Hey all, Nick here! Thanks for the feedback on the first episode. Decided to go with the name Unpacked for the show, and we're working on the branding now for it with Javed! Should have a new episode up every other week going forward on the weekends, discussing big industry topics, some more personal takes on games, and so on. Hope you enjoy it!
Games from the 90s NEVER had this problem. Sure, some of them have the usual bugs and glitches but you can ALWAYS come back and replay them, even DECADES LATER, WAY past the game's release date. No BS online connection needed too.
The game isn't supposed to be fun. Fun can be satisfying, satiating, which is exactly what you don't want in a live service game. It doesn't drive revenue. The business model for live service is addict, then frustrate. Add in artificial limits (like season passes and things where you have to keep repeating levels to progress), or things that block progression until a certain amount of time elapsed (mobile games), then let people pay to avoid the artificial limits.
Committing to not time gating content goes a long way for attracting me to the game. But the reality is that I'm actually pretty terrible at gaming despite being a lifelong fan. It takes me a long time to finish games, and I've got books and shows to watch too. After trying to come back to Destiny 2 after they turned off the expansion I was playing through, I'm not really interested in any live service anything. MMOs are a similar situation; I don't want to feel guilted into playing your game because I dropped thirty bucks on the subscription or battle pass, I want to enjoy my entertainment when I want (or can, really) and not be penalized for wanting or needing to spend time elsewhere. Give me another rock-solid single player or couch co-op game and I'm there.
if the experience is based solely on multiplayer, i can understand why publishers opted for live services and i can tolerate them if they're also free but if i'm buying a $70 game that has live service and also focuses on campaign/single player story experience, we're going to have a problem
@@GreenLantern814 If something demands as much time as a full time job, I better be getting paid. I will spend as much free time on a game if I enjoy it, not because it is pushing FOMO on me. I understand timed modes and cosmetics as long as they show up again within a year.
Corporations typically chase trends in society, that's normal. What isn't normal is the cynical, if not sociopathic psychological manipulation of these models to get you to spend money in our pretty shitty economy.
@@AchedSphinx Yes, they did. And no, they didn't. On the surface, they did go after an existing market once they saw the potential of the battle royale formula. But when you recall all the details, they actually _pivoted_ into said formula with an existing, finished product that no one would've developed from scratch as a battle royale game. Fortnite was a third-person cartoon with building mechanics - i.e. nothing like PUBG. I'd say it was less chasing a trend and more lucky seizure of an opportunity. And obviously, luck played a huge role in it. Epic didn't cook up the Fortnite plan. It just kind of worked out for them.
@@wizzenberrythats cuz the devs obviously wanna make it and they had fans for it with helldivers 1. No one wanted rocksteady to make this game. When it was announced i was confused cuz they were suppose to be making a superman game.
"We anticipate this game will still be riding high as the sun itself burns out and dies, billions of years from now." -Corpos "We are sunsetting the game as its first quarter was unfortunately less profitable than models predicted. Thank you for your passionate engagement and understanding, we look forward to three more awesome days with you all in our favorite game." -The same Corpos, three months later
@@SimuLordThat's not what the suits will learn from this. Instead, they will shut down the studios that are struggling too much, and try to replace them by buying some independent AA studios. Those new acquisitions will be given creative independence for a while, then the money machine will start squeezing them to produce more profits sooner, and the cycle continues.
@@Kris-wo4pj The thing is, how do you make a Superman game make sense? He's indestructible and nothing poses a threat to him. He's the ultimate Marty Stu character that doesn't work in a game loop.
I've always liked to say that "Live Service games will all one day be Dead Service games." They're all created with a tombstone half-chiseled ready for their inevitable demise. There's a generation that just expect this and don't comprehend that a "dead game" doesn't have to stop existing because the developers/publishers stopped funding the servers. But in an era where every piece of software is part of a "subscription" whether you want it to be or not, we don't even own the games we pay for regardless.
Between Cold Take, Extra Punctuation, and now this new series, I'm realizing that some of the best non-ZP material for me on this channel is hearing members of the team just say out-loud whatever interesting thoughts have been bouncing around inside their skulls. Good job with this one Nick, I'm always happy to have another opinion show to add to my diet.
People only have so much time in a day. If you found a live service game that you like, you have no reason to try a new one. Inevitably, they come crawling back to a past favorite. So ultimately, the reason live services fail is the same reason so many MMOs failed.
I’ve been really enjoying Nick’s return to the video stuff. He’s a very passionate and knowledgeable dude who cares deeply about the industry. In this one and the last one; it could have been very easy to get heated and mad, but he stays level headed and insightful. No judgement to fans or haters - he’s just laying out the facts. Excited for more of this series.
