It's such a shite game that only the most desperate Crash Bandicoot fans eat it up The ones with actual standards see it's just your typical shit MOBA game wearing Crash's skin
ross scott has said the best, "any game that requires you to connect to a central server, is on life support" whenever the company decides to pull that pluck that game dies. so remember, live service is a death sentence.
And here we are having Games existing for 10+ years as "live services" being actual more old school MMO's still being somewhat fun and people playing them. It isn't about the servers, it's about not selling an unfinished mess and then promissing to fix it later down the line and calling that "more content".
My 1997 CD copy of TotalAnnihilation is still fun 25+ years later? I think it's totally fine to enjoy these live service games. But they will absolutely never outlive any game that is offline and can be installed/played at any time. Even the shittiest broken mess like Big Rigs outlives many of these online-only games. Is it going to be fun 25 years later? That's subjective, but at least I can play it.
Unless you beg the 'Doctors' to not pull the plug, and give them all of your money out of desperation to just keep your loved one alive.... I realise this comment has literally become about American health care, but its metaphorical relationship to gaming still stands. Actually, the similarities between the two are suspiciously numerous, come to think about it......
At seeing the title of this video I thought Ross's campaign might have been the topic, especially since he mentioned the possibility of reaching out to Stephanie for help in calling attention to the issue
@@nobodyinparticular9640 It would encourage publishers to either actually support their live services, or force them to stop making them, either would be an improvement over the current state of affairs.
I would love to see what the ET equivalent to our modern crash would be. The game that is bad but got all the blame for the companies favoring product over art
"Crash" applies when the market drops as people stop playing games altogether, which is far from happening. This is more like the bloat finally deflating (and farting out the ones who should be staying instead of the shit at the top).
Reminds me of a concept they explored in Leverage(A TV show on tnt) where they took down a CEO that jumps from company to company. One of the crew brings up to the ceo about the huge fines the company could face the way he is running it. He replied with(paraphrased) " You know [insert another company name here] was in the news for paying 2 billion dollars in fines last years for selling a dangerous product. What the news doesn't tell you is that same company made 20 billion dollars on that product. 10% of the profits went to fines, that's like... Tipping your waiter."
Yup! The fossil fuel industry has been running on that exact model for decades. Sadly however many fines aren't even collected or are lowered through litigation and/or regulatory capture.
Many companies quite literally factor in government fines and even lawsuit settlements when calculating profits for a product they’re planning to release. Even that’s from Leverage. It’s a very surreal show in how realistic it tries to be
It's worth remembering that Fortnite took a while and a new game mode to actually become popular. If it was trashed at the first sign of failure, it would not have gotten the battle royale mode and it would have been totally forgotten as a failed zombie horde mode game.
@@mitrovarr This is the key point, they actively refuse to let anything grow naturally. Either it becomes a smash hit bigger than anything, or it's cancelled.
I'm slightly amusing that the game used as background when Steph was talking about failed Final Fantasy projects was XIV, the one thing that's doing good, exactly because its team refuses to fuck with fads and gold rushes
I was going to say the say thing. I don't play it anymore, but XIV has been the exception to that rule for years, so it shouldn't have been included, even if just to reference SQEX as a whole.
@@nobodyinparticular9640 Yeah but that's kinda irrelevant. It was remade over a decade ago, and the pic accompanying the comment is ARR (the remade game) and all its expansions to date. The game that "initially crashed and burned" wasn't represented, and what was shown instead was, as the original comment suggested, mildly amusing.
@@nobodyinparticular9640I was there at the time and oh my gosh it was so awful. Imagine being on the same server as your party, in the same location, but for some reason, you can't find them nor can they find you. But then they remade it and it got great! I miss playing FF14.
I had the same thought; FFXIV is doing just fine. I’ve been playing for 10 years, since 2.2, and I’m already getting psyched for 7.0. OTOH, I’m still mad about them killing off Record Keeper outside of Japan.
@@nobodyinparticular9640 for real tho, even tho I still have a perfectly fine working ps1, I still emulate because I can run games at WAYYYY higher resolutions - I think ps1 is like at most 480i? Plus it's not easy to get CRT monitors anymore, and ps1 at base resolution looks like absolute crap on a modern unmasked screen
@@Iruparazzoyeah, emulating older games is just more convenient than setting up the actual consoles. For the latter, you need like CRT to HDMI converters and the space for all the consoles you want to hook up. And guess for those that say want a more accurate experience by playing on the actual consoles, you can set up emulators to play identically as the console itself, in terms of graphics and the like, y'know.
The games suddenly being much better balanced after they shut down reminds me of the old "if you don't like the micro-transactions, don't buy them" videos Surprise, surprise! The monetisation was always making the game worse, even if you don't engage! By choosing to make a game a live service, you're always making a worse game
Part of me laments that my favorite Naughty Dog games are the Jak and Daxter games which has not seen new material in more than a decade... and then I think about it and thank goodness their series was never popular enough to get the Live Service Cash Grab Treatment.
Frankly, I no longer care about fighting all the countless fires that will pop up in the gaming and games industry anymore. I've focused attention on: Getting getting rid of the fire starters - shareholders & their economic system.
"Good" I immediately think before realising those games you bought to play are no longer playable because companies didn't bother to legacy them into an offline single player mode. Btw, Crash Team Rumble is being shuttered after less than a year, and they're still selling it. I think companies should refund games that they sell you and then axe months in.
