw people away from the mostly unoriginal schlock that is most AAA money printing games these days...

Or, basically, a significant number of big name studios/publishers need to basically just go entirely bankrupt.

Are either of these likely to happen?

Probably not, not soon, barring an extremely serious basically global economic downturn.

The fact that there is this much uniformity in strategy means that there will be sort of attritional damage done to the less successful, but that... might result in a sea change of market strategy to some other basically fad for AAA game studios... or it might result in even further buyouts and consolidation of once great IPs and studios.

Welcome to video game hell, nearly no one is truly innocent.

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding

But for so long as live service games make the insane amounts of money that they currently do, this is going to be how it is. Indie devs are a blessing

Ah yes, I totally have the time to dedicate to each and every single one of these 'endless' experiences and an bottomless wallet chock full of cash whose only purpose is to be spent on cosmetic items that nobody but me will ever give two shits about.