More like it doesn't need to learn anything as long as it is profiting continuously. Merit doesn't matter in the long run, and thus passion projects are left to die.
@@fieryrebirth This is the way it has been. People decide every day whether or not it will continue to be so. Sadly, a lot of people just seem too deep into their sunk cost fallacy arguments of "This must be a great way to make games, I spent so much on all those pre-purchases so I could get the bonuses I don't entirely remember what they were! It's you guys who are crazy, I'm gonna keep being cool over here in coolsville". Still, it's never too late. We should believe they can get there.
What's really wild is that the game includes Captain Boomerang, a character known for using boomerangs, and he's standing on top of a building shooting enemies with a sniper rifle. That's really the only bit of evidence one needs to know that boardroom suits dictated this game's development. Suit: "We should turn this into a looter shooter live service." Dev: " That's not the game we want to make and we truly believe that the live service and looter shooter markets are oversaturated." Suit: "Looter shooters and live services make money. Turn this game into one. Here's a list of popular characters for you to include that market research shows will increase profits." Dev: *looking over list then stops suddenly* "King Shark? Captain Boomerang? These characters don't really work for a looter shooter. They rarely if ever even use guns." Suit: "Listen, no one cares about the source material. They're popular characters right now. They'll bring in sales. Use them. It'll be fine." *proceeds to make 1000 other inane demands to ensure the game's failure all while thinking it'll bring in a billion dollars*
I swear to god nothing killed my enthusiasm for this game faster than Captain Boomerang with a gun. Is it so much to ask to play as a goofy Silver Age villain?
That's the main feature it killed the hype for the game for me. When it was first announced, i was excited for all the Arkham style combos and counters i can do with the Suicide Squad characters, i imagined so many boomerang related gadgets and Harley using her bat or hammer for different attack combos, but it was revealed it was a looter shooter, my excitement went to zero. And i love some looter shooters, the Borderlands series is between my favourite games, but for a Rocksteady game, it just doesn't fit.
Thing is, even if they wanted some excuse to sell people loot, they could still stay authentic. Captain Boomerang could ya know, use boomerangs as a ranged weapon and you could easily add some lights or different casings to have variety. Same with King Shark. Oh, he bites people as his main melee attack? Give him grills then. I don’t know what he’d have for a ranged attack, but given this is a superhero world and all sorts of random tech, you could make some justification. Maybe he does some sort of ground slam that sends out a linear shockwave across the ground. Give him brass knuckles or gloves or whatever. But suits probably saw “guns” and said “stick to guns” or they wanted it out faster so there wasn’t a chance to experiment… or the studio is sapped of all/most of its actual talent, and the people involved just didn’t care.
it'd be cool to have a character that has to time their attacks to do more damage and get extra effects. Boomerangs work because you would be able to combo with them as they return @@affsteak3530
@mrshmuga9 give Captain Boomerang a moveset based on the (now dead) Rogues tech. Ice, fire, tornado, lightning, sonic, and a sticky bomb boomerang. Pins on his hat and shoulder patch cosmetics. King Shark? Tech based hydrokinesis. Also fin based bling.
God it's wonderful to see a video from the man in charge himself. It feels like there's a purposeful diversity in the cast doing the videos on this channel and I'm totally here for it.
Back under The Escapist, I really just had a lot of my creative drive driven out of me by having to report to corporate suits every week and trying to keep people coming to our content so we could stay alive. Now that I don't report to people that don't care about our content in the slightest and just wanted to pump us for money, I'm excited again and have been having a lot of fun just being back in the editing side of things!
@@SecondWindGroup It is kind of amazing (and sad) how much power and authority these people have over our lives, isn't it? I mean, nobody voted for them, they aren't on TV or social media telling us what they are about, we can't ask them their positions on important issues that affect our lives. Hell, most of us don't even know their names or what they look like! But they often have more control over our lives and more influence over our time than the members of government we see on the news constantly...
@@Jedi_Vigilante And best of all, Second Wind themselves prove that these arseholes just aren't needed. SO much of our entertainment is made bland because of these suits. I'm absolutely sick of them, especially when they go and "remake" some old game or show I love and then fill it with crap because a focus group told them so, and the ever present desire to "expand" for "modern audiences" blabla. It's like for fucks' sakes, the ORIGINAL game had to appeal to NEW people and it managed, why do you think it still wouldn't do so? AND you have all the original fans there too! Double-win, but nope, not good enough, they then have to make it bland and crap. I'm having so much fun playing older games, rather than new ones, and unironically watching Kdrama now rather than bland hollywood crap.