Gosh how many games have we lost like this? Like any live service or mobile gacha could go down at any time and there's no way to play them. Hopefully we get a proper offline version of NieR Reincarnation
@@lolozo214 it's going down already? I swear it just came out.. Then again, if this game and the Love Live live service game are anything to go by, they don't really need to be up for long before they're struck down. That, and three years is considered long-lived in live service years
It's easy to believe that at least some of these live service games are being set up specifically with failure in mind when you consider that there are movie studios that have made film crews and editors complete movies that the executives had zero intention of ever releasing because they calculated that the expected box office return would make them less money than just padding the production budget and then canceling the release and writing the whole thing off as a massive loss in their tax returns. And, oh look, one of those movie studios is Warner Brothers, which just so happens to also have a game studio that's publishing live service games. I think when the publisher is running the live service as a grift, the plan is to basically release it, squeeze as much money as they can from the whales in as short amount of time as possible, shut down the service as soon as it starts flagging, write off the production and operating costs of the service as losses, then fire all of the staff who was working on it and sell shutting down the game to the shareholders as reducing payroll and operational overhead in order to pump the stock valuation. Some of them have probably even calculated that they could make more money with one of the failed fly-by-night live services than they could from actually making another Fortnite, because actually providing the service long term means you have to keep paying staff to maintain it and server infrastructure to run it.
The thing is, tanking a movie is drawing on specific carve outs in the law made for the film industry largely in exchange for them cranking out a couple decades of shameless WWII propaganda. All industries can gain tax relief for failures, but only limited on the taxes they would pay on the income they spent (which they're already dodging but so are the film studios). Only movies can potentially get relief exceeding the loss itself, to the extent that a 100% loss is more profitable than the 10-20% loss of releasing a flop.
I guess this is a serious matter of opinion. Cause I haven't watched one of their videos in at least a year and got news no different. I'm back on this channel to see if I can enjoy the content again. Lol but it's definitely a matter of preference. Lol
“The more I look at the live service market, the more I feel failure is a part of the business model.” Bingo. tax write-offs, son. The games industry is a casino where the big rollers are basically playing on free credits because all of their losses are made back and more via tax loopholes and intentionally bloated sales estimates which is why they always like to spout that games “Failed to meet expectations” so they can “””credibly””” write even successful games off as failures. It’s an infinite money glitch for them, and a colossal drain on tax dollars for everyone else.
@4:26. The irony of using a picture of Final Fantasy XIV, the live service game that almost single-handedly kept Square alive for years, being used to represent all the failed live service games they've released.
"Squib" is the movie industry term for the special effects that mimic a person getting shot. They're little devices usually taped to the actor's costume. The blood and apparent tearing of flesh you see in a film or TV show when a person is hit is the squib being detonated by a special effects engineer somewhere off-screen.
That report about 500 studios working on live services, it's worth pointing out, was commissioned by VC companies with a vested interest in making GAAS look as profitable as possible and essentially frames any game receiving updates as a live service. That would, for example include Baldur's Gate 3. Not to deny that there is far too much of what Steph is referring to, because yes, if you can't count them on one hand, that is still far too many, but it's more to just to point out the source of that news is highly propagandised to appeal to corporate shareholders and their imaginary monopoly money.
That always bothered me as a kid reading the books, like squibs are treated terribly and no one ever stops to think that that should be changed - not even in a really crappy plotline like the house elf slavery, everyone just accepts it. Makes me want to read a story about a squib trying to change the super prejudiced wizarding society now
@@grumpysphinx4911 In a typical conservative fashion, her stories are really about keeping the status quo and reacting to any challenges. A person's situation can improve but that's it, and the people who want any systematic change are either misinformed or villains. That's why Harry saves an elf from abusive slavery yet later owns and keeps an elf himself. He and his friends become powerful but have no desire to outlaw slavery or even just the abuse of slaves.
The annoying thing about this is than in other languages that word is completely untranslated. At least in Latin American Spanish it remains the same. And until this video I could only connect that word to Harry Potter and JKR. I thought it was made up for the books. So I thank this video in fact for being able to take that word away and know its true origin, and another, funnier definition. I'll have a weird squid or a damp firework any day in contrast to anything JKR related,
That is the problem. When one of these things is a hit, it makes so much money compared to its cost that companies don't care if reality means most will fail. The funny thing is that they rely on you getting invested in something that can be taken away at a moment's notice. I keep thinking about how this is just the MMO gold rush all over again, and how the industry doesn't learn. They looked at WOW and wanted that recurring monthly revenue, even though most would fail to catch on, or would close as people went back to something they already played. And that was 20 years ago.
And just think, if Activision had given Toys for Bob another real Crash or Spyro game to work on, they might not have bolted for the door and fled as far and as fast as possible.
Oh, I absolutely know the feeling of observing some random aspect of modern language, culture or society, and going "Why. The _fuck._ Is this anywhere _near_ a thing?! Are there only a few dozen people on this planet with working brains, or am I losing my mind? Or something in between?!" (It's something in between, I know, but yeah. It does get incredibly infuriating and frustrating in places, how little people care about things they should care about... and also about things I'm just being pedantic about.)
*Socialize* the games industry. Transition to independent studios. The company and workers will own and control their work and eventually both get most of the earnings.
I am starting to wonder if these games almost designed to suck as much money as possible then fail are being used for tax scumminess. WB cancelled fully finished films as tax writeoffs where they earn more not releasing it then releasing it. Could this be similar? I wonder if these games, made super cheaply, suck a bit of money, then shut it down let's them put that as a big loss on their taxes and end up making even more money. Like you said. They HAVE to know these games are going to fail...
I had a similar thought...intentional failure as a vehicle to lessen overall tax burden seems highly probable. May also explain some of the seemingly insane 'development costs' that publishers have been yapping about for a while now....Game 'fails' but it 'cost soooo much to make' 😏
The live service that ALWAYS makes me a chuckle is Marvel Snap. I see ads often that proclaim "YOU CANT JUST PAY TO WIN IN THIS GAME". Which makes me go - "okay but you can DEFINITELY pay so it's pay to still lose?"
Help me to advocate for a truth in advertising bill to legally require video games to display pricing on the cover that represents the true cost of the game plus every single piece of DLC and purchasable addon. Consumers should be seeing the real price of the games they buy.
Oh that would be perfect! So many games would look insanely expensive then. The Sims 4 would go from being free to play to being over $1000 of DLC, for example.
