Thank you for being one of very few gaming critics to call out corporations for the SCAMS they are. I'm constantly baffled by how edgy and opinionated gamers can be but yet when it comes to actually criticizing BUSINESS PRACTICES suddenly they turn into brainwashed simps for big business.
I do NOT think the Live Service Model is BAD, when depicted on the Graph. The PROBLEM is that Corps do NOT care about Step 1, or at least they do not care AFTER Day 1 Release. At the very least they do NOT view Step 1 to be about Customers, and instead Board of Directors & Shareholders to a Lesser Amount.
When I was a videogame journalist here in Chile, I said the live service trend was a bad and stupid move and every gaming site here called me idiot, short sighted, etc. Now I’m laughing so hard because they are calling me trying to make something about it for their sites, so damn laughable. I’m with you Stephanie! This trend was a train wreck even before the engine start running. Great vid as always
Oh no, you are silly and short sighted. Live Service is only growing in terms of popularity. 2024 will be bigger than 2023. What you've done is found a RUclips personality and bubble that agrees with you and echochambers create stupidity. The reason GAAS has far outpaced single player is because gamers prefer it.
Every game wanting an entire season worth of time and input for a limited time has made me hate gaming a lot more. I have several season passes for games I enjoy, but cant play them enough within a few months to get everything. U wish more used to Halo model of "pay for the pass and unlock it even after the season ends". Its like you have to dedicate your life to one game with a fulltime job, to be able to get the content for the season, punishing people for playing other games and having no time.
Too true. I was interested in The Avengers when they first showed off that trailer, but the second they said it was a “live service” that interest died immediately. You’d think some of these executives would understand that just because a term is marketable to them, doesn’t mean it’s marketable to everyone else.
They don't care. I'm willing to bet their business model is almost exactly based on the one that worked ridiculously well for Bungie and Destiny: 1. Shit out an attractive, addictive but plot and content-barren grindathon with accompanying road map. 2. Trickle content out while massively pushing the cosmetics and cash shop. 3. Wait for a few whales to get hooked. 4. If no whales hooked within internally agreed-upon timeframe, shut game down, lay off all the devs, and write it off as a tax loss. 5. If enough whales hooked, lay off majority of devs, apart from the ones who good at making skins, and put your feet up while the money gets delivered to your door in massive articulated trucks. Live Service games are basically a high risk/high reward strategy in which the only people risking anything are the devs and the customers.
Even if people didn't skip them because the practice was poisoned they skipped them because if you're already playing one live service, maybe two, you literally cannot play any more!
I believe the line Steph used back then was "The currency videogames demand most of us now isn't *money* , it's *time* ." As I was *deep* into Warframe at that time (and still am, but healthily less so) it was a bit of a revelation moment.
@@tgcid2018 It's done some *really* cool things in recent years, but that "lizard-brain tickle of reward" gameplay loop remains the same. To the degree they had a character in-game acknowledge it in *exactly those words* . Though that line was later removed, heh.
Warframe at least has actually managed a 10 year lifetime, and is pretty fair with its pay systems and in-game market. And once you clear through the game's content you can just play when the new updates come out for a few days then let it rest until you're in the mood for it again.
The Square Enix admission their live service chasing hurt their profits is *the* best part. Proof that somebody in their offices not only had enough clarity to see the problem for what it was, but the courage to actually admit it on record. That pour soul is probably looking at the company still throw itself at NFTs and crypto powered gaming and is dying a little more inside every day.
Thank God for them for being spot on about live service games Also when they said "I looked like I was fucked behind the bushes... By the bushes" I expected them to add "I mean, I was but I don't want you all to see that"
"Let's all laugh at an industry That never learned anything tee hee hee" Keep calling it, Steph. We'll keep smiling and watching you rock the pinball world.
its especially sad in the case of knockout city and echo VR because those were good games with dedicated communities, which would have benefited from proper game design rather than the live service system
This actually goes as far back as the MMO "gold rush" so yes, they in fact didn't learn anything. The whole "games as a service" model didn't start with Ubisoft, it started with Sony Online Entertainment. Strategic Simulations releasing Neverwinter Nights on AOL was also a big factor before that too. Without that game, EverQuest probably wouldn't exist.
I'm not smiling. I love gaming, but hell, the industry is such a colossal cesspool, it's killing my passion. It's very sad to look back the these last years, notice how many games I didn't even know existed, and realize how little I care. And whenever a big name drops in, I just brace for the inevitable letdown. Which almost never fails to come.
I've always loved how you've maintained your fortune telling ability by assuming that video game corporations will always do the worst, most short-term payoff seeking thing possible (which they always do).
It's the MMO gold rush from the 2000s. Companies looked at WOW and decided they wanted that, despite the fact that people don't have infinite time and money, so they would need to make a game that would pull people away from something they already liked. They learned nothing. Live services as a whole won't disappear, but the successful ones already exist. It's long since time stop chasing them.
I'm absolutely baffled at their inability to learn from the aforementioned MMO rush. It's not like a live service is all that different from an MMO from a service perspective; constant oversight and maintenance, constant need to produce new content, constant need to keep the players engaged for as long as possible. The lessons were RIGHT THERE. Failing to learn them is like jamming your hand in a gasoline fire after you've already burnt yourself in a campfire.
In the strangest case of Irony, this quote from Talladega Nights perfectly sum up the MMO and Live Servive Gold Rush..... "If ya ain't first, yer last"
@@crapshot321 The fundamental problem is that shareholders don't make their money from dividend streams provided by steady profits from a healthy company. They make their money when the stock price goes up. This is what drives the "we must have constant growth" issue; the CEO and other executives are literally paid by the shareholder owners to continue artificially inflating the share price by any means necessary instead of trying to build a healthy, sustainable company.
Every time my friends say "I'm just doing my dailies" kills me inside, even when I've played games with the same mentality before. Just do your dailies, your weeklies, it's just 1h-2h a day, and you get TOOOOONS of rewards!!! Don't forget battlepass challenges, wouldn't want to FOMO on that rare unlock by the end of season! Oh, and also get the special pass that gives you bonus rewards for daily logins, because it's INSANE value if you play EVERY day! Just need to launch the game...
I feel like this comment is a bit aggressive. Games can be more than the internal rewards; they can be social experiences and relaxation. Dailies in a well-loved MMO are very much an excuse to hang out where you can chat with friends. It can also be a way of making progress that's low investment; most people I know who "do dailies" do so on a laptop while watching their kids or in between other activities with downtime. It can also be very relaxing to do low-octane gameplay that you're already familiar with and can just breeze through it. I won't deny that a lot of games have ramped up their demands but it seems overblown to get quite so up-in-arms over your friends doing something they seem to enjoy.
You just described, why I can't return to Warframe. It used to be fun, but now I log in, see all the daily weekly monthly crap I supposed to do and I just alt F4. No working class human has that amount of time, and at this point I don't care anymore...
I feel so much better ever since I stopped caring and either dropped games that do "dailies", "weeklies", etc. or stopped ever opening a shop, battle pass or whatever tab.
Unrelated but always wanted to say this. Thank you for coming out and never stopping. It helped me realize I’m trans and your videos on the horrible practices of companies has been a driving force in my own studies and start of career. Thank god for you
I was playing HI Fi Rush at the weekend and thinking, imagine if we never had microtransactions or live services, then games would just have to try and be good, and we wouldn't have to wait for these diamonds in the rough.
Actually rather than "Infinite Money" it should say "Literally ALL of The Money" is more accurate. You can want Infinite Money, but do so in a way that's NOT destructive like Warframe, which has a so called Live Service Model being in a MMORPG type game. Which even James Stephanie Sterling praised.
@@TheAyanamiRei They don't want all of the money: even that would be more realistic than the perpetual, explosive growth that they expect to go on forever in a system with finite resources.
Yeah you'd think they would think harder about what they invest their money into with the sky high amount of money it costs to make these live service games
i feel this way exactly. I adore games, but i hate certain things about the industry (lazy cash grabs, poor treatment of employees, work harassment, general lack of creativeness when a "trend" catches on ect). Indie games aren't ALWAYS the answer but they show us proof that you can have a healthy team, be creative, and make money making something cool, fun, and something the team itself was passionate about. I don't think calling out larger companies in the hopes they do better is bad at all, and should be welcomed. I don't want these companies to disappear, but I miss certain kinds of creativity that AAA studios can make when they TRY. (fromsofware is NOT perfect, but they are a good example of a studio that at least makes something new and interesting with each new game they make (aside from the meh remake))
I like Stephanie LOVE games, I'm just tired of the usual bullshit that surrounds them. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to boot up my third dwarven fortress this week.
"As service after service was served its notice" "Went limp in a case of premature extermination" "Locus of hyperfocus" Your makeup might have been a mess but your script was especially brilliant! I remember when you first made that episode about the live service death spiral. Thanks for that. Me and all my associated mental health issues really might have been taken in by them otherwise - even now, its a struggle.
"Just sell games, that's how you got rich in the first place." That and underpaying/not paying staff and creators and loads of tax breaks and write offs.
As someone who was working on Battlefield Mobile until a few days ago, there were countless super talented folks on that team who were working on getting the game ready for launch without any hint that things were wrong. Then just before lunchtime on Tuesday, we got an emergency meeting of vague description. Then we learned the whole studio was shut down. Then we learned that the press release had gone out before the meeting even started. Then... everyone just had to try and figure out what the hell to do next. All these games are made by real people, all working very hard to try and make something fun within the goals we're given, and when they're canned, there's always a human cost that often goes overlooked.