Think live-service games are what killed my passion for gaming for a solid few years, I just didn`t realize it at the time. They aren`t games, they are work, they can never be fun, otherwise the "players" wouldn`t feel the need to buy the pay to win things from the shops. Nowadays I`d never even try a "free" game, there is no point, it`s just exhausting having to be constantly on alert to the many ways how a game company would try to trick me into spending more of my money on their "games". Behind every "chance" event I have to wonder if the odds have been altered specifically against me, to make me desperate enough to give in to just a little microtransaction boost to get me to the good part.
@@DenyTheWitch There are tons of indie games with more impressive and demanding visuals than Shovel Knight though, if that's what you care about. But yeah, not many that will press a 4080 admittedly. That said, how many actual GOOD AA or AAA games are there out there that can meaningfully utilize a 4080? Even at 4K. Maybe like 1 or 2 a year if you're lucky. I'd assume you're playing most games at 120+ fps, because there's usually not much else to do with that performance.
@@backlogbuddies the bottleneck of the whole generation is hardware of current consoles. Which means until we will be 2 years into next cycle with something like PS6 and XBOX720... Any game will run and look good on rtx3060/3070 because they will be made with limits of PS5 in mind.
You know what games are still fun? The old Batman Arkham games. And I can download and play any one of them right now from my library, and that (probably...) isn't changing.
MORE players were playing Arkham Knight this weekend on Steam. And MoRE viewers on Twitch too. Arkham games still great, and servers will never shit down.
I'm glad you mentioned "As numbers rain like confetti". I was watching some footage of the game from other RUclipsrs and I felt like the numbers flow like blood decals in Brutal Doom. The impact of a Super Shotgun reducing a Cacodemon to gibs replaced with a stream of digits, the game *telling* me I've done damage in place of making me *feel* like it. Is this what the modern audience wants? Their upgrades reduced to simply changing the weapons color and making the number go up? Thinking of Project Brutality for Doom, I'm reminded of how *every* weapon you get has a specific use. The starter pistol has a silencer, so you can force some infighting with a little strategy as you bait returning fire. The SMG fires faster with a bigger magazine, the .45 uses more ammo per shot but hits like a truck. Every weapon category has this kind of system in place, making each one special. The live service model paints an item orange and tells me I got something amazing. The Dragons Breath shells light up the room and lets the combat tell me I got something amazing. "Fire! Fire fire waaaaaaah!" vs "400, 400, 600 (but in orange)"
"bro trust me, this weapon does +0.5% damage against Infantry-type enemies, it's GOTTA be good, AND the name is orange!!" I'm so glad Cyberpunk scrapped this fucking system and now works like a real video game instead of an Excel spreadsheet with how many numbers there are
I don’t know why, but Borderlands is basically the only time I’m okay with having numbers displayed. Every other game that does it that isn’t an RPG, it feels wrong.
"We'd like you to pay full price for a game that _might_ be good, eventually, if you continue to pump money into it. In the mean time, we're hoping that social pressure from other players will keep you invested and putting a part-time job's worth of time into it, not because it's enjoyable in itself, but because our market plan is counting on it." I _get_ why a marketing department would think that is a good idea; what I don't get is why they think anyone with two brain cells would buy such a product more than once.
I think another layer to all this is that either players have already bought an engagement ring to another live service game and can’t be pulled away, or they’re already been burnt out and they’re savvy to all the tricks another LS game will pull. I’m definitely in the latter camp with Destiny 2.
Or a third thing, they’re interested, but want to see how it’s supported and if it’ll be supported long. If the game is good but they take 4 months to release an update, that initial interest will subside, and proven it’s not worth investing their time.
A lot of the current issues with GaaS are shared with the MMO genre, namely that when you're making a game which commands a lot of time out of your playerbase, it also requires a lot of money and development time to keep the players sated. Once revenue starts to take a hit, content will start to slow down for the game, which encourages leaving the game for new pastures, which only reduces revenue even more, creating an infernal cycle that will continue until shut down. In addition, players only have so many hours in a day to spend playing games, if there are 10 games they want to play which each want them to put 20 hours a week into, expect them to drop all but 1-2 of them. In contrast, single player non-GaaS games are much better because you get a full experience out of the gate, and those games respect your time much better by letting you be able to get everything you want without forcing you to play 20 hours a week.