Full disclosure: I have only a passing interest in the gaming world and find its social & political realities depressing (don't think I'm alone in that). BUT I love listening to you talk about it. This is poetry 😁
Whenever I heard the word "squib" I think of "Baman Piderman" and fondly remember the days when animators could make a living off of RUclips. I'm glad you took a moment to tackle this subject. As for this "live service" games, it seems the strategy to enjoying them is not play them, and wait out the Publisher/Developer deciding it's not making enough money, and therefor removing the crappy monetization elements, thereby leaving us a better game. Or the game shuts down and dies. But hey, collateral damage is a shame, but hey, it happens.
There's something oddly poetic about JSS just ending the video after petering out at the end there. Maybe I'm just reading into it a bit more than I should, but it's like a mirror held up to the way live services also just don't seem to last, no matter how much you want them to, no matter if there's more to be said. Big "if" on the part of live services, but the point still stands. Ironically, these games would mean more and last longer if they weren't charging money to do so.
interestingly a lot of aaa failed live services were games for which you expect single player campaigns; suicide squad, gotham knights, avengers etc. the successful games are the one sthat have a clear multiplayer structure and are not part of a singel player ip like fortnite, apex, ark, roblox and even helldivers. the big mutated exception is destiny 2 which limbs along
As a lifelong lover of the Crash games I didn't even know Rumble existed, how tf do they expect to make a profit if they forget to advertise their expensive product?! I'm glad to see Toys for Bob break free, they did a good job of making the recent (non-live) Crash games, and it'll be cool to see what might come of them! Plus now we can hopefully do this without the stink of an abusive company too
rumble had very little to no promotion, it was announced at the game awards, went radio silent, then it had a trailer at summer gammes fest, then it released with a few trailers on their yt channel it was that bad that some ppl didnt even know what the game was going to be like
I usually put these videos on and toss my phone in my pocket to listen along at work, and without visuals, the intro joke felt like it was going in a completely different place
I think the idea behind damp squibs is that a squib is already a pretty pitiful explosive, so a damp one would just be another level of pathetic This is my offering to the algorithm 🙏
The whole point of these games is to be thrown off a cliff in the hopes some people dive in after it, letting the studio climb down and pick the pockets of the now dead fools.
I felt so smart about this for the longest time. There's Warframe, sure, but I've learned to moderate my spending there, and even if it ended next week, that's a *lot* of return on investment. But then came Dissidia Opera Omnia. And that 'heartbreak' analogy was suddenly very apt. Sure, it was a fanfiction-ass game. But it was also being written and designed by people who actually loved the material. Who used the opportunity to do things like giving characters who didn't make it a second chance to talk to loved ones. The opportunity to come to terms with what happened to them. It was beautiful. It was just also part of a game that charged 30 to 70 dollars US for alternate skins. Can't imagine why they didn't pull the numbers they wanted. It's not just that Squenix is overcommitted to the live service genre. They're also astonishingly bad at it.
Yeah...DOO did some interesting stuff storywise, but I didn't sink a damned dollar into it, because a bunch of pixels in the form of clothes just wasn't worth it to me.
I was hoping somebody would mention Warframe! It's not like DE has never made any scummy moves, and Waframe's very much a grindy game (though there's something about its grind that doesn't turn me off even though normally I have very little patience for grindy games), but I don't know any other live service game that would be so brimming with content while being honestly free. Like, sure, you can spend a ton of money on Warframe, but it's almost always either purely cosmetic stuff or stuff that you can earn in the game. Hell, I can't think of any other game that would give its players ways of earning premium currency without spending real money on it.
Good video. Though it was slightly funny at 4:30 hearing the line about going over SE's disastrous live services of late....while showing FFXIV in the background, a pretty well received MMO that's still going strong and is is heading into its fifth expansion. Well received from its 2.0 revival onward anyway. Kind of sad to see the company that apologized for FF 14 1.0 and rebuilt the game to make it better rather than cut their losses and run, now making all these live services they don't plan to support.
It's baffling that so many of these live service games are looter shooters as if the publishers don't understand people aren't magically going to have time for more of the genre that even as an offline experience demands a lot of time when they're probably already playing Destiny or one of the other few successful ones. You'd think that by now someone would realize that WAY more effort needs to be put into the development of these games for them to even have a chance to stick. I get that goal is just get in, get as much money as possible, then get out, but with how quickly a lot of these games are dying, are they even achieving the base goal of making money in the first place? I can't imagine many of them are even doing better than breaking even.
Side note on Squibs: If you're in the Firearms community, you will hear that word in another context. It's a bullet that doesn't have enough pressure behind it to leave the barrel, so it gets stuck in there and requires a gunsmith to get out. Probably a holdover from the days of black powder and paper cartridges to be honest where that could be caused by wet powder, but these days it's caused by anything that results in an overly low pressure cartridge. I'm reminded of the Hi-point customer who suffered 36 squibs IN A ROW and sent back a barrel stuffed with 9mm rounds because his gun "went bang, but nothing came out". Hi-Point was befuddled.
I was watching Sting's Last Match with my dad last night and I was talking about how Commander Sterling is one of my favorite wrestlers and it's been great to watch you come up and develop as a wrestler.
What baffles me about Square Enix is they already HAVE their wildly successful live service. Final Fantasy XIV is one of the most successful MMOs in existence. Millions of people giving them $15/mo and buying expansions and merch, the cash shop that only exists because players begged for one to buy cosmetics and account services in its early days. Squenix has done what every company in the mid-late 2000's dreamed of - they got their own World of Warcraft. And yet that's just not enough for them, they still sink all this money on "services" that get shut down within months when they already have their golden goose. It's insane.
Squibs are also the little explosives that imitate bullet impacts in movies (on scenery or on actors) as well as ammunition that fails to fully ignite, leaving the bullet stuck in the barrel.
Game dev Mike Bithell talked about the recent layoffs and actually referenced the quote "Companies don't just want a ton of money, they want ALL the money"
Reminds me of how the animal crossing mobile game that is full of microtransactions has been regularly updated for 7 years but the 80 dollar game in switch got one dlc and then stopped being updated 3 years after launch
Hypotthetically, even if you removed all the bad and negative stuff in liiive service games, that would be the factor to turn me away from them. You basically have to dedicate all your free time to them to get the best from them.