Honestly the fact that someone as committed as Steph ended up jaded and burnt out on the industry and rejected by "the gamers"™ for not letting companies they like off the hook when the next game comes out like every other 'journalist' in the space does (and for not being a reactionary misogynist douchebag) says more about the state of the industry than anything.
A wide swath of gamers wanted JSS to be their attack dog, going after "safe" companies like EA but ignoring the bullshit that their favorite companies engaged in. What they didn't realize was that their attack dog would refuse to be their bitch.
The Gamers(tm) have a short list of acceptable targets that they will absolutely eat up any criticism of. Until you criticize a game that target makes that they like, or a person they like, or you bring up ‘forbidden politics’, or you do it while being a not-white male. So the field of acceptable targets is narrower than you’d think at first glance.
Games journalism is largely a marketing job, generating hype and recycling a never ending line of early 20 something’s who are just thrilled to be in the industry. I personally don’t trust the reviews or opinions of any game journalist under the age of 35. James Stephanie Sterling, Jeff Gerstmann, Gene Park are a few of the people on that list I trust. They’ve been around long enough to become a bit cynical and jaded because they’re veterans who aren’t naively seduced by a free game copy, a sponsored stream or an exclusive developer interview. They can see the bullshit for what it is because they’ve seen it all before.
I only wish the CEOs and other management dorks were the ones to pay the price for these failures. But of course it's the devs, QA staff, other workers, and we the customers that took it in the pants. Took it in the pants in a bad way I mean.
To be fair, the devs dont have the balls to take a stand & call the bs out. And havent done so for over a decade. I'd say devs at Blizzard are the closest due to all the protests, but Overwatch 2 is still live service trash. So yeah, the devs are just as guilty, like German soldiers back in WW2(they were lower on the hierarchy than the Generals, but all the fucked up shit Nazis did, blood is on those soldiers' hands too. All except the few that actually tried to assassinate Hitler. Look up Operation Valkyrie).
Well when you find out investors love two statistics: Earnings per Share and the horrible REVENUE PER EMPLOYEE it makes a lot of sense. Shareholders fucking love firing people. It looks great on the balance sheet and year end report. I mean just imagine thinking like that.
@@Walt_Xander94 "To be fair, the devs dont have the balls to take a stand & call the bs out." Gotta hard disagree there. It's easy to call out companies you don't work for; not as easy to call out companies you do work for. Most devs are just middle wage workers trying to provide for themselves or families and worry about losing their jobs, just like the rest of us.
@@Walt_Xander94 You forgot "comparing X to the Nazis" in Internet rules is an instant disqualification from any argument. But I digress. If a dev kicks up a stink before a product has shipped, they get booted and their name doesn't make it into the credits. They can't go talk about their experience because the project they were working on is protected under an NDA they were forced to sign as part of their job, so their voice goes unheard by the majority. We're actually seeing a lot of devs leave the industry because of this Catch 22. Either that, or they go independent, which is feeling more and more like the future of the industry as big companies release fewer and fewer games annually in an attempt to have only huge hits in their books. Activision published 6 games in 2020 (And one of those was a Stadia port of Sekiro), 3 in 2021 (And 2 of those were just next gen/switch ports of 2020 games), and 1 last year.
@@Walt_Xander94 OK, not only is comparing devs to actual nazis a ridiculous strawman, but you also fail to take into account that many developers HAVE taken a stand and are attempting to unionize, but publishers still treat them as expendable. Devs at blizzard did take a stand, but Blizzard higher ups ignored their demands and buried anyone who protested. Developers at Riot also protested against uncomfortable working conditions and Riot fired every worker who protested. Devs aren't the ones to blame here, it's the suits up top who aim to keep them down
The execs in charge of Dungeons and Dragons seem to want to turn that game into some sort of live service video game. It's probably going to go about as well as you'd expect. The first step in this plan was apparently to piss off their entire fanbase.
@@jellyfishjones4741 And the people who originally drafted up the paperwork that they desperately want to rip to shreds and replace with their new, shittier paperwork, were smart enough to fortify the original documents with a clause that makes it impossible for them to be turned off, essentially preventing them from being torn to shreds.
I'm honestly surprised you didn't pick Cassandra as a middle name given how much you have proved you are truly the Cassandra of video games. Steph unsurprisingly was right again
They’re the Cassandra of video games, true, but idk, they just FEEL like a Stephanie to me. Plus choosing Stephanie as the middle name means they can then keep adding “tha Cassandra of video games” to the end as a title and it’d feel like something was missing without a title to follow the name, for someone with a signoff of “thank good for me”, you know?
What's upsetting about all of this, is that the people hurt by these terrible decisions won't be the people that made them. And they will do it all over again, because their ego can't be touched while sitting all the way up there in their chairs of gold.
@@Damian_1989 and the MMO, both with the monthly subscription, and eventually the FTP model ones. Eventually, it leads to a Culling (Pun completely intended). And they’ll do it again, and again, and again. Guess which business model still exists and has room for many games to make money? Yep, the good ol’ traditional “sell you a game” model.
You didn't need psychic powers to see this happen. It was obvious this was going to happen to Live Services, when there are too many "games" (and I use that term very loosely) that all only exist to try and prey on addiction to keep players playing (and paying, which is what they really want) No matter how addicted a player is, they cannot play every Live Service, let alone afford to. Live Services are competing in a Battle Royale against themselves; as Ramirez said in Highlander, "In the end, there can be only one."
It's pretty telling that the ones who survived in the live service market focussed on getting out ONE game, relatively early, with a gameplay loop that doesn't get tiring, and then spending the time making the game itself stay interesting. It's still scuzzy in a business sense of course. But they knew not to chase the fad, but to be the fad that everyone else chased but also better.
A well earned victory lap. Given the length of development cycles, it shouldn't be surprising that trend chasing rarely works, but they keep trying it. Wasn't there a Q&A session with Ubisofts upper echelons, and someone asked why are we chasing trends instead of setting them, which is a question that needs to be asked more widely in the game industry
They're chasing trends because trend data is how you impress investors, the most skittish creatures on the planet. They have to convince people that they will always keep growing and investing in them will therefore always turn a profit, and that means making safe decisions in a controlled environment. Following trends. A more experimental game might be really interesting in one way or another, or might really hit with a niche audience and gain a cult following but otherwise be an absolute commercial failure. When you're courting investors, you can't risk that. They're not making art, they're making products but not even that any more. Like McDonald's and many other mainstream businesses they could give a shit about selling a product let alone a quality one. No, these days they sell 'experiences'. One off transactions are worthless in the modern phase of capitalism; a lot of mcjob companies will actually tell you that in training 'repeat customers are the most important thing'. Recurring transactions are the real money maker, and capitalism ensures that every game will have them.
That's how long this cycles last in capitalism, it's a big boom and then a big crash as always, 7 to 10 years at most. Many get rich off the boom, then only the bigger names remain after the crash and thus are able to absorb all the small and broken ones. Monopolies grow bigger and wealth concentrates more and more
@@Sonichero151 Are you kidding? Valve? The company that literally had to split Half Life 3 into "Episodes" that were supposed to come out faster... then never releasing Episode 3 after nearly 15 YEARS. The company that also had a live service for Dota and Artifact and introduced lootboxes and skin gambling? I just love how people somehow give Valve a pass.
The only thing they really need to be good at is scamming people, plus maybe a few levels in taking credit for the work of others. Like the "business genius" who built up Commodore Computers by tricking a microchip manufacturer into overextending itself into bankruptcy, then buying them up cheaply to take possession of the massive order of microchips he never paid them for. Of course, after that, I'm guessing it was a little harder to find another gullible mark... so the Amiga wasn't quite as profitable as the C64.
So have we figured out how we're going to celebrate getting ourselves down to 800K subscribers? We really should take pride in putting so much effort to get the weeds out of the garden!
@Bojoschannel It was over 900K before the transition and we celebrated when enough of those fuckers fucked off and got it down to under 900K. It is up to our Cassandra's decision, of course.
@@matthewroberts6833 oh i remember that, just thought she had lost even more due to corporate bootlickers or something since i haven't seen her videos much after i gave up on videogames
Heck I figured this out back in 2014 with Destiny 1 when I found myself making algorithmic spreadsheets to configure the probability of how many raids I’d have to do to get all the loot and gear I still needed and it felt like a 2nd job. Never again.
The point you raised of companies trying to copy the game when it's successful instead of realising why that won't work reminds me a bit of how Netflix went; started off great for streaming, then every other company around decided to fracture things off into their own 'services' and now they're crying and wailing that profits aren't continuing the meteoric rise Netflix had originally because it turns out the general public doesn't work like the infinite time and money fountain they want us to be in order to pay them.
One of my favorite memes: the guy putting his pirate hat away in 2012 because Netflix is pretty good, but taking it back out in 2019 because there's now a million streaming services all with exclusive content. Like Gabe Newell said all those years ago, piracy is a service problem. And these past few years, corporations have been providing incredibly awful service.