But I also think a lot of AAA publishers don't actually know how to design, fund and budget for a Live Service game. Take a look at Genshin Impact or Fortnite, those are the two most expensive games ever made... they spend and keep spending to keep earning. Genshin costs $100 million to develop, and by the time its second anniversary they spent another $400 million dollars in post-content development. But all these AAA developers see the dollar signs of revenue and think they can cut costs, cut corners, cut staff (or lose staff due to poor retention) and crunch. I don't see EA or WB dropping half-a-billion dollars for a Live Service game, but that is what it takes. (Sony just bought Bungie for that price and hoped for the best, and then immediatly failed.
@boxhead6177 All great points. Gacha are successful because they have a 2-week content loop, which is insane, but they invest a lot back into their games and they are generally of "AA Quality" or lower. Genshin actually fuels, supplements, or subsidizes the development of *three* separate games. Shareholders see the numbers it rakes in and don't realize how much of that money goes back into the games. Gacha live and die on those 2-3 week content update cycles, and by adding variety. The Live Service western titles are somehow missing that point. Lower development costs (but still crazy reinvestment) is what lets the successful ones thrive. The lower-budget ones are still getting an enormous amount of content. And dozens of gacha die every year, they can't afford 7 year development cycles before launch.
This game makes me so fuckin sad, cuz when I heard “Co-Op Suicide Squad game by Rocksteady where you take down the Justice League,” I thought that would be INCREDIBLE!!!! The variety in the close quarters combat styles, ability to do combos with eachother, fighting big bosses together… And it’s such a dropped ball. And Redfall was the same damn thing last year for me, Arkane Studios is my genuine favorite developer (both Austin and Lyon), and that one still stings. It reminds me of a joke in the show Silicon Valley where this billionaire was like “oh, digital currency? Yeah no, alotta money in that, did a big push, made like 13, only one worked though, kinda.”
Just been playing Skull & Bones Open Beta. Almost all of your points are very present in that game. What hit hardest is you can see the potential greatness, but it's been pushed aside to make way for the live service.
Just a add information, Marvels avengers when the servers shut down got a patch to remove microtransactions and made all the content playable offline. And the week before shut down got a huge sale.
Proposal: it's not that the industry doesn't learn from its mistakes, it's that projects have so much momentum that it takes years to turn the ship around. Sometimes the sunk cost is too great. See this and Redfall.
Also, it doesn't matter if 9 high budget live services tank and fail if just one blows up and dethrones Fortnite, or one of the other big ones. It's like a gambling addict chasing the big payout. It doesn't matter how much they lose along the way, as long as they win big.
A lot of these games can be summed up as "I already have Borderlands at home, and it doesn't require another $10-15 every month to play"... There is a lot of dopamine production in the "big numbers, bright colors, lots-o-loot" game model, but just like anything else it has diminishing returns over time. Eventually, the same amount just doesn't have the same effect. You can either try to ramp up the quantity, or look for a different source. Game publishers hate trying anything new because there are fewer assurances of a return on investment, so they go for the ramp up option. The problem is we've already hit critical mass here, and now what was once fun and exciting is now just more grind. The fact that it is also tied into a financial model that is a never-ending money sink certainly doesn't help...
I love Borderlands, i love DC and i love Suicide Squad, but this game just doesn't interest me at all. It's like the game was intended to market for me, but it failed completely. I really hoped this would have had Arkham style combat and less wacky movement (and also no live service), it would have been a day 1 buy for me.
I do think we're coming up on the end of this craze, yah. Feels like a lot of companies saw what those early Live Service successes were pulling in, the notion that you can have all the ongoing sales success of a F2P MMORPG without the MMORPG, and launched big projects to try to take advantage... and they all ran into each other. There's just only so much room for these types of games, and its probably been known for a while that a lot of these games were most likely going to fail, but sunk cost won out in the end. Folks have to remember that these massive projects are like ocean liners, it takes a LOT of time and effort for them to change direction. Suicide Squad was announced with a trailer in 2020, which probably means they'd been working on the game for a few years already. Probably too late to pivot at that point, and they really only had the options of canceling the game or seeing if they could at least make some of the already massive production budget back...
I think it's telling that the last few massive successes in game design came from smaller (indie) studios or even mods that evolved into huge IPs as they got picked up by big studios. Fortnite is a modded version of a coop defense game that was made by the Epic developers who were fans of PUBG which was originally a mod of ARMA 3. Dayz was a mod of ARMA 2 which spawned a whole bunch of pvpve survival games. League of Legends is one of many offshoots of DOTA which was a mod of Warcraft 3. Counter-Strike was a mod for Half-Life. Minecraft was made by one guy in JAVA. Binding of Isaac, Vampire Survivors, Dwarf Fortress, Stardew Valley, Undertale, etc. Point is, you can't really look at big studios to innovate anymore. There are some tried-and-true methods that work well (GTA, Nintendo stuff) but even that isn't about innovation as much as refreshing the same old crap. If you really want something fresh and new, the ones with the most money are the least likely to give it to you. Find the one passionate person in their basement programming their own little game to get something good.