Oh huh, I didn't know Toys for Bob had been consumed by AB. Good that they're getting back on their own. (They were the authors of Star Control and Star Control 2)
I didn't know "squib" was a word for firework, I always thought it was what they used in movies to make it look like blood is spraying out of you after you've been shot. That's the only context in which I've heard such a word.
Squib is also a name for a firearm cartridge that goes off but has insufficient powder burned for the bullet to leave the barrel, resulting in a dangerous barrel obstruction.
A squib is an intentionally short kickoff in american football with the goal to meet the minimum requirement for yards traveled on the kick, but keep it so close to the kickoff team that they might be able to dive on it and regain possession. It is often performed by kicking the top of the oblong football to make it tumble around unpredictably, making it hard for the receiving team to catch. I don't remember if the receiving team has to touch the ball first, to turn the kickoff into a live ball, or if there is no need to simulate a "fumble" for possession change.
Bobby Kottick reference is dated now, Steph. He left in december. Activision is perfectly capable of being exceptionally evil without him - you give him too much "credit" - he was one cog in a monstrous evil machine.
I genuinely appreciated that jab at the "Cait Sith" debacle that cropped up. How I pronounce the name will ultimately never matter because 1) I'll never have a reason to *speak* it verbally around people, and 2) it's all just text among us otherwise anyways.
I spent the whole video waiting for Steph to rememebr how to pronounce Cait Sith and had to look it up: The Celtic mythical creature Cait Sith is pronounced Ket She or Kit She depending on dialect. This is fairly close to the Japanese game's Kitto Shi, and makes sense considering the character was given a Scottish voice. According to a post in Octover 2023 from the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth official twitter account, however, it IS meant to be Kate Sith in the English game. Which conflicts with all the other facts but in fact fits perfectly with the fact that Japanese RPGs have been bastardizing mythologies the world over for decades.
💀 I didn't even realize Crash Team Rumble CAME OUT.
I never even heard about that game until another channel spoke about it.
I was just about to say the same thing. Never heard of it.
This is the first I'd heard of it
Hope it's parents took the news well 😁
It's such a shite game that only the most desperate Crash Bandicoot fans eat it up
The ones with actual standards see it's just your typical shit MOBA game wearing Crash's skin
I'm learning about live service games being discontinued at the same time i learn about their existence
We did it
We have invented
Dead Service games
Same
same. this is always so weird
ross scott has said the best, "any game that requires you to connect to a central server, is on life support" whenever the company decides to pull that pluck that game dies. so remember, live service is a death sentence.
And here we are having Games existing for 10+ years as "live services" being actual more old school MMO's still being somewhat fun and people playing them. It isn't about the servers, it's about not selling an unfinished mess and then promissing to fix it later down the line and calling that "more content".
My 1997 CD copy of TotalAnnihilation is still fun 25+ years later? I think it's totally fine to enjoy these live service games. But they will absolutely never outlive any game that is offline and can be installed/played at any time. Even the shittiest broken mess like Big Rigs outlives many of these online-only games.
Is it going to be fun 25 years later? That's subjective, but at least I can play it.
Unless you beg the 'Doctors' to not pull the plug, and give them all of your money out of desperation to just keep your loved one alive....
I realise this comment has literally become about American health care, but its metaphorical relationship to gaming still stands.
Actually, the similarities between the two are suspiciously numerous, come to think about it......
Shout out to Ross Scott for trying his hardest to prevent live service games being shut down through a legal precedent. Also, thank God for JSS.
Accursed Farms is the shit!!!
At seeing the title of this video I thought Ross's campaign might have been the topic, especially since he mentioned the possibility of reaching out to Stephanie for help in calling attention to the issue
Do most, ugh, "live service" games even deserve to continue exist tho?
The majority of them are just utter shite.
@@nobodyinparticular9640 It would encourage publishers to either actually support their live services, or force them to stop making them, either would be an improvement over the current state of affairs.
Would LOVE to see the Jimquisition cover Ross's project. It seems like a match made in heaven tbh
"Why is there a crash in the games industry" well 500 live services are being made
No shit, right? It's like they're _trying_ to re-crash the industry.
It's all that bandicoots fault we swear!
I would love to see what the ET equivalent to our modern crash would be. The game that is bad but got all the blame for the companies favoring product over art
I'm actually shocked that number isn't higher
"Crash" applies when the market drops as people stop playing games altogether, which is far from happening. This is more like the bloat finally deflating (and farting out the ones who should be staying instead of the shit at the top).
Reminds me of a concept they explored in Leverage(A TV show on tnt) where they took down a CEO that jumps from company to company. One of the crew brings up to the ceo about the huge fines the company could face the way he is running it. He replied with(paraphrased) " You know [insert another company name here] was in the news for paying 2 billion dollars in fines last years for selling a dangerous product. What the news doesn't tell you is that same company made 20 billion dollars on that product. 10% of the profits went to fines, that's like... Tipping your waiter."
Yup! The fossil fuel industry has been running on that exact model for decades. Sadly however many fines aren't even collected or are lowered through litigation and/or regulatory capture.
Many companies quite literally factor in government fines and even lawsuit settlements when calculating profits for a product they’re planning to release. Even that’s from Leverage. It’s a very surreal show in how realistic it tries to be
Steps for success:
1) Make a Fortnite
2) Discover that your Fortnite isn't as popular as Fortnite after 3 weeks
3) Cancel your Fortnite
4) Repeat
But if your fortnite does become THE fortnite, you get a billion billion dollars
Might as well head to the casino and spin the roulette a few times
@@0Gumpy0 Fortnite is still the fortnite. You have no chance, it's like buying an NFT.
It's worth remembering that Fortnite took a while and a new game mode to actually become popular. If it was trashed at the first sign of failure, it would not have gotten the battle royale mode and it would have been totally forgotten as a failed zombie horde mode game.