Rumbleverse's downfall is really sad for me because the game feels the best it has since launch. The gameplay was actually really thoughtful and had me hooked on the game loop. I really hope the devs are still able to continue working on it and release it again better than ever
The issue with these recurrent revenue models is that they're meant to be perpetual motion machines. People come in, spend, and love the experience so much they keep spending in perpetuity. The problem is, most people aren't entertained by doing the same thing infinitely. This perpetual motion machine has to be turned by a crank, kept fed with constant updates to keep the player base hooked. Meaning the developers are never done with it. Meaning at best, we're right back where we started with the "make and sell a product" model, where entire teams are indefinitely drawn off to make more content.
I had a revelation last night, high as shit, staring at my book shelf...FF9 Walkthrough was the precursor to ALL of this. It constantly primed you to join their service for tips/character slots and the rest of the book that you paid for being online. Squenix was always Shinra.
I wonder how young you are, those services weren't always an evil capitalist ploy. In the 80s/90s before the internet was what it is today those phone services were pretty much the games' wiki page and many if not most phone services were either free or extremely cheap to call to. A shame how Capitalism destroys everything it touches.
I still have that bad boy lying around somewhere. I'm pretty sure it didn't even work to drive people to the site either, god bless internet text walkthroughs. Those were the days ^_^ Though humorously enough Playonline does still exist in some capacity for a few services (such as ff11 which a friend got me into all of 4 years ago lol)
One thing that was always funny to me about the live service rush is... look. I'm a big Warframe guy. I love the combat, I love the aesthetic, I like how it feels to dominate the battlefield, but it does on some level feel like a job. Anyway. Trying to live service-ify every game always felt silly, because there's only so much of that feeling you can take.
What kills me is that no one in that affair, at any point, stopped to ponder "hey if we started by making a good game first and then people would give us money to play more of it"
@@zyriantel9601 And also, these are execs. They have no idea what a "good video game" is. They want something that can be expressed in the form of a spreadsheet, and art and quality simply can't be expressed in the form of a spreadsheet. Which is why we shouldn't let the spreadsheet people make the decisions over which art gets made and which doesn't.
Nope, there is no attention span for these things that sound like hard work. Let's just pick the infinite revenue! Then just figure out an excuse and off they go towards next humiliating failure over and over again.
@@timop6340 It's not even a matter of work - these are CEOs, they already basically only work as a hobby and could live the rest of their lives without lifting a finger anyway if they wanted - it's a matter of ego. These people think they know better than everyone else, and see the world through the extremely narrow lens of their shitty business degree. To them things like art literally don't exist, there's only money, and because they figured out a way to make money enter their wallet for a while, they think there is nothing else to it. And even if they're wrong (and they are inevitably), they suffer no consequence because their asses are covered. They and their buddies will just keep reaping the profits until they inevitably sink the ship, at which point they have golden parachutes.
I do NOT think the Live Service Model is BAD, when depicted on the Graph. The PROBLEM is that Corps do NOT care about Step 1, or at least they do not care AFTER Day 1 Release. At the very least they do NOT view Step 1 to be about Customers, and instead Board of Directors & Shareholders to a Lesser Amount.
As someone who has played (and dropped) multiple live services over the past few years, I have only played 2 of them for more than 20 hours. If they weren't all included on the Game Pass/bought second hand I wouldn't have bothered playing any of them!
I don't think I'd ever heard of a single one of the games mentioned here. I honestly felt like the live service thing had fizzled out a while back but god damn I had no idea how many went balls deep into it.
I only heard of one before because Epic was giving away an exclusive skin. It was kind of okay, but it wouldn't hold my interest long enough for them to make money.
We know these corporations are going to try again. They're that short sighted. Also, i approve of the use of clips from Knightmare. Really loved that show, and miss it
I didn't know the circle profit graphic was a real company asset ???? I seriously thought it was a meme someone made critiquing it, that's actually insane
I tried playing several MMO'S at once and just couldn't do it. This live service craze that I hope burns is exactly as you said and no different honestly then someone trying to play WoW, Gw2, FF online or whatever others at the same time. It's just daunting to think about....but all these companies have zero idea how much content your game needs to sustain. Not only does the gameplay need to be fun, but the main gameplay loop needs to be fun AND you need about just as much content AS and MMO at LAUNCH!
I did hear about all the ones closing via Yong Yea and instantly thought of Stephanie and the episode about the spiral of live services which was a favourite of mine. The Cassandra of Video Games strikes again!
I’ve been rewatching older episodes a lot recently and it was kind of surreal that I watched the last appearance of the Season of the Witch mask within hours of this episode going up. Pre-pandemic content almost feels like broadcasts from a fictional alternate timeline at this point, so seeing any continuity that reminds me it’s all real can be confusing.
I've actually seen live services done really well. In community led projects where the only goal is the improvement of the fun because thats all the community cares about, and the community is the one making it.
I'm honestly kind of surprised that some of them seem to be realizing that spitting out so many live services isn't tenable, I fully expected it to last longer than a decade before they started to slow down
"Lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee" Yahtzees jingle rings more and more true every year, it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.
"Live Services" remind me of Stringer Bell in The Wire. He didn't invest early in mobile phones because everyone had one, failing to have the foresight to see the reality of the market. Publishers invest too much in "live services" because they too lack the foresight to recognise the realities of the market. Just like 1st person shooter goldrush before, publishers would rather gamble millions in the hopes of finding their golden goose, than diversify and generate reliable revenue from an audience whose loyalty isn't generated from addiction. Doesn't matter how many "live services" fail and classic style games succeed, they'll never learn.
When I think of the only successful live service games, Destiny and Genshin Impact, they invest substantially in their expansions to keep players engaged. A lot of the other live services either don't have the resources or aren't willing to commit. They just see the $ and blindly chase after it.
Genshin is a bit different from all of the games mentioned in this video in that it is a Gacha game, and as such has a different business model than live service games that depend on battle passes and such. Gacha games primarily target “whales” for revenue, people willing to sink thousands of dollars in the hopes of pulling the monthly character or variant. Another well known Gacha game is Fate/Grand Order.
You warned us for years but most didn't pay heed. I was shunned on a FB group when I kept mentioning how live service games are scams (not all but most)
Square enix is especially funny for this because the two examples of their somewhat successful online games are ones they either seem to resent or not understand. They have tried to kill ffxi multiple times but the director and leaders of the team have managed to push back against it, and any attempt at replicating the success of ffxiv since its rebuilding after the initial failure (WHICH WAS USED AS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE ABOUT WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN MAKING A GAME LIKE THIS ACTUALLY WORK, although it was in an earlier time before the market was saturated) have all failed, the best they've managed to do is put a bit more resources into annoying stuff in xiv's online cosmetic store, and while there's a lot fo cool stuff to unlock in the game, if nobody used the mog station stuff you could easily pretend it doesnt exist, but they dont, and I despise it. They made a mount based on a cool boss design from the game, and rather than put it as a reward for beating that boss in the minimum gear challenge setting in the game, it costs £20.
JSS is always right. LOL Zilla got rekt by OG Godzilla. If you mention a 9th game shutdown by SquareEnix, you could play the Psx original song for Chocobo Gp.
My live service of choice just announced end of service. It ran for 10 years and has a sequel on the horizon, so it had a real good run. It also took the store offline the second they made the announcement. There were signs, but the company never came out and said anything until the store was already gone. So it is possible to have good live service model games! You just gotta, you know, actually treat it like a game and put love and effort into it just like any other game.
No meme I was excited for that suicide squad game until that image leaked of the interface. Instantly went from "I'm excited about rocksteady's next game" to "if I'm loading into repetitious missions from a lobby to get loot I'd rather die"
I hope Stephanie gets multiple offers from gaming companies, just to literally light the printouts on fire for the channel. It would be some great validation for the demonstrated foresight.
Namco has a problem where they put out gatchas for the Tales of Series and then ax them for a new one so fast that even the most dedicated fans of the franchise have mostly stopped bothering with them
Publishers don't seem to notice that most of the successful live service games have developers that don't _do_ many other things outside of maintaining and expanding on the live service.
Right? Like, look at Destiny 2 - it’s going great right now, and is preparing to launch another major expansion to the story that will bring all kinds of new content to the game. Notice how many other games Bungie’s been working on besides Destiny? Yeah, it’s not a big number.
I'm so crushed that Crimesight is going down. There are plenty options to have local/offline play together without the servers running, they're just going to yeet a fun game like that, I hate it so much.
I THOUGHT I saw that graphic cycle somewhere before... It's a good thing James Stephanie Sterling archives a lot of this stuff to make sure we don't forget the shit the Games Industry has continuously tried to pull.
"Gold rush" is being generous, unless you see the CEOs as underwater, trying desperately not to drown while still clinging to the golden cement shoes at their feet...
Would be accurate, except that the CEOs of these big companies never pay the price. They get big bonuses even if they sink the company, and it's the workers that end up fired and broke because of the CEO's bad decisions.
1:38 The tipping point was Strategic Simulations releasing Neverwinter Nights as part of the AOL service in 1991, followed by SOE releasing EverQuest in 1999.
It's really hard to break into the live service market. Once you have your big popular ones, your PubG, Fortnite, Rainbow 6 Siege, Overwatch, Destiny 2, DBD etc, that all offer something just different enough, there's not much incentive to go to others. People have already invested tons of time, money and effort into the other ones, and so they don't have the time or desire to get into another one.
