I've seen enough: No more forcing singleplayer studios to make mediocre live service games
I've seen enough: No more forcing singleplayer studios to make mediocre live service games
We're leaving this one behind in 2024.
It's so strange to me that so many of these got made. Anyone could see they were going to be terrible and die on their arses and yet they continued to plough time and talent into them. What a waste of everyone's time.
Yeah but have you considered Fortnite makes money. We should make a Fortnite
Also, people have infinite time, right?
Surely they have room for a couple more unfinished games wasting their time as a feature while they expect "the good shit" to drop in several months.
Oh wait, we've not sold enough. Sorry people, we're killing that roadmap. See you for the next one!
Studio execs look at the mountains of money which have come from online games like WoW or Fortnite and get gold fever. They dream of having a permanent siphon attached to their customers' wallets and so will ignore any warning signs that their ideas suck and keep chasing the subscription model. And, in the end, it's not the execs who really suffer when these things don't pan out. They blame "market forces" and "soft demand", fire the development team and then spin up the next stupid idea, either at the same company or at a new one.
The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they'll end up high up somewhere else.
Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.
The people in charge are, genuinely, not human. They don't have basic reasoning skills nor the human experience that label requires. A decapitated chicken could make better decisions than the average suit, the suit just has enough money to force it.
Once again, the opposite of "live service" is not "single player".
Digital Extremes and Bungie were the first formerly singleplayer-focused studios to find major success making MMOs with more action-heavy gameplay
Both companies were known for making multiplayer games before making live service games. BioWare made plenty of multiplayer games before Mass Effect 3.
If you want a term for something that means "not a live service", "single player" is a bad way to do it.
Once again, the opposite of “live service” is not “single player”.
Thank you. As someone who loves multiplayer games, I like that I have had a lot of options lately. But, this whole "live service" crap needs to die. Sell me a game and then go away. If you want to release an expansion and sell me that, great, I'll take a look. But, quit trying to sell me a subscription.
Like anything else, live service does have a place in gaming but it absolutely does not need to be forced into everything.
I am really enjoying Helldivers 2 and it is a live service that is doing a great job of avoiding the FOMO aspect of most live service games while providing the benefits of a worldwide, changing campaign that has content added slowly over time to encourage continued engagement. It also offers daily challenges, but also rewards everyone for group efforts so it doesn't punish for not playing every day.
The recently did an oopsie by going too high with the in game price on the collab with Killzone that would be the road to being predatory, but they listed to the response and handled it well enough. Sadly, this is the exception and not the rule.
It really is ridiculous to reference bungie in that article, they had arguably the biggest online multiplayer games with 2 and 3. And halo 1 had to be up there with LAN games at the time.
Maybe it was just bad autocorrect and they meant single payer.