@@mitrovarr This is the key point, they actively refuse to let anything grow naturally. Either it becomes a smash hit bigger than anything, or it's cancelled.
The irony that the roughly 4 minute mark verifies that, least insofar as making the game fun.
Too bad "make the game fun" isn't the main goal, eh...?
By putting Cait Sith on top of the eyeballs, you just made it look like he has massive balls.
's at least somewhat on-brand
Unintended, surely.
Lore accurate
new tanuki just dropped
Huh, didn't know he was part tanuki.
I'm slightly amusing that the game used as background when Steph was talking about failed Final Fantasy projects was XIV, the one thing that's doing good, exactly because its team refuses to fuck with fads and gold rushes
I was going to say the say thing. I don't play it anymore, but XIV has been the exception to that rule for years, so it shouldn't have been included, even if just to reference SQEX as a whole.
FF14 did initially crash and burn, y'know
It's only after the game was like remade from the ground up that it got massively successful
@@nobodyinparticular9640 Yeah but that's kinda irrelevant. It was remade over a decade ago, and the pic accompanying the comment is ARR (the remade game) and all its expansions to date. The game that "initially crashed and burned" wasn't represented, and what was shown instead was, as the original comment suggested, mildly amusing.
@@nobodyinparticular9640I was there at the time and oh my gosh it was so awful. Imagine being on the same server as your party, in the same location, but for some reason, you can't find them nor can they find you.
But then they remade it and it got great! I miss playing FF14.
I had the same thought; FFXIV is doing just fine. I’ve been playing for 10 years, since 2.2, and I’m already getting psyched for 7.0. OTOH, I’m still mad about them killing off Record Keeper outside of Japan.
Meanwhile, I'm still able to play Crash Bandicoot on PS1, nearly 28 years later....
Im playing zelda majora’s mask on my n64 26 years later and it still works perfectly
I imagine my PS1 still works fine to this day, but the PS1 emulator in my PC just works better, lol
@@nobodyinparticular9640 for real tho, even tho I still have a perfectly fine working ps1, I still emulate because I can run games at WAYYYY higher resolutions - I think ps1 is like at most 480i? Plus it's not easy to get CRT monitors anymore, and ps1 at base resolution looks like absolute crap on a modern unmasked screen
@@Iruparazzoyeah, emulating older games is just more convenient than setting up the actual consoles. For the latter, you need like CRT to HDMI converters and the space for all the consoles you want to hook up.
And guess for those that say want a more accurate experience by playing on the actual consoles, you can set up emulators to play identically as the console itself, in terms of graphics and the like, y'know.
@@klisterklister2367Hope you didn't use the joystick enough for it to get wobbly...
As multiple villains in Yugioh have famously said, multiple times:
"What a digital dummy!"
[Actual 4kids dialog.]
The games suddenly being much better balanced after they shut down reminds me of the old "if you don't like the micro-transactions, don't buy them" videos
Surprise, surprise! The monetisation was always making the game worse, even if you don't engage!
By choosing to make a game a live service, you're always making a worse game
Part of me laments that my favorite Naughty Dog games are the Jak and Daxter games which has not seen new material in more than a decade... and then I think about it and thank goodness their series was never popular enough to get the Live Service Cash Grab Treatment.
Frankly, I no longer care about fighting all the countless fires that will pop up in the gaming and games industry anymore. I've focused attention on:
Getting getting rid of the fire starters - shareholders & their economic system.
Based
"Good" I immediately think before realising those games you bought to play are no longer playable because companies didn't bother to legacy them into an offline single player mode. Btw, Crash Team Rumble is being shuttered after less than a year, and they're still selling it. I think companies should refund games that they sell you and then axe months in.
Gosh how many games have we lost like this? Like any live service or mobile gacha could go down at any time and there's no way to play them.
Hopefully we get a proper offline version of NieR Reincarnation
Remember overwatch 1?
Infinite Crisis, my beloved
@@lolozo214 it's going down already? I swear it just came out.. Then again, if this game and the Love Live live service game are anything to go by, they don't really need to be up for long before they're struck down. That, and three years is considered long-lived in live service years
Moral of the story, if a Live Service game is released, ignore it.
It's easy to believe that at least some of these live service games are being set up specifically with failure in mind when you consider that there are movie studios that have made film crews and editors complete movies that the executives had zero intention of ever releasing because they calculated that the expected box office return would make them less money than just padding the production budget and then canceling the release and writing the whole thing off as a massive loss in their tax returns. And, oh look, one of those movie studios is Warner Brothers, which just so happens to also have a game studio that's publishing live service games.
I think when the publisher is running the live service as a grift, the plan is to basically release it, squeeze as much money as they can from the whales in as short amount of time as possible, shut down the service as soon as it starts flagging, write off the production and operating costs of the service as losses, then fire all of the staff who was working on it and sell shutting down the game to the shareholders as reducing payroll and operational overhead in order to pump the stock valuation. Some of them have probably even calculated that they could make more money with one of the failed fly-by-night live services than they could from actually making another Fortnite, because actually providing the service long term means you have to keep paying staff to maintain it and server infrastructure to run it.
The thing is, tanking a movie is drawing on specific carve outs in the law made for the film industry largely in exchange for them cranking out a couple decades of shameless WWII propaganda. All industries can gain tax relief for failures, but only limited on the taxes they would pay on the income they spent (which they're already dodging but so are the film studios). Only movies can potentially get relief exceeding the loss itself, to the extent that a 100% loss is more profitable than the 10-20% loss of releasing a flop.
jesus christ this is the only channel with tolerable games journalism thank god for you steph
Agreed, but also shout out to Jack Sather.
AccursedFarms (AKA Ross Scott) is another one that is fantastic. He also does other highly entertaining series.