4:32 That one was doomed from the start as a tie-in to an anime adaptation of a manga. When there's no more manga to adapt, no more anime, no more live service. Dai in Dragon Quest Tact has more of a prospective future than Dai in his own game lol. (Not that that's saying much when Dai's game wa shinderu)
You mentioning people being overworked and underpaid reminded me of an article (I forget where, but it was a major news publisher) where somebody was actually trying to argue that it was unfair to employers to make them pay minimum wage to the disabled because they were incapable of working as much as everybody else. They stopped just short of actually saying that disabled people weren't real people, but you could read the intent between the lines.
We keep going backward in time. It's like the number of times one has to have a debate about minimum wage. We have these rules for a reason... Anyway, we all know what the capitalist/alt-right class would do if they could get away with it. People aren't people in their eyes. They would gladly build gas chambers. As it is, they are always dead-set on cutting social programs, essentially starving the underclasses into silent submission... the Republicans getting bolder about cuts to Medicare and Social Security is another blatant sign of the not-so-quiet part being said out loud. Lest we forget that capitalism has always aligned itself pretty well with social Darwinism/Nazism and history repeats itself. When people start complaining about content creators like JSS bringing up these issues in the first place, they are responsible for trying to ignore the obvious. It well applies to society at large, not just this shitty "entertainment" industry, and some of us don't have the luxury of ignoring it.
Reminds me of that time companies wanted to pay 14 year olds below minimum wage because they weren’t fully adults despite having them working besides actual adults.
The odd thing is there was a perfect circle... And it wasn't too different to the ubi circle. Let Devs have enough time and money to make a good game -> players enjoy a good game -> more people buy said game -> more profit -> let Devs have enough time and money to make a good game...
@@Jackalblade9 It actually was, which makes its shutdown disappointing. The only major failure with Rumbleverse was the complete lack of marketing to get people into it. JSS might have even enjoyed it considering the combat was basically WWE wrestling on steroids.
The bubble has well and truly burst. And while I am pained to see developers close up products they enjoyed making (Knockout City), I am very happy to see this proliferation of money grubbing nonsense get taken down a few pegs.
Nail on head with the MMO craze analogy, Back then nobody every stopped to ask the question of "is this game good enough to pry players away from WOW?" because unless it was you were never going to succeed Fast forward to the current gold rush there was a bit more leeway because there were genres to play in but unless in your chosen live service space you were able to genuinely pull players away from games like Fortnight and Destiny why even bother? Also I think its telling that both times the industry has don't this dance the success stories aren't the games trying to cynically cash in on the gold-rush but rather the pioneers that whilst yeah they struck a money vein did so trying to build a system they thought would work for their game. Like say what you want about destiny, but its clear that it was envisioned as a way to bring a WOW style MMO to consoles via a sci-fi FPS with a universe so lore dense Bungie clearly gave a shit about what they were trying to make, as opposed to say something like Anthem, that was built purely to get in on a money making trend with fairly limited creative passion behind it.
I've never even considered wearing an actual mask when my face looks as busted as the Shroud of Turin after a night out .. see, that's why you get paid the big bucks! 💚
Thank god for you and your lovely Zant figure on the shelf. So happy to see Live services are in freefall after all these years. Related note, I don't think Skyrim was that good of a game. But it did come out when we were all sick of shooter games, so it was a breath of fresh air. Wondering if we can finally return to good games or if there's some new horror on the horizon
Back 4 Blood may have gotten three expansions, but they dropped support a little over a year after launch. The plans and promises they had for future development are unlikely to materialize now that they're pulling the plug, choosing instead to devote their resources to... another new game. Sounds a lot like they're planning to swindle their customers for a third time. B4B can't even depend on mod support like Left 4 Dead 2, a game that continues to thrive 13 years after release. If history is anything to go by, Back 4 Blood is now on deathwatch, ready to join its fellow DOA predecessor Evolve in the grave.
publishers: this infinite money machine we've come up with is what players want players: ..... publishers: wait what why aren't you feeding money into the infinite money machine? I thought that was what you asked for?
I actually think the constant events in Pokemon Go are counter productive and I suspect they are the same in other live service games. In the early days of Pokemon Go people played on the side when they had time. There very rarely were events, so you didn't miss out when you couldn't play for a few days or weeks. Even raids were in circulation for like a month, so plenty of time to catch the raid mons. Now you have one event after another, after another, after another. The result: It does feel like a job keeping up with all of it and fatigue sets in. I know many people who quit. Even I quit for over a year. Only got back into it recently, but not sure how long that will last. And that's not just anecdotal the player base is shrinking rapidly. But do these dumbasses learn from it? No. Their takeaway seems to be that they have to pack the game with even more fomo-stuff and make it even more into a grind. Good luck with that one...
Gotta bookend the coverage of miserable shit that needs coverage because it refuses to stop being miserable shit that hurts people with some moments that are just fun and good. The action figure box being placed on the pinball machine and sliding back off onto the floor was my favorite, the pained groaning noises as the tamogachi was inverted coming in at a close second
Thank you for being one of very few gaming critics to call out corporations for the SCAMS they are. I'm constantly baffled by how edgy and opinionated gamers can be but yet when it comes to actually criticizing BUSINESS PRACTICES suddenly they turn into brainwashed simps for big business.
Most gamers are the crappiest people alive sad to say...
Try to be one that has a brain lol
Took the words right outta my mouth! 😂
Its because they associate anything slightly left of center with the blue-haired barista at Starbucks who cringed when they tried to hit on her.
I do NOT think the Live Service Model is BAD, when depicted on the Graph. The PROBLEM is that Corps do NOT care about Step 1, or at least they do not care AFTER Day 1 Release. At the very least they do NOT view Step 1 to be about Customers, and instead Board of Directors & Shareholders to a Lesser Amount.
This pisses me off also.
When I was a videogame journalist here in Chile, I said the live service trend was a bad and stupid move and every gaming site here called me idiot, short sighted, etc.
Now I’m laughing so hard because they are calling me trying to make something about it for their sites, so damn laughable.
I’m with you Stephanie! This trend was a train wreck even before the engine start running. Great vid as always
Tell them to suck your hairy chilean plumbs
Oh no, you are silly and short sighted. Live Service is only growing in terms of popularity. 2024 will be bigger than 2023.
What you've done is found a RUclips personality and bubble that agrees with you and echochambers create stupidity.
The reason GAAS has far outpaced single player is because gamers prefer it.
Every game wanting an entire season worth of time and input for a limited time has made me hate gaming a lot more. I have several season passes for games I enjoy, but cant play them enough within a few months to get everything. U wish more used to Halo model of "pay for the pass and unlock it even after the season ends". Its like you have to dedicate your life to one game with a fulltime job, to be able to get the content for the season, punishing people for playing other games and having no time.
It's like the saying goes, anyone who believes in infinite growth is either a madman or an economist.
Probably both.
You just said the same thing twice.
The pseudoscience of neoliberal economics knows no bounds
Remember kids: Infinite growth in nature is called cancer.
Or a cancer cell.
It got to the point where people literally skipped any game calling itself a live service. Which is absolutely hillarious.
Too true. I was interested in The Avengers when they first showed off that trailer, but the second they said it was a “live service” that interest died immediately. You’d think some of these executives would understand that just because a term is marketable to them, doesn’t mean it’s marketable to everyone else.
They don't care.
I'm willing to bet their business model is almost exactly based on the one that worked ridiculously well for Bungie and Destiny:
1. Shit out an attractive, addictive but plot and content-barren grindathon with accompanying road map.
2. Trickle content out while massively pushing the cosmetics and cash shop.
3. Wait for a few whales to get hooked.
4. If no whales hooked within internally agreed-upon timeframe, shut game down, lay off all the devs, and write it off as a tax loss.
5. If enough whales hooked, lay off majority of devs, apart from the ones who good at making skins, and put your feet up while the money gets delivered to your door in massive articulated trucks.
Live Service games are basically a high risk/high reward strategy in which the only people risking anything are the devs and the customers.
Same. Anytime online only or live service popped up, I knew to skip.
Even if people didn't skip them because the practice was poisoned they skipped them because if you're already playing one live service, maybe two, you literally cannot play any more!
and anything with any gambling nonsense.
what people always forget about the Ouroboros is that it's also shitting in its own mouth
ew, i'll never again see ouroboros in the same form as before
Today I (Wish I Hadn't) Learned...
@@preguicadetu I mean a snake's cloaca isn't at the tip, it's a bit further up.
So, the ouroboros doesn't NECESSARILY poop into its own mouth.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 the live service Ouroboros does!
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 it does, as soon as it eats too much of its own tail. Like the live service industry.
I believe the line Steph used back then was "The currency videogames demand most of us now isn't *money* , it's *time* ."
As I was *deep* into Warframe at that time (and still am, but healthily less so) it was a bit of a revelation moment.
Oh god I used to be so obsessed with warfarm but I haven't played in years
@@tgcid2018 It's done some *really* cool things in recent years, but that "lizard-brain tickle of reward" gameplay loop remains the same.
To the degree they had a character in-game acknowledge it in *exactly those words* . Though that line was later removed, heh.
Warframe at least has actually managed a 10 year lifetime, and is pretty fair with its pay systems and in-game market.
And once you clear through the game's content you can just play when the new updates come out for a few days then let it rest until you're in the mood for it again.
Enabler.
The Square Enix admission their live service chasing hurt their profits is *the* best part. Proof that somebody in their offices not only had enough clarity to see the problem for what it was, but the courage to actually admit it on record. That pour soul is probably looking at the company still throw itself at NFTs and crypto powered gaming and is dying a little more inside every day.