Well the big bucks mean they can have psychologists on staff to optimise the Pavlovian conditioning these games overtly leverage to extract money from players.
Oddly enough the thing that's kept my personal favourite Pavlov going was never a live service, it was the community fostered that enjoy making all manner of new content in terms of maps, weapons, and custom game modes.
Communities make the experience last longer. With both Runescape and Warfraem it was the people I could talk to in various chats that kept me engaged until I eventually still had had enough.
@@CrysJaL Yeah I was gonna say Warframe was a good example of that. I also lost interest, but the community aspect of it with the clans and stuff kept me engaged for 600 hours. Haggling with people in trades etc. Same with Runescape actually, but like 20 years ago I mean. Runescape is unplayable to me now, even OSRS, because you almost never see anyone talking. The game's playerbase is like 50% bot farms, and everyone else is either chatting in discord instead or just playing it like a singleplayer game. If you played the game in 2004 your friends list was full by the end of the first year because people playing it back then were constantly chatting to each other whilst they did stuff. Some complete random comes up to you whilst you're chopping a tree and asks "WC lvl?", then 5 hours later you were doing quests with him lol. That's basically gone now.
@@yewtewbstew547 That is such a shame, it really seems like Discord, encouraging people to be in their own "social silos" is killing social experiences.
Games with Live Service crap is an immediate turnoff for me. Can't wait till the industry stops chasing that trend, most people only have enough time to play a couple and the dumbass execs need to realize that.
It's not just about time for me: I've played enough Live Service games to realize that their content, as a general rule is almost always bland, boring and uninspired. It's not just time consuming - it's a waste of my time in the first place. I can waste my own time just fine without paying for it. I'm actually quite good at it.
@@Zynet_Eseled Besides, it's some kind of looter-shooter or a similar genre, right? Never cared for those types of games anyway, I find them rather boring, even if they're not Live Service Games. Give me a narrative driven RPG or Adventure-Puzzle game any day. I'd even prefer some Walking Simulators over Shooters, honestly. But I admit, that just comes down to my personal preference.
@@Zynet_Eseled "well priced" is a nonsense statement to someone old enough to remember a time before content was cut out, repackaged, and sold separately as "microtransactions" and "dlc". Scamming people into paying for cosmetics is pathetic and I have no patience for it - just as I have no patience for the grind designed specifically to wear players down until they spend money to skip it.
i got recommended this after trying out the open beta of Skull and Bones, and being immensely underwhelmed. I am walking away, still lusting for the pirate parts of Black Flag (sword play, sailing and ship combat, exploration) to be made into its' own full thing. Back to Black Flag, Rogue, and Sid Meier's Pirates! for me.
And the way they can do it with a fraction of the production, budget or marketing of these AAA live service shills. It just baffles how even after years of repeated flops this still keeps happening.
Pro-consumer live service is an oxymoron, there is no such thing. The entire concept is anti-consumer by design. You pay us forever until you don't at which point no one gets to play this thing ever again. A live service is a dead game walking the minute it launches, it just depends how long until the trigger is pulled by the publisher. That's not good for any consumer ever.
Warframe needs to be in this conversation. They have been churning out absolutely massive updates for 10 years now without any subscription or other bs AND has tradable premium currency.
@@devilmikey00 That's not how deep rock works though. It gets seasonal updates, but after each season the contents of the battle pass go into the regular loot pool. The battle pass is free, too. Also, the game is fully p2p and can be played offline. The only monetization it has is cosmetic dlc packs that release with each season. It really is like, the only pro consumer live service game.
Well Nick, these are great. I dig it. It's honest, forthright, very direct, succinct, and inspired the following tag line for ya... Let's get this all out in the open, all right?
I don't know if we can say for sure that the work put into these "games" had any passion at all. From what I remember of the interviews of the devs behind Anthem, I believe the devs there were pretty much forced into making the game, 'cus EA was jelly of Destiny and wanted the same thing, more or less.
Even some of the pioneers in 'looter shooter' design like Borderlands have crumbled ino unrecognisable slop, and games like Destiny 2 seem to perpetually struggle with cycles of player burnout and people getting completely fed up and tired with stringing 3 hours of content over 7 weeks of weekly released 'story' missions. I think you hit the nail on the head with the focus on single-player success stories for a similar reason to why Manga is outselling Comics, people want a coherent, focused story experience without the kind of dross the industry uses to try and create a perpetual money printer. Think of the eternal "reboots" or "events" of comics and look at the 3-monthly "season" cycles of Live Service models, I think they're pushing people away for similar reasons.