So true 😢 .... Sad as that is 😊
I guess this is a serious matter of opinion. Cause I haven't watched one of their videos in at least a year and got news no different. I'm back on this channel to see if I can enjoy the content again. Lol but it's definitely a matter of preference. Lol
@@vkermodekumav8949 yeah, people who say "this is good" or "this is bad" are in fact stating their opinion lmao..
“The more I look at the live service market, the more I feel failure is a part of the business model.”
Bingo. tax write-offs, son. The games industry is a casino where the big rollers are basically playing on free credits because all of their losses are made back and more via tax loopholes and intentionally bloated sales estimates which is why they always like to spout that games “Failed to meet expectations” so they can “””credibly””” write even successful games off as failures. It’s an infinite money glitch for them, and a colossal drain on tax dollars for everyone else.
It's always tax loopholes and money laundering. Same with Hollywood.
@4:26. The irony of using a picture of Final Fantasy XIV, the live service game that almost single-handedly kept Square alive for years, being used to represent all the failed live service games they've released.
The "basic Lee" joke was perhaps the single greatest visual gag of any video you've made this year! Well done!
"Squib" is the movie industry term for the special effects that mimic a person getting shot. They're little devices usually taped to the actor's costume. The blood and apparent tearing of flesh you see in a film or TV show when a person is hit is the squib being detonated by a special effects engineer somewhere off-screen.
That report about 500 studios working on live services, it's worth pointing out, was commissioned by VC companies with a vested interest in making GAAS look as profitable as possible and essentially frames any game receiving updates as a live service. That would, for example include Baldur's Gate 3. Not to deny that there is far too much of what Steph is referring to, because yes, if you can't count them on one hand, that is still far too many, but it's more to just to point out the source of that news is highly propagandised to appeal to corporate shareholders and their imaginary monopoly money.
dang ffxiv catching strays, and thats the only square enix life service they actually fixed and are still making content for.
> Live Services Are Being Sent To Die
Thank the all mighty.
Not die! They... uh... are being sent to live on a farm upstate, honest.
@@JustAnotherLawyerWhere they charge each piece of grass rent.
Still feel bad they aren't preserved in some form.
they didnt mean they will stop making them, only that the games are made with their death in mind, so they can launch another one right after
@@devforfun5618 Shit. orz
A squib is also the slur JKR decided to use for kids that can't use magic that have wizard parents. Basically meaning those kids are defective
That always bothered me as a kid reading the books, like squibs are treated terribly and no one ever stops to think that that should be changed - not even in a really crappy plotline like the house elf slavery, everyone just accepts it. Makes me want to read a story about a squib trying to change the super prejudiced wizarding society now
I heard squib and thought of a misfired firearms cartridge.
@@grumpysphinx4911 In a typical conservative fashion, her stories are really about keeping the status quo and reacting to any challenges. A person's situation can improve but that's it, and the people who want any systematic change are either misinformed or villains. That's why Harry saves an elf from abusive slavery yet later owns and keeps an elf himself. He and his friends become powerful but have no desire to outlaw slavery or even just the abuse of slaves.
The annoying thing about this is than in other languages that word is completely untranslated. At least in Latin American Spanish it remains the same. And until this video I could only connect that word to Harry Potter and JKR. I thought it was made up for the books.
So I thank this video in fact for being able to take that word away and know its true origin, and another, funnier definition. I'll have a weird squid or a damp firework any day in contrast to anything JKR related,
wait, you telling me, an organization, that has centuries and barely moved an inch, discriminates on those who are lesser than them? say it aint so...
"Live Services Are Being Sent to Die"
And nothing of value was lost.
That is the problem. When one of these things is a hit, it makes so much money compared to its cost that companies don't care if reality means most will fail.
The funny thing is that they rely on you getting invested in something that can be taken away at a moment's notice.
I keep thinking about how this is just the MMO gold rush all over again, and how the industry doesn't learn. They looked at WOW and wanted that recurring monthly revenue, even though most would fail to catch on, or would close as people went back to something they already played. And that was 20 years ago.
Up next on my recommended list: "Why the PS3 is everyone's new favourite system".
And just think, if Activision had given Toys for Bob another real Crash or Spyro game to work on, they might not have bolted for the door and fled as far and as fast as possible.
No other content goes off the rails into random song/adhd/'tisim dumps like a Jimquisition video.
Makes me and my mental health feel 'seen'.
Oh, I absolutely know the feeling of observing some random aspect of modern language, culture or society, and going "Why. The _fuck._ Is this anywhere _near_ a thing?! Are there only a few dozen people on this planet with working brains, or am I losing my mind? Or something in between?!" (It's something in between, I know, but yeah. It does get incredibly infuriating and frustrating in places, how little people care about things they should care about... and also about things I'm just being pedantic about.)
*Socialize* the games industry.
Transition to independent studios. The company and workers will own and control their work and eventually both get most of the earnings.
I am starting to wonder if these games almost designed to suck as much money as possible then fail are being used for tax scumminess.
WB cancelled fully finished films as tax writeoffs where they earn more not releasing it then releasing it. Could this be similar?
I wonder if these games, made super cheaply, suck a bit of money, then shut it down let's them put that as a big loss on their taxes and end up making even more money.
Like you said. They HAVE to know these games are going to fail...
I had a similar thought...intentional failure as a vehicle to lessen overall tax burden seems highly probable.
May also explain some of the seemingly insane 'development costs' that publishers have been yapping about for a while now....Game 'fails' but it 'cost soooo much to make' 😏
Get ready to talk about Foamstars in 6 months too lol
I never even heard of Crash Team Rumble.
The live service that ALWAYS makes me a chuckle is Marvel Snap. I see ads often that proclaim "YOU CANT JUST PAY TO WIN IN THIS GAME". Which makes me go - "okay but you can DEFINITELY pay so it's pay to still lose?"
I've been playing it for ages and just uninstalled last night. It has certainly become more stingy over time!
With the way I play, it's pay to lose.
Help me to advocate for a truth in advertising bill to legally require video games to display pricing on the cover that represents the true cost of the game plus every single piece of DLC and purchasable addon. Consumers should be seeing the real price of the games they buy.