That was masuda, the CEO
@@ausgod538 I wonder how he thinks that egg on his face tastes?
@@zyriantel9601 someone hit him in the face with a frying pan and call him an omelet.
It's amazing that the Final Fantasy 14 studio is like the only island of sane, quality game development inside Squenix anymore.
The admission was a long time coming, not to mention more than you'll get out of Ubisoft/EA/Activision
Thank God for them for being spot on about live service games
Also when they said "I looked like I was fucked behind the bushes... By the bushes" I expected them to add "I mean, I was but I don't want you all to see that"
"Let's all laugh at an industry
That never learned anything tee hee hee"
Keep calling it, Steph. We'll keep smiling and watching you rock the pinball world.
its especially sad in the case of knockout city and echo VR because those were good games with dedicated communities, which would have benefited from proper game design rather than the live service system
This actually goes as far back as the MMO "gold rush" so yes, they in fact didn't learn anything. The whole "games as a service" model didn't start with Ubisoft, it started with Sony Online Entertainment. Strategic Simulations releasing Neverwinter Nights on AOL was also a big factor before that too. Without that game, EverQuest probably wouldn't exist.
@@tenjenk Yeah! I loved Knockout City when it first released
I'm not smiling. I love gaming, but hell, the industry is such a colossal cesspool, it's killing my passion. It's very sad to look back the these last years, notice how many games I didn't even know existed, and realize how little I care. And whenever a big name drops in, I just brace for the inevitable letdown. Which almost never fails to come.
Didn't have to scroll far for this quote.
I've always loved how you've maintained your fortune telling ability by assuming that video game corporations will always do the worst, most short-term payoff seeking thing possible (which they always do).
ah yes giving the common senee answer is crystal ball levels of intelligence in the modern age 😂
It's the MMO gold rush from the 2000s. Companies looked at WOW and decided they wanted that, despite the fact that people don't have infinite time and money, so they would need to make a game that would pull people away from something they already liked. They learned nothing.
Live services as a whole won't disappear, but the successful ones already exist. It's long since time stop chasing them.
Exactly! And all because shareholders and investors can't learn to live with just making a profit. No, no! They must have all the money.
I'm absolutely baffled at their inability to learn from the aforementioned MMO rush. It's not like a live service is all that different from an MMO from a service perspective; constant oversight and maintenance, constant need to produce new content, constant need to keep the players engaged for as long as possible. The lessons were RIGHT THERE. Failing to learn them is like jamming your hand in a gasoline fire after you've already burnt yourself in a campfire.
This is where my mind went. Thank you for crawling into my brain and giving my thoughts words that make sense.
In the strangest case of Irony, this quote from Talladega Nights perfectly sum up the MMO and Live Servive Gold Rush..... "If ya ain't first, yer last"
@@crapshot321 The fundamental problem is that shareholders don't make their money from dividend streams provided by steady profits from a healthy company. They make their money when the stock price goes up. This is what drives the "we must have constant growth" issue; the CEO and other executives are literally paid by the shareholder owners to continue artificially inflating the share price by any means necessary instead of trying to build a healthy, sustainable company.
Every time my friends say "I'm just doing my dailies" kills me inside, even when I've played games with the same mentality before.
Just do your dailies, your weeklies, it's just 1h-2h a day, and you get TOOOOONS of rewards!!!
Don't forget battlepass challenges, wouldn't want to FOMO on that rare unlock by the end of season!
Oh, and also get the special pass that gives you bonus rewards for daily logins, because it's INSANE value if you play EVERY day! Just need to launch the game...
I feel like this comment is a bit aggressive. Games can be more than the internal rewards; they can be social experiences and relaxation. Dailies in a well-loved MMO are very much an excuse to hang out where you can chat with friends. It can also be a way of making progress that's low investment; most people I know who "do dailies" do so on a laptop while watching their kids or in between other activities with downtime. It can also be very relaxing to do low-octane gameplay that you're already familiar with and can just breeze through it.
I won't deny that a lot of games have ramped up their demands but it seems overblown to get quite so up-in-arms over your friends doing something they seem to enjoy.
You just described, why I can't return to Warframe. It used to be fun, but now I log in, see all the daily weekly monthly crap I supposed to do and I just alt F4. No working class human has that amount of time, and at this point I don't care anymore...
I feel so much better ever since I stopped caring and either dropped games that do "dailies", "weeklies", etc. or stopped ever opening a shop, battle pass or whatever tab.
Any game that impose mandatory time feels like a chore to me. When I can chose what I want to do, it's a much more pleasant experience.
And you never use any of those things, because you’re sick of the game after
Unrelated but always wanted to say this. Thank you for coming out and never stopping. It helped me realize I’m trans and your videos on the horrible practices of companies has been a driving force in my own studies and start of career. Thank god for you
I'm not sure how this translates to a career other than understanding collective bargaining is the only hope against capitalist obliteration.
I was playing HI Fi Rush at the weekend and thinking, imagine if we never had microtransactions or live services, then games would just have to try and be good, and we wouldn't have to wait for these diamonds in the rough.
Consumer: I want to play a game.
Developer: I want to make a game.
Publisher: I want infinite money.
Spot the problem.
The problem is clearly the player who want to play for fun instead of play to earn (the publisher all the money)
Actually rather than "Infinite Money" it should say "Literally ALL of The Money" is more accurate. You can want Infinite Money, but do so in a way that's NOT destructive like Warframe, which has a so called Live Service Model being in a MMORPG type game. Which even James Stephanie Sterling praised.
@@TheAyanamiRei They don't want all of the money: even that would be more realistic than the perpetual, explosive growth that they expect to go on forever in a system with finite resources.
Publisher: I want infinite money and I'm going to use and abuse the other two to make that happen.
Being a Consumer not a Client
I love how the industry completely forgot how badly the MMO boom went for it. It's like it never learns.
🎵🎵🎵
"Let's all laugh
At an industry
That never learns anything
Teehee-hee"
🎵🎵🎵
@@chrisjones5949 yahtzee is that you
That's exactly what came to mind for me too.
Yeah you'd think they would think harder about what they invest their money into with the sky high amount of money it costs to make these live service games
Sterling has true love for video games. If you hate something that you still enjoy You have the most understanding of it. A true connoisseur.
i feel this way exactly. I adore games, but i hate certain things about the industry (lazy cash grabs, poor treatment of employees, work harassment, general lack of creativeness when a "trend" catches on ect). Indie games aren't ALWAYS the answer but they show us proof that you can have a healthy team, be creative, and make money making something cool, fun, and something the team itself was passionate about.
I don't think calling out larger companies in the hopes they do better is bad at all, and should be welcomed. I don't want these companies to disappear, but I miss certain kinds of creativity that AAA studios can make when they TRY.
(fromsofware is NOT perfect, but they are a good example of a studio that at least makes something new and interesting with each new game they make (aside from the meh remake))
I like Stephanie LOVE games, I'm just tired of the usual bullshit that surrounds them. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to boot up my third dwarven fortress this week.
"As service after service was served its notice"
"Went limp in a case of premature extermination"
"Locus of hyperfocus"
Your makeup might have been a mess but your script was especially brilliant!
I remember when you first made that episode about the live service death spiral. Thanks for that. Me and all my associated mental health issues really might have been taken in by them otherwise - even now, its a struggle.
"Just sell games, that's how you got rich in the first place."
That and underpaying/not paying staff and creators and loads of tax breaks and write offs.
Don't forget non-mandatory-but-kind-of-mandatory-if-you-wanna-progress OT crunches
As someone who was working on Battlefield Mobile until a few days ago, there were countless super talented folks on that team who were working on getting the game ready for launch without any hint that things were wrong. Then just before lunchtime on Tuesday, we got an emergency meeting of vague description. Then we learned the whole studio was shut down. Then we learned that the press release had gone out before the meeting even started. Then... everyone just had to try and figure out what the hell to do next.
All these games are made by real people, all working very hard to try and make something fun within the goals we're given, and when they're canned, there's always a human cost that often goes overlooked.
It looked like it was a genuine attepmt to bring the full fledged BF to mobile, my heart goes out to you and the whole studio.
Honestly the fact that someone as committed as Steph ended up jaded and burnt out on the industry and rejected by "the gamers"™ for not letting companies they like off the hook when the next game comes out like every other 'journalist' in the space does (and for not being a reactionary misogynist douchebag) says more about the state of the industry than anything.
A wide swath of gamers wanted JSS to be their attack dog, going after "safe" companies like EA but ignoring the bullshit that their favorite companies engaged in. What they didn't realize was that their attack dog would refuse to be their bitch.
The Gamers(tm) have a short list of acceptable targets that they will absolutely eat up any criticism of. Until you criticize a game that target makes that they like, or a person they like, or you bring up ‘forbidden politics’, or you do it while being a not-white male. So the field of acceptable targets is narrower than you’d think at first glance.
@@TheRogueWolf Now that's Ironic.
Games journalism is largely a marketing job, generating hype and recycling a never ending line of early 20 something’s who are just thrilled to be in the industry.
I personally don’t trust the reviews or opinions of any game journalist under the age of 35.
James Stephanie Sterling, Jeff Gerstmann, Gene Park are a few of the people on that list I trust. They’ve been around long enough to become a bit cynical and jaded because they’re veterans who aren’t naively seduced by a free game copy, a sponsored stream or an exclusive developer interview. They can see the bullshit for what it is because they’ve seen it all before.