The thing is... Warframe exist. No battle passes, no extension to buy every 3 months, none of that. And we do get newbies regularly. And DE (the developer) laid off some people, sure, but it was their publishing branch, nothing to do with the game. And the game IS good. And propose so many different game loop, it doesn't get stale unless YOU make it stale. I think live services CAN work, but only if they take inspiration from how Warframe does it, and more importantly, their devs who are fine with people taking a break from it.
These "Live Service Games" aren't games, these are services with games attached. The monetization is the first design objective, everything else has to wriggle around that - which results in basic gameplay loops, since you need "content" that can be easily influenced by your purchase decisions.
5:35 Think my earliest recollection of disliking "live-service" style content would've been way back when WoW 1st came out with repeatable "Daily" missions. It just felt so low-effort. I did them. Ran all the dailies, got all the things. And ye, learned how non-rewarding it all really was. Half-full glass, we're on the downward slope of the live-service mountain. It'll still be rough, so many devs losing their livelihoods, but at least it's winding to a close much like the MMO race in the late 2000s heh
It's funny that focus groups are mentioned, because - yeah, they probably did focus test this, and what's more, the focus testers might not even be gamers. They drag in people from "a diverse group" to make sure it's not biased, and in turn get people ranging from "never held a controller" to "only played a FIFA one time" and the odds of getting actual gamers is low as hell. So yeah, those people probably thought the game would make a mint.
I firmly believe that the Live Service model is dying, at least the side that isn't free to play, but publisher uphold that model because the games were years in development and reworking them into a more sustainable model costs more money. Sony cancelled quite a lot of their 12 planned live service titles, but sadly not all of them.
Nice video. These games are fun at first and can honestly get very boring and tiring the first half hour after that it is just fake smiles and trying to get as much fun out of it. Keep up the good work.
It is possible to make the live service model work. Sadly too many companies want the cash at the end instead and not the work it takes to get there. Make good product, make lots of sales. Why is that so hard to comprehend???
We have been warned about 'Games as a service' for years and it is coming to fruition that many have correctly feared. The BIGGEST issue will be about personal ownership of games.
In retrospect "Notes from the Editor" would be a cool name to vibe with the whole "online magazine" aesthetic I feel could be a selling point for Second Wind to certain audiences.
I completely agree with you. I see all of these perpetually on-line game series as nothing more than a money-grab which is bankrupt of ideas. More of the same, over and over with a veneer of new skins; I'll play old single-player stand-alone and indie titles. These guys won't get my money.
Thia is why i stick to single player only games. They got dozens of hours of gameplay. No predatory FOMO tactics. And yea lots of new games are bad now but with little patience you wait a few years the game gets fixed and is 50+% off its finally ready to play and worth buying. In the meantime plenty of older games that are on deep discount during sales still worth playing. Especially if you enjoy open world sandboxy games you can play them forever.
What's so silly is it's a live service game, but it's not multiplayer, all the updates are free, and you can go back to old seasons whenever you want. The live service mobius strip is complete. We have wrapped back around to making normal games
My personal live service casualty is Dreadnought. Hugely fun alpha and beta with an addictive multilayer loop, that was in 'beta 2' buried under paid services and a dumb tier system
I want to like the Suicide Squad game so much. It had everything going for it; good main and side characters, good premise, good studio, etc. But then they perfectly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when they revealed it was an always online, live-service gear-grinder with 3 unique mission types repeated infinitely from start to end. Add on a $100 AUD price tag and mediocre gun-play and you've successfully lost me. The worst part of all is that it wouldn't be impossible to "fix" the game from where it currently is. A few more varied missions that aren't just "go to location, kill everything, obtain loot", an option to play offline to experience the story without the online gear-grinding (maybe even a local multiplayer option in offline mode), more emphasis on the individual characters' combat styles and making them feel like actual classes instead of all of them playing the exact same and shooting the exact same guns (e.g. Deadshot being more critical hits/priority target focused, Shark being more of a tank and having more abilities related to heavy weapons and/or melee, Boomerang being more hit-and-run and running around at top speed drawing agro from the team, Harley maybe pulling more from the Arkham games and focusing on hitting combos and dodging hits, etc.), and I could see this game being upgraded to perfectly average, perhaps even good. But since it's a live-service game, the plug will likely be pulled in a few months time when the studio decides it isn't worth keeping the servers running, meaning all of the good parts will be thrown out and the issues will never be fixed, condemning this game to being remembered as below average forever.