Oh that would be perfect! So many games would look insanely expensive then. The Sims 4 would go from being free to play to being over $1000 of DLC, for example.
Full disclosure: I have only a passing interest in the gaming world and find its social & political realities depressing (don't think I'm alone in that). BUT I love listening to you talk about it. This is poetry 😁
The musical interludes just keep getting better 😂
Whenever I heard the word "squib" I think of "Baman Piderman" and fondly remember the days when animators could make a living off of RUclips.
I'm glad you took a moment to tackle this subject.
As for this "live service" games, it seems the strategy to enjoying them is not play them, and wait out the Publisher/Developer deciding it's not making enough money, and therefor removing the crappy monetization elements, thereby leaving us a better game. Or the game shuts down and dies. But hey, collateral damage is a shame, but hey, it happens.
There's something oddly poetic about JSS just ending the video after petering out at the end there. Maybe I'm just reading into it a bit more than I should, but it's like a mirror held up to the way live services also just don't seem to last, no matter how much you want them to, no matter if there's more to be said. Big "if" on the part of live services, but the point still stands.
Ironically, these games would mean more and last longer if they weren't charging money to do so.
interestingly a lot of aaa failed live services were games for which you expect single player campaigns; suicide squad, gotham knights, avengers etc. the successful games are the one sthat have a clear multiplayer structure and are not part of a singel player ip like fortnite, apex, ark, roblox and even helldivers. the big mutated exception is destiny 2 which limbs along
As a lifelong lover of the Crash games I didn't even know Rumble existed, how tf do they expect to make a profit if they forget to advertise their expensive product?!
I'm glad to see Toys for Bob break free, they did a good job of making the recent (non-live) Crash games, and it'll be cool to see what might come of them! Plus now we can hopefully do this without the stink of an abusive company too
I only knew about it by a tie-in toy from McDonald's.
rumble had very little to no promotion, it was announced at the game awards, went radio silent, then it had a trailer at summer gammes fest, then it released with a few trailers on their yt channel
it was that bad that some ppl didnt even know what the game was going to be like
I usually put these videos on and toss my phone in my pocket to listen along at work, and without visuals, the intro joke felt like it was going in a completely different place
I just started showing my daughter Trapdoor! Fantastic!
I just wanna give that squid a hug. He looks like he could use one.
Today Steph taught me that the phrase "panning out" came from prospectors in the gold rush! You're a good writer, you are!
I think the idea behind damp squibs is that a squib is already a pretty pitiful explosive, so a damp one would just be another level of pathetic
This is my offering to the algorithm 🙏
The substitute moogle was a brilliant idea
The whole point of these games is to be thrown off a cliff in the hopes some people dive in after it, letting the studio climb down and pick the pockets of the now dead fools.
Live services are dying, while Stephanie is thriving.
I felt so smart about this for the longest time. There's Warframe, sure, but I've learned to moderate my spending there, and even if it ended next week, that's a *lot* of return on investment.
But then came Dissidia Opera Omnia. And that 'heartbreak' analogy was suddenly very apt.
Sure, it was a fanfiction-ass game. But it was also being written and designed by people who actually loved the material. Who used the opportunity to do things like giving characters who didn't make it a second chance to talk to loved ones. The opportunity to come to terms with what happened to them.
It was beautiful. It was just also part of a game that charged 30 to 70 dollars US for alternate skins. Can't imagine why they didn't pull the numbers they wanted.
It's not just that Squenix is overcommitted to the live service genre. They're also astonishingly bad at it.
Yeah...DOO did some interesting stuff storywise, but I didn't sink a damned dollar into it, because a bunch of pixels in the form of clothes just wasn't worth it to me.
I was hoping somebody would mention Warframe! It's not like DE has never made any scummy moves, and Waframe's very much a grindy game (though there's something about its grind that doesn't turn me off even though normally I have very little patience for grindy games), but I don't know any other live service game that would be so brimming with content while being honestly free. Like, sure, you can spend a ton of money on Warframe, but it's almost always either purely cosmetic stuff or stuff that you can earn in the game. Hell, I can't think of any other game that would give its players ways of earning premium currency without spending real money on it.
Good video. Though it was slightly funny at 4:30 hearing the line about going over SE's disastrous live services of late....while showing FFXIV in the background, a pretty well received MMO that's still going strong and is is heading into its fifth expansion.
Well received from its 2.0 revival onward anyway. Kind of sad to see the company that apologized for FF 14 1.0 and rebuilt the game to make it better rather than cut their losses and run, now making all these live services they don't plan to support.
It's baffling that so many of these live service games are looter shooters as if the publishers don't understand people aren't magically going to have time for more of the genre that even as an offline experience demands a lot of time when they're probably already playing Destiny or one of the other few successful ones. You'd think that by now someone would realize that WAY more effort needs to be put into the development of these games for them to even have a chance to stick. I get that goal is just get in, get as much money as possible, then get out, but with how quickly a lot of these games are dying, are they even achieving the base goal of making money in the first place? I can't imagine many of them are even doing better than breaking even.
Side note on Squibs: If you're in the Firearms community, you will hear that word in another context. It's a bullet that doesn't have enough pressure behind it to leave the barrel, so it gets stuck in there and requires a gunsmith to get out. Probably a holdover from the days of black powder and paper cartridges to be honest where that could be caused by wet powder, but these days it's caused by anything that results in an overly low pressure cartridge.
I'm reminded of the Hi-point customer who suffered 36 squibs IN A ROW and sent back a barrel stuffed with 9mm rounds because his gun "went bang, but nothing came out". Hi-Point was befuddled.
I was watching Sting's Last Match with my dad last night and I was talking about how Commander Sterling is one of my favorite wrestlers and it's been great to watch you come up and develop as a wrestler.
I thought squibs were those explosive blood packs Verhoeven buys in bulk when he makes a movie? Never heard it in context of a "damp firework."
Very cool intro! Really like the transition and references. Thank God for you!