@@TheRogueWolf I think a lot of people got sick of all bad news but its not exactly JSS' fault that the game industry are greedy turd huffing fucks.
Making a 14 minute video just to tell the videogame industry "told you so" is a power move and I'm here for it
The videogame industry literally goes chasing "told you so"s tbf
I only wish the CEOs and other management dorks were the ones to pay the price for these failures. But of course it's the devs, QA staff, other workers, and we the customers that took it in the pants. Took it in the pants in a bad way I mean.
To be fair, the devs dont have the balls to take a stand & call the bs out. And havent done so for over a decade. I'd say devs at Blizzard are the closest due to all the protests, but Overwatch 2 is still live service trash.
So yeah, the devs are just as guilty, like German soldiers back in WW2(they were lower on the hierarchy than the Generals, but all the fucked up shit Nazis did, blood is on those soldiers' hands too. All except the few that actually tried to assassinate Hitler. Look up Operation Valkyrie).
Well when you find out investors love two statistics: Earnings per Share and the horrible REVENUE PER EMPLOYEE it makes a lot of sense. Shareholders fucking love firing people. It looks great on the balance sheet and year end report. I mean just imagine thinking like that.
@@Walt_Xander94 "To be fair, the devs dont have the balls to take a stand & call the bs out." Gotta hard disagree there. It's easy to call out companies you don't work for; not as easy to call out companies you do work for. Most devs are just middle wage workers trying to provide for themselves or families and worry about losing their jobs, just like the rest of us.
@@Walt_Xander94 You forgot "comparing X to the Nazis" in Internet rules is an instant disqualification from any argument. But I digress.
If a dev kicks up a stink before a product has shipped, they get booted and their name doesn't make it into the credits. They can't go talk about their experience because the project they were working on is protected under an NDA they were forced to sign as part of their job, so their voice goes unheard by the majority.
We're actually seeing a lot of devs leave the industry because of this Catch 22. Either that, or they go independent, which is feeling more and more like the future of the industry as big companies release fewer and fewer games annually in an attempt to have only huge hits in their books. Activision published 6 games in 2020 (And one of those was a Stadia port of Sekiro), 3 in 2021 (And 2 of those were just next gen/switch ports of 2020 games), and 1 last year.
@@Walt_Xander94 OK, not only is comparing devs to actual nazis a ridiculous strawman, but you also fail to take into account that many developers HAVE taken a stand and are attempting to unionize, but publishers still treat them as expendable. Devs at blizzard did take a stand, but Blizzard higher ups ignored their demands and buried anyone who protested. Developers at Riot also protested against uncomfortable working conditions and Riot fired every worker who protested. Devs aren't the ones to blame here, it's the suits up top who aim to keep them down
The execs in charge of Dungeons and Dragons seem to want to turn that game into some sort of live service video game. It's probably going to go about as well as you'd expect. The first step in this plan was apparently to piss off their entire fanbase.
They're so mad their product isn't like software. And that all their old products are still absolutely useable.
@@jellyfishjones4741 And the people who originally drafted up the paperwork that they desperately want to rip to shreds and replace with their new, shittier paperwork, were smart enough to fortify the original documents with a clause that makes it impossible for them to be turned off, essentially preventing them from being torn to shreds.
I'm honestly surprised you didn't pick Cassandra as a middle name given how much you have proved you are truly the Cassandra of video games. Steph unsurprisingly was right again
They’re the Cassandra of video games, true, but idk, they just FEEL like a Stephanie to me.
Plus choosing Stephanie as the middle name means they can then keep adding “tha Cassandra of video games” to the end as a title and it’d feel like something was missing without a title to follow the name, for someone with a signoff of “thank good for me”, you know?
I'm glad, I would have been "Ack, who's calling me?" every few minutes.
What's upsetting about all of this, is that the people hurt by these terrible decisions won't be the people that made them. And they will do it all over again, because their ego can't be touched while sitting all the way up there in their chairs of gold.
"I'm just a dumb-dumb with perfect skin and a great rack"
Words to live by
May we all aspire to one day have perfect skin and a great rack ✨
This is the way.
Those pics we're "stirring"...
@Skye Ritchie those are definitely two things I do not have.
I do have the first thing, though, being a dumb-dumb.
@@vxicepickxv Don't feel bad, it's a start!
Imagine being shocked that every game being a live service would inherently kill off most of them. Those games demand so much of your time
It's the same logic as streaming services being surprised that their saturation of the market caused it to stagnate.
@@Damian_1989 and the MMO, both with the monthly subscription, and eventually the FTP model ones. Eventually, it leads to a Culling (Pun completely intended). And they’ll do it again, and again, and again. Guess which business model still exists and has room for many games to make money? Yep, the good ol’ traditional “sell you a game” model.
You didn't need psychic powers to see this happen. It was obvious this was going to happen to Live Services, when there are too many "games" (and I use that term very loosely) that all only exist to try and prey on addiction to keep players playing (and paying, which is what they really want)
No matter how addicted a player is, they cannot play every Live Service, let alone afford to. Live Services are competing in a Battle Royale against themselves; as Ramirez said in Highlander, "In the end, there can be only one."
It's pretty telling that the ones who survived in the live service market focussed on getting out ONE game, relatively early, with a gameplay loop that doesn't get tiring, and then spending the time making the game itself stay interesting.
It's still scuzzy in a business sense of course. But they knew not to chase the fad, but to be the fad that everyone else chased but also better.
A well earned victory lap. Given the length of development cycles, it shouldn't be surprising that trend chasing rarely works, but they keep trying it. Wasn't there a Q&A session with Ubisofts upper echelons, and someone asked why are we chasing trends instead of setting them, which is a question that needs to be asked more widely in the game industry
They're chasing trends because trend data is how you impress investors, the most skittish creatures on the planet. They have to convince people that they will always keep growing and investing in them will therefore always turn a profit, and that means making safe decisions in a controlled environment. Following trends.
A more experimental game might be really interesting in one way or another, or might really hit with a niche audience and gain a cult following but otherwise be an absolute commercial failure. When you're courting investors, you can't risk that. They're not making art, they're making products but not even that any more. Like McDonald's and many other mainstream businesses they could give a shit about selling a product let alone a quality one. No, these days they sell 'experiences'. One off transactions are worthless in the modern phase of capitalism; a lot of mcjob companies will actually tell you that in training 'repeat customers are the most important thing'. Recurring transactions are the real money maker, and capitalism ensures that every game will have them.
"And that's THE THING." "Isn't IT." Bravo on the editing!
The video game industry couldn't even pull off this 10 year plan...
That's how long this cycles last in capitalism, it's a big boom and then a big crash as always, 7 to 10 years at most. Many get rich off the boom, then only the bigger names remain after the crash and thus are able to absorb all the small and broken ones. Monopolies grow bigger and wealth concentrates more and more
Very few can pull it off..... like 3....
ValVe, Epic Games, and Bungie have done it.
@@Sonichero151 Are you kidding? Valve?
The company that literally had to split Half Life 3 into "Episodes" that were supposed to come out faster... then never releasing Episode 3 after nearly 15 YEARS.
The company that also had a live service for Dota and Artifact and introduced lootboxes and skin gambling?
I just love how people somehow give Valve a pass.
Why did anyone believe them?
Every time a live service game dies an angel grows wings
That’s a lot of angels!
At this point they are about to start looking biblically accurate
... more like, a whale dies.
Video game executives: bad at pattern recognition Among other things
Time for Yahtzee to do another "Let's all laugh at an industry..."
...that never learns anything, tee-hee-hee!
@@IlIBonesIlI That phrase is literally a decade old.
How had it aged so well?
"ceos make so much money cause they make the bestest choices that keep business running *bj noises*"
reality: HAHAHA!
The only thing they really need to be good at is scamming people, plus maybe a few levels in taking credit for the work of others. Like the "business genius" who built up Commodore Computers by tricking a microchip manufacturer into overextending itself into bankruptcy, then buying them up cheaply to take possession of the massive order of microchips he never paid them for. Of course, after that, I'm guessing it was a little harder to find another gullible mark... so the Amiga wasn't quite as profitable as the C64.
@@repulser93 Because the game industry has not changed in the slightest in ten years.
"Ouroboros of Avarice" needs to be a Norwegian Death Metal band. Immediately.
So have we figured out how we're going to celebrate getting ourselves down to 800K subscribers? We really should take pride in putting so much effort to get the weeds out of the garden!
How many subs did she have previously?
@Bojoschannel It was over 900K before the transition and we celebrated when enough of those fuckers fucked off and got it down to under 900K.
It is up to our Cassandra's decision, of course.
I thought it actually juuust scrabbled over 1mil hurdle before transition
@@matthewroberts6833 oh i remember that, just thought she had lost even more due to corporate bootlickers or something since i haven't seen her videos much after i gave up on videogames
@@Bojoschannel It's a safe bet that it's a little from Column A and a little from Column B. . . and those columns are pretty close together already.
Heck I figured this out back in 2014 with Destiny 1 when I found myself making algorithmic spreadsheets to configure the probability of how many raids I’d have to do to get all the loot and gear I still needed and it felt like a 2nd job. Never again.
The point you raised of companies trying to copy the game when it's successful instead of realising why that won't work reminds me a bit of how Netflix went; started off great for streaming, then every other company around decided to fracture things off into their own 'services' and now they're crying and wailing that profits aren't continuing the meteoric rise Netflix had originally because it turns out the general public doesn't work like the infinite time and money fountain they want us to be in order to pay them.