One of the things Pat and Woolie have talked about that makes the most sense is the reason studios never give up trying to push themselves into a market so saturated is because it only takes one really good success to make back all that was lost. It's sorta like the gambler's fallacy, if they just keep sinking money into it, the hope is it'll finally pay off with the jackpot, so they'll burn as many projects and people as it takes chasing it. The prospect of near infinite money is too tempting to pass on, even if the chances of success are as low as the actual lottery.
That and these big live service games take years to make and by then the market is already saturated. You can't just make something as bland and generic like KTJL, it needs to stand out. At least Pat is having fun with Helldivers 2 (after the whole sync to psn kerfuffle) gonna be a fun podcast next week.
Here's the thing though. Anthem had the building blocks to be an amazing singleplayer game. Solid combat and traversal, a good story with high stakes, an insanely detailed world and lore. It was all there. The requirements of liveservice killed Anthem. It could have been the third main Bioware singleplayer IP, alongside Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
That's not even getting into the mobile side of the live service equation which completely collapsed last year. Much like MMO's there is only a finite amount of time and money people can spend and only a handful of games can succeed when time and money are constantly demanded by a game. By the time any studio is chasing a money sink multiplayer trend of any kind, it's already too late.
It's just so depressing man. Artists and programmers had to design and code the game, to meet the bare minimum corporate wanted Rocksteady to reach. And what's the result? Suicide Squad barely even reached the numbers Crystal Dynamic's Avenger's had on the first day.
The more companies lose money on dead end projects like these the better. We should always vote with out wallets and buy games we're really interested into.
The contrast in the near adjacent launch of suicide squad and granblue fantasy relink shows how people will still enjoy games with some of these traits if they're given the appropriate care, uniqueness and respect for the player. By focusing the game much more on cool bpss fights it avoids the generic trash mob slop most of these games fall into and manages to feel more like monster hunter, while being mpre fast paced and approachable.
I'm doing my own independent work trying to catalogue all the tech layoffs, but it's fascinating to me how No Man's Sky, Fortnite, and League of Legends all kinda popularized this bill of "make the least game for the most profit and sell it CONSTANTLY." I don't remember battlepasses before Fortnite took off, and I know Tencent owns like all of the properties that function like this. 3:10 your point about the "end goal" is SO true. Noah Caldwell-Gervais, Folding Ideas, and Hbomberguy ALL enjoyed No Man's Sky at launch, they found joy despite the situation. Their opinions now exist for a game that is completely unrecognizable. It filled its "launch promises" but lost the simple, understated quiet that it had. Ever since, it feels like other major AAA companies are assuming they can just do the same thing. I already played Borderlands 2 for over 100 hours, I wish they'd stop trying to fill that void with a soulless re-creation of what made that game fun.
The industry's always been sink or swim, but suddenly sinking means your hard work disappears forever and swimming means iterating on that hard work at the exclusion of all else... until it disappears forever. I just hate to think how much money needs to be lost before these developers have a chance at an outcome that isn't completely void of meaning.
The main problem I see with live service games, and I say this a lot, is playing one is like having another job. A person really only has the time and money to play one. I play Warframe. It's a flawed grindy mess with a story and art style I like, with some fun gameplay. I've sunk too much money into it (free to play but cosmetics ain't cheap) and way too much time (over 3000 hours, I've been playing it for about 6 years now). Now I can only speak for myself, but I imagine any player of a live service game must think the same, but if a new game wants to grab my attention it has to have enough content, and be a good enough game to not only be better than the one I'm playing, but also overcome the cost I've already sunk into my current live service game. And Suicide Squad just isn't it. Neither was Avengers. The amount of effort needed to create a live service game that can compete in the current market of live service games would be better used to make a solid single player experience. But companies just see "Fortnite make lots money, we want lots money" and run their heads to the same brick wall over and over again.
As someone who barely has free time anymore & who is only invested in 4 Live Services (Fortnite, Pokemon GO, Monster Hunter NOW & Pikmin Bloom) everything Nick is saying resonates with me. I would love to play a King Shark videogame in the style of something like XMen Origins: Wolverine or the Deadpool game from the PS3 era, but since Fortnite & Destiny make billions of dollars, AAA companies obsessively chase after that end point, even though it's already been fulfilled by those games. It's kind kf like how Square Enix & Ubisoft both chased after NFTs after they thought they could make money off them, only for the massive financial losses & backlash to steer them away. Also yes, I'm counting Niantics biggest 3 games as Live Services since even though they're phone games that require constant battery life tk play, they also only work if you're connected to the Internet & have a GPS signal. So the servers need to be Live for it to be a working Service (or Pedometer in Pikmin Bloom's case).