Crash Team Rumble was destined to be a failure when even Caddicarus wasn't interested in playing the game.
It’s like he knew
Ross Scott of Accursedfarms is trying to start legal action about this
The songs in each episode are fucking awesome
Adding Squibs to my next DnD campaign
Will they be damp?
@@dkevans And will they be able to move around on their own, either as some weird lifeform or a magical experiment gone wrong?
@@ladyabaxa I'd go for magical experiment gone wrong. 🤔
"The Services of Burke" sounds like both an upmarket suit store in London and a 50-something plumber from the Northeast of England, I love it
A squib sounds like an aberration for a squid in Dredge
Didn't expect a lengthy diatribe and musical number about the term 'damp squib', but it's moments like this that keep life interesting
What baffles me about Square Enix is they already HAVE their wildly successful live service. Final Fantasy XIV is one of the most successful MMOs in existence. Millions of people giving them $15/mo and buying expansions and merch, the cash shop that only exists because players begged for one to buy cosmetics and account services in its early days. Squenix has done what every company in the mid-late 2000's dreamed of - they got their own World of Warcraft. And yet that's just not enough for them, they still sink all this money on "services" that get shut down within months when they already have their golden goose. It's insane.
Imagine if the money put into all those failed live services was put into XIV. Actually, that money probably came from XIV...
You're forgetting that that's in addition to FFXI, their first MMO, that's still active and maintained even after about two decades of service.
Please tell me the "Damp Squib" is coming to the store. My life is incomplete without it on a shirt.
Nintendo: sues Yuzu out of existence
Sterling: "Better make my hundredth video about live services sucking."
Squibs are also the little explosives that imitate bullet impacts in movies (on scenery or on actors) as well as ammunition that fails to fully ignite, leaving the bullet stuck in the barrel.
Squibs are also the tiny harmless explosives with fake blood that simulate bullet impacts in older movies.
That 'Basic lee' gag took me a couple of minutes of head-scratching to get
When I hear "squib," I think of the practical special effect used to simulate a person getting shot for TV and movies.
Game dev Mike Bithell talked about the recent layoffs and actually referenced the quote "Companies don't just want a ton of money, they want ALL the money"
Reminds me of how the animal crossing mobile game that is full of microtransactions has been regularly updated for 7 years but the 80 dollar game in switch got one dlc and then stopped being updated 3 years after launch
It's genuinely hard to call some of the survivors "games" when they take up more time than an full-time job.
Hypotthetically, even if you removed all the bad and negative stuff in liiive service games, that would be the factor to turn me away from them. You basically have to dedicate all your free time to them to get the best from them.
Not me hearing squib and only assuming it was a word for the getting shot effect in films, you learn something new every day
... and then, like a gift of mana from the heavens... Helldivers 2.
Squib is also the term for the explosive cartridge used to activate emergency releases for things like cargo hooks on aircraft.
4:36 Actually Dragon Quest Tact just shut down last week after 3 years of service. But there were others.
Oh huh, I didn't know Toys for Bob had been consumed by AB. Good that they're getting back on their own. (They were the authors of Star Control and Star Control 2)
I really like the "damn/damp squib" joke in the song.
They had Crash Team Rumble on discount last month. Classic move.
Gotta fool/scam people to squeeze those last few sales before going ftp! :V
So effing scummy, ugh
I didn't know "squib" was a word for firework, I always thought it was what they used in movies to make it look like blood is spraying out of you after you've been shot. That's the only context in which I've heard such a word.
Squib is also a name for a firearm cartridge that goes off but has insufficient powder burned for the bullet to leave the barrel, resulting in a dangerous barrel obstruction.
A squib is an intentionally short kickoff in american football with the goal to meet the minimum requirement for yards traveled on the kick, but keep it so close to the kickoff team that they might be able to dive on it and regain possession. It is often performed by kicking the top of the oblong football to make it tumble around unpredictably, making it hard for the receiving team to catch.
I don't remember if the receiving team has to touch the ball first, to turn the kickoff into a live ball, or if there is no need to simulate a "fumble" for possession change.
I has hopes of seeing memes from the Willy Wonka disaster in Glasgow here. Wasn't disapointed.
Crash Team Rumble could’ve worked if they announced The Unknown, an evil bandicoot that lives in the walls
Bobby Kottick reference is dated now, Steph. He left in december. Activision is perfectly capable of being exceptionally evil without him - you give him too much "credit" - he was one cog in a monstrous evil machine.
I was not expecting a musical number but I am delighted
Thank God and that goes double for you, Steph.
Zombobby chasing the Toys for Bob logo was an excellent touch
That stuffed animal intro puts the space in eye balls.
"He's the Kotick Bobby of calimari" Fuckin well played Zman.
It is emotionally dangerous to get attached to a video game and want it to go on for years and years
That lil Squib ditty was the highlight of my day
It’s a shame people investing in these live service items only to see them crash and burn a few months later.
This is the first time Ive heard the word squib, and that is exactly what i imagined.
I genuinely appreciated that jab at the "Cait Sith" debacle that cropped up. How I pronounce the name will ultimately never matter because 1) I'll never have a reason to *speak* it verbally around people, and 2) it's all just text among us otherwise anyways.
i wholeheartedly welcome Damp Squib into the Jimquistion pantheon
0:25 - your poor kitty has arthritis.
10/10 episode the moment the Squib Song came on.
4:28 isn’t final fantasy 14 like the most successful game considering its an online MMO by design
I spent the whole video waiting for Steph to rememebr how to pronounce Cait Sith and had to look it up:
The Celtic mythical creature Cait Sith is pronounced Ket She or Kit She depending on dialect. This is fairly close to the Japanese game's Kitto Shi, and makes sense considering the character was given a Scottish voice.
According to a post in Octover 2023 from the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth official twitter account, however, it IS meant to be Kate Sith in the English game. Which conflicts with all the other facts but in fact fits perfectly with the fact that Japanese RPGs have been bastardizing mythologies the world over for decades.