*looks over at Netflix's most recent disastrous decision to curtail users who share their account with family members and friends*
Jim gaffigan had a good quote about this, "Why don't we take all the streaming networks put it together in one spot and call it cable television?"
One of my favorite memes: the guy putting his pirate hat away in 2012 because Netflix is pretty good, but taking it back out in 2019 because there's now a million streaming services all with exclusive content.
Like Gabe Newell said all those years ago, piracy is a service problem. And these past few years, corporations have been providing incredibly awful service.
@@mjc0961 There’s an intense irony behind Gabe saying that, considering how Valve is going these days
Rumbleverse's downfall is really sad for me because the game feels the best it has since launch. The gameplay was actually really thoughtful and had me hooked on the game loop. I really hope the devs are still able to continue working on it and release it again better than ever
They should rework it into a couch splitscreen experience. (even fortnite has that)
@@joe--cool totes agree. Get some four player split screen wrestling action and put the Rumble into Rumbleverse with mega matches.
The issue with these recurrent revenue models is that they're meant to be perpetual motion machines. People come in, spend, and love the experience so much they keep spending in perpetuity. The problem is, most people aren't entertained by doing the same thing infinitely. This perpetual motion machine has to be turned by a crank, kept fed with constant updates to keep the player base hooked. Meaning the developers are never done with it. Meaning at best, we're right back where we started with the "make and sell a product" model, where entire teams are indefinitely drawn off to make more content.
I had a revelation last night, high as shit, staring at my book shelf...FF9 Walkthrough was the precursor to ALL of this. It constantly primed you to join their service for tips/character slots and the rest of the book that you paid for being online. Squenix was always Shinra.
I wonder how young you are, those services weren't always an evil capitalist ploy. In the 80s/90s before the internet was what it is today those phone services were pretty much the games' wiki page and many if not most phone services were either free or extremely cheap to call to. A shame how Capitalism destroys everything it touches.
I still have that bad boy lying around somewhere. I'm pretty sure it didn't even work to drive people to the site either, god bless internet text walkthroughs. Those were the days ^_^
Though humorously enough Playonline does still exist in some capacity for a few services (such as ff11 which a friend got me into all of 4 years ago lol)
I mean, the real precursor to live services were MMOs. They laid the groundwork for what came later.
One thing that was always funny to me about the live service rush is... look. I'm a big Warframe guy. I love the combat, I love the aesthetic, I like how it feels to dominate the battlefield, but it does on some level feel like a job. Anyway. Trying to live service-ify every game always felt silly, because there's only so much of that feeling you can take.
I continue to just adore the energy in the open/close segments.
I swear they're getting better every week.
What kills me is that no one in that affair, at any point, stopped to ponder "hey if we started by making a good game first and then people would give us money to play more of it"
Because they've eliminated everyone who has an iota of common sense and surrounded themselves with yes men instead.
But that takes effort, and effort takes time, and time costs money, you see
@@zyriantel9601 And also, these are execs. They have no idea what a "good video game" is. They want something that can be expressed in the form of a spreadsheet, and art and quality simply can't be expressed in the form of a spreadsheet.
Which is why we shouldn't let the spreadsheet people make the decisions over which art gets made and which doesn't.
Nope, there is no attention span for these things that sound like hard work. Let's just pick the infinite revenue! Then just figure out an excuse and off they go towards next humiliating failure over and over again.
@@timop6340 It's not even a matter of work - these are CEOs, they already basically only work as a hobby and could live the rest of their lives without lifting a finger anyway if they wanted - it's a matter of ego.
These people think they know better than everyone else, and see the world through the extremely narrow lens of their shitty business degree. To them things like art literally don't exist, there's only money, and because they figured out a way to make money enter their wallet for a while, they think there is nothing else to it.
And even if they're wrong (and they are inevitably), they suffer no consequence because their asses are covered. They and their buddies will just keep reaping the profits until they inevitably sink the ship, at which point they have golden parachutes.
Sitting with a cup of hot coco and watching Stephanie dissect live services. Mondays don't get better than this
I agree.
I'm drinking vodka with sugary black tea as a chaser wolfing down tobacco listening to my large dog chew on his crotch...
I do NOT think the Live Service Model is BAD, when depicted on the Graph. The PROBLEM is that Corps do NOT care about Step 1, or at least they do not care AFTER Day 1 Release. At the very least they do NOT view Step 1 to be about Customers, and instead Board of Directors & Shareholders to a Lesser Amount.
Cocoa? On a Monday? You're depraved!
Having tea and biscuits at 1am on the other side of the world on an early Tuesday morning... Good ol' Steph is the best chaser!
As someone who has played (and dropped) multiple live services over the past few years, I have only played 2 of them for more than 20 hours. If they weren't all included on the Game Pass/bought second hand I wouldn't have bothered playing any of them!
Never doubted you for a second. You've always been spitting truth. May all live service games die a pitiful death.
Somebody should strap the CEOs of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast into a chair and make them watch this on repeat for a month or more.
I don't think I'd ever heard of a single one of the games mentioned here. I honestly felt like the live service thing had fizzled out a while back but god damn I had no idea how many went balls deep into it.
I only heard of one before because Epic was giving away an exclusive skin. It was kind of okay, but it wouldn't hold my interest long enough for them to make money.
The realest game critic of all time, never switched up their views, an icon. Been a fan since 2015 and will always be!
@@Eisenbison gender politics, yes. anti-capitalism was always the theme of his content though. Like it was always obvious.
We know these corporations are going to try again. They're that short sighted.
Also, i approve of the use of clips from Knightmare. Really loved that show, and miss it
I didn't know the circle profit graphic was a real company asset ???? I seriously thought it was a meme someone made critiquing it, that's actually insane
Reality is stranger than fiction.
I tried playing several MMO'S at once and just couldn't do it. This live service craze that I hope burns is exactly as you said and no different honestly then someone trying to play WoW, Gw2, FF online or whatever others at the same time. It's just daunting to think about....but all these companies have zero idea how much content your game needs to sustain.
Not only does the gameplay need to be fun, but the main gameplay loop needs to be fun AND you need about just as much content AS and MMO at LAUNCH!
I love a good I-told-you-so episode.
I did hear about all the ones closing via Yong Yea and instantly thought of Stephanie and the episode about the spiral of live services which was a favourite of mine. The Cassandra of Video Games strikes again!
I’ve been rewatching older episodes a lot recently and it was kind of surreal that I watched the last appearance of the Season of the Witch mask within hours of this episode going up. Pre-pandemic content almost feels like broadcasts from a fictional alternate timeline at this point, so seeing any continuity that reminds me it’s all real can be confusing.
I've actually seen live services done really well. In community led projects where the only goal is the improvement of the fun because thats all the community cares about, and the community is the one making it.
City of Heroes
So far, apart from the initial expense to buy the game, I’m pretty sure Deep Rock Galactic is totally free otherwise.
I'm honestly kind of surprised that some of them seem to be realizing that spitting out so many live services isn't tenable, I fully expected it to last longer than a decade before they started to slow down
"Lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee"
Yahtzees jingle rings more and more true every year, it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.
You forgot a very important word
@@mjc0961 YOU SAW NOTHING
"Live Services" remind me of Stringer Bell in The Wire. He didn't invest early in mobile phones because everyone had one, failing to have the foresight to see the reality of the market. Publishers invest too much in "live services" because they too lack the foresight to recognise the realities of the market. Just like 1st person shooter goldrush before, publishers would rather gamble millions in the hopes of finding their golden goose, than diversify and generate reliable revenue from an audience whose loyalty isn't generated from addiction. Doesn't matter how many "live services" fail and classic style games succeed, they'll never learn.
When I think of the only successful live service games, Destiny and Genshin Impact, they invest substantially in their expansions to keep players engaged. A lot of the other live services either don't have the resources or aren't willing to commit. They just see the $ and blindly chase after it.
Genshin is a bit different from all of the games mentioned in this video in that it is a Gacha game, and as such has a different business model than live service games that depend on battle passes and such. Gacha games primarily target “whales” for revenue, people willing to sink thousands of dollars in the hopes of pulling the monthly character or variant.
Another well known Gacha game is Fate/Grand Order.
there's no way those are the only ones, right? I know live services are rarely any good, but that's such a low percentage of success...
Thank you for always having full, non-generated captions on your videos.
You warned us for years but most didn't pay heed. I was shunned on a FB group when I kept mentioning how live service games are scams (not all but most)
Square enix is especially funny for this because the two examples of their somewhat successful online games are ones they either seem to resent or not understand. They have tried to kill ffxi multiple times but the director and leaders of the team have managed to push back against it, and any attempt at replicating the success of ffxiv since its rebuilding after the initial failure (WHICH WAS USED AS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE ABOUT WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN MAKING A GAME LIKE THIS ACTUALLY WORK, although it was in an earlier time before the market was saturated) have all failed, the best they've managed to do is put a bit more resources into annoying stuff in xiv's online cosmetic store, and while there's a lot fo cool stuff to unlock in the game, if nobody used the mog station stuff you could easily pretend it doesnt exist, but they dont, and I despise it. They made a mount based on a cool boss design from the game, and rather than put it as a reward for beating that boss in the minimum gear challenge setting in the game, it costs £20.
JSS is always right.