Soap Opera Games. No ending just a constant stream of tune in next time with a release schedule designed to never give you time to stop and think and move on.
Unfortunately the root of all these live service games is quite simple - corporate greed. So long as that exists, cash-grabs will remain endemic to this industry, alongside many others. Values have to change before behaviour does, and all that follows from it, and that kind of transformation can take centuries, so I think corporate short-sightedness is here to stay for most of our lifetimes!
I must ask. What is the name of the song that starts at 0:58, that is used throughout the video? It sounds good! I didn't see it credited anywhere in the video.
The idea that players will just drop whatever live service game they've already invested countless hours of their time into to swap to your product is a thought these kinds of developers and publishers need to forget ASAP. Suicide Squad isn't going to do Destiny numbers because the Destiny players aren't going to play it.
I think an issue with the philosophy behind these games is that on release, you're arguably buying the game at it's lowest point. Every live service game launches at it's weakest state, then (supposedly) gets better with content updates, balance patches, DLCs etc. It's just not a very enticing sell to play something like suicide squad and finish the campaign when it's essentially in an extended beta still. You'll have to play through all of it again when there's new characters, new missions etc. so why even bother in the first place.
My fear is that they won't learn anything from this and that they'll do what other studios did: blame the industry for being too competitive, blame the developers for not making the game good enough, or worse and most insulting, blame the players for not spending enough money when they had the chance. The problem with the industry is that they've made so much money that they can blatantly insult their audience to their faces and then just go on to the next project expecting that either we'll listen and feel bad, or we'll have forgotten about what they said. And up to now, it's actually worked.
I constantly tell people that live service games, or anything with microtransactions, simply cannot be good. Because the entire game has to be designed around those systems from the very beginning for them to actually work. And those systems are always anti-fun. Even if you don't notice it, every part of the game is negatively effected by the mere existence of those systems. So like a house built on sand, its incredibly difficult to make anything solid on top of such a weak foundation. Now, this doesn't mean you can't enjoy these games at all. They almost always have at least some small part that's still fun. That's the hook that gets you in the door, and hopefully willing to ignore the mountain of intentional problems surrounding the good parts. Not to mention how these games are anything but permanent. Either because the servers got shut down, or because a patch comes out and ruins everything you liked about it, they all inevitably become unplayable. And that point is coming faster and faster every day. And because all these flaws are intentional, they will never improve. Its pointless to wait and hope that any live service will ever become more fun, because that's simply not what companies behind them ever want. So the only thing we can do is abandon the whole idea, and let it starve to death.
Layoffs have nothing to do with game performance in the marketplace and *everything* to do with management maintaining its socioeconomic distance from labor. This is especially notable when a game performs well, as the resulting layoffs reify and sustain the myth of infinite growth while also offsetting the expense of stock buybacks (which, remember, used to be illegal for almost exactly the same reason that they lead to layoffs) such that executives receive bonuses.
I never undestand how anyone can buy live service games with price of normal game. For me myself I never bought this type of games, couse i don’t see a point spending money on base game where everything is behind wallpay. Its like buying house where is mostly nothing in it at same price of Perfectly furnished and nice painted.
Gunning down hordes as Beeg Numbers rain like Confetti needs more than just that to hold interest. Even the great ones in the genre (hello Warframe) need something that can genuinely hold the long term interest, and can make the grind feel worth it (in Warframe, that's the collection aspect, and the fact that basically any weapon and Warframe can be viable, where the more stuff you gather, the easier it is to experiment with new builds. It's not a treadmill, it's a staircase.) And given that I barely have time or interest even in Warframe, after the 1,300 hours I've put into it... If even one of the great games in the genre isn't keeping me locked in, what hopes does something like Suicide Squad have?
The "wasting so much work" part is what really hurts. Suicide squad looks amazing, the animations and the charm the characters have when moving around is extremely good. The sound design is incredible too from what I've seen. We could've had a great game if they weren't constrained to the endless replayable live service model. But all of that art. All of those months of work are going to be tossed into the trash, never to be played because WB thought that, even though this is a game you can play completely in single player, you can't do that without an internet connection.
Live service games have no business being priced 70$. You either make it free with micro transaction (like genshin impact) or 20-30$ and 2-3$ for each new content.
Great opening. There is so much of a struggle now when you sit down on a Friday night to find a game worth playing. Every highlighted release is just a waste of time so I think the average AAA customer just rebuys a game they new was good from the last generation rather than scroll for an hour through Skinner box and Skinner box
To me what fundamentally makes pretty much kills every live service game is the fact that they are very obviously more concerned about keeping me playing it than entertaining me. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if you couldn't literally