LOL Zilla got rekt by OG Godzilla.
If you mention a 9th game shutdown by SquareEnix, you could play the Psx original song for Chocobo Gp.
My live service of choice just announced end of service. It ran for 10 years and has a sequel on the horizon, so it had a real good run. It also took the store offline the second they made the announcement. There were signs, but the company never came out and said anything until the store was already gone. So it is possible to have good live service model games! You just gotta, you know, actually treat it like a game and put love and effort into it just like any other game.
what game is this one?
The Squenix bit is extra baffling because they already have a massively successful live service gane that is IMO, one of the best, in FFXIV
And they want like 20 more of those. At the same time.
They'll find a way to squeeze more profit out of FFXIV, too, I'm sure. Yoshi P and the dev team can only hold them off for so long :/
No meme I was excited for that suicide squad game until that image leaked of the interface. Instantly went from "I'm excited about rocksteady's next game" to "if I'm loading into repetitious missions from a lobby to get loot I'd rather die"
I hope Stephanie gets multiple offers from gaming companies, just to literally light the printouts on fire for the channel. It would be some great validation for the demonstrated foresight.
Namco has a problem where they put out gatchas for the Tales of Series and then ax them for a new one so fast that even the most dedicated fans of the franchise have mostly stopped bothering with them
Publishers don't seem to notice that most of the successful live service games have developers that don't _do_ many other things outside of maintaining and expanding on the live service.
Right? Like, look at Destiny 2 - it’s going great right now, and is preparing to launch another major expansion to the story that will bring all kinds of new content to the game.
Notice how many other games Bungie’s been working on besides Destiny?
Yeah, it’s not a big number.
Thank you for being vocal about this predatory practise! More than worthy of a gloat imo
We all knew this was coming...well most of us, i just didn't expect them to all end within weeks of each other!
I've wanted to be a video game director since I was a child (1840's) and your content is simultaneously so satisfying and frustrating.
I'm so crushed that Crimesight is going down. There are plenty options to have local/offline play together without the servers running, they're just going to yeet a fun game like that, I hate it so much.
I THOUGHT I saw that graphic cycle somewhere before... It's a good thing James Stephanie Sterling archives a lot of this stuff to make sure we don't forget the shit the Games Industry has continuously tried to pull.
"Gold rush" is being generous, unless you see the CEOs as underwater, trying desperately not to drown while still clinging to the golden cement shoes at their feet...
Would be accurate, except that the CEOs of these big companies never pay the price. They get big bonuses even if they sink the company, and it's the workers that end up fired and broke because of the CEO's bad decisions.
1:38 The tipping point was Strategic Simulations releasing Neverwinter Nights as part of the AOL service in 1991, followed by SOE releasing EverQuest in 1999.
A start of a great monday.
Thank God for Mondays! (and Jim)
It's really hard to break into the live service market. Once you have your big popular ones, your PubG, Fortnite, Rainbow 6 Siege, Overwatch, Destiny 2, DBD etc, that all offer something just different enough, there's not much incentive to go to others. People have already invested tons of time, money and effort into the other ones, and so they don't have the time or desire to get into another one.
The Cassandra of gaming strikes again.
4:32 That one was doomed from the start as a tie-in to an anime adaptation of a manga. When there's no more manga to adapt, no more anime, no more live service. Dai in Dragon Quest Tact has more of a prospective future than Dai in his own game lol. (Not that that's saying much when Dai's game wa shinderu)
You mentioning people being overworked and underpaid reminded me of an article (I forget where, but it was a major news publisher) where somebody was actually trying to argue that it was unfair to employers to make them pay minimum wage to the disabled because they were incapable of working as much as everybody else. They stopped just short of actually saying that disabled people weren't real people, but you could read the intent between the lines.
Well, that's disgusting.
Welcome to capitalism, where humans are not seen as living beings, but soulless machines.
We keep going backward in time. It's like the number of times one has to have a debate about minimum wage. We have these rules for a reason...
Anyway, we all know what the capitalist/alt-right class would do if they could get away with it. People aren't people in their eyes. They would gladly build gas chambers. As it is, they are always dead-set on cutting social programs, essentially starving the underclasses into silent submission... the Republicans getting bolder about cuts to Medicare and Social Security is another blatant sign of the not-so-quiet part being said out loud. Lest we forget that capitalism has always aligned itself pretty well with social Darwinism/Nazism and history repeats itself.
When people start complaining about content creators like JSS bringing up these issues in the first place, they are responsible for trying to ignore the obvious. It well applies to society at large, not just this shitty "entertainment" industry, and some of us don't have the luxury of ignoring it.
Reminds me of that time companies wanted to pay 14 year olds below minimum wage because they weren’t fully adults despite having them working besides actual adults.
The odd thing is there was a perfect circle... And it wasn't too different to the ubi circle.
Let Devs have enough time and money to make a good game -> players enjoy a good game -> more people buy said game -> more profit -> let Devs have enough time and money to make a good game...
I am shocked to realize that Rumbleverse didn't even last as long as my current relationship. I feel like that thing JUST dropped.
It did just drop. Summer of 2022.
What's a Rumbleverse?
Much like JSS I'd never heard of it until it died. It was good?
@@Jackalblade9 It actually was, which makes its shutdown disappointing. The only major failure with Rumbleverse was the complete lack of marketing to get people into it. JSS might have even enjoyed it considering the combat was basically WWE wrestling on steroids.
@@avengeddisciple Awww, now I'm bummed. That sounds like the first battle royale game I'd have enjoyed.
Problem with wheels is that despite how wonderful it feels to soar through the air, at some point, you're being ground into the mud.
The bubble has well and truly burst. And while I am pained to see developers close up products they enjoyed making (Knockout City), I am very happy to see this proliferation of money grubbing nonsense get taken down a few pegs.
Nail on head with the MMO craze analogy, Back then nobody every stopped to ask the question of "is this game good enough to pry players away from WOW?" because unless it was you were never going to succeed
Fast forward to the current gold rush there was a bit more leeway because there were genres to play in but unless in your chosen live service space you were able to genuinely pull players away from games like Fortnight and Destiny why even bother?
Also I think its telling that both times the industry has don't this dance the success stories aren't the games trying to cynically cash in on the gold-rush but rather the pioneers that whilst yeah they struck a money vein did so trying to build a system they thought would work for their game. Like say what you want about destiny, but its clear that it was envisioned as a way to bring a WOW style MMO to consoles via a sci-fi FPS with a universe so lore dense Bungie clearly gave a shit about what they were trying to make, as opposed to say something like Anthem, that was built purely to get in on a money making trend with fairly limited creative passion behind it.
I've never even considered wearing an actual mask when my face looks as busted as the Shroud of Turin after a night out .. see, that's why you get paid the big bucks! 💚
The fact that it was a jack o lantern mask in February is *chefs kiss*
@@haphazardlark1502 Even in winter, always be spookin’
History maybe doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes
Cool, something to watch while I work.
Same here, thanks steph 😀
Me three
Great video. I almost feel the same way about the explosion of streaming platforms and content. Like guys...we can only consume so much content.
more halloween themed costumes throughout the year would be rad :O
Halloween is pretty great as vibes go
The further away from Halloween the costumes and masks make their appearances the more fun it is imo
Thank god for you and your lovely Zant figure on the shelf. So happy to see Live services are in freefall after all these years.
Related note, I don't think Skyrim was that good of a game. But it did come out when we were all sick of shooter games, so it was a breath of fresh air.
Wondering if we can finally return to good games or if there's some new horror on the horizon
I really liked Rumbleverse, it was a genuinely unique take on the Battle Royale formula. I just wish I could have gotten friends to play it.
Back 4 Blood may have gotten three expansions, but they dropped support a little over a year after launch. The plans and promises they had for future development are unlikely to materialize now that they're pulling the plug, choosing instead to devote their resources to... another new game. Sounds a lot like they're planning to swindle their customers for a third time. B4B can't even depend on mod support like Left 4 Dead 2, a game that continues to thrive 13 years after release. If history is anything to go by, Back 4 Blood is now on deathwatch, ready to join its fellow DOA predecessor Evolve in the grave.
... there's expansions?
publishers: this infinite money machine we've come up with is what players want
players: .....
publishers: wait what why aren't you feeding money into the infinite money machine? I thought that was what you asked for?
I actually think the constant events in Pokemon Go are counter productive and I suspect they are the same in other live service games. In the early days of Pokemon Go people played on the side when they had time. There very rarely were events, so you didn't miss out when you couldn't play for a few days or weeks. Even raids were in circulation for like a month, so plenty of time to catch the raid mons.
Now you have one event after another, after another, after another. The result: It does feel like a job keeping up with all of it and fatigue sets in. I know many people who quit. Even I quit for over a year. Only got back into it recently, but not sure how long that will last. And that's not just anecdotal the player base is shrinking rapidly. But do these dumbasses learn from it? No. Their takeaway seems to be that they have to pack the game with even more fomo-stuff and make it even more into a grind. Good luck with that one...
Honestly I'm living for the weird show and tell sections
Gotta bookend the coverage of miserable shit that needs coverage because it refuses to stop being miserable shit that hurts people with some moments that are just fun and good. The action figure box being placed on the pinball machine and sliding back off onto the floor was my favorite, the pained groaning noises as the tamogachi was inverted coming in at a close second
My favorite of these segments was the WereBear plush from a few years ago, it unlocked a core memory(tm) for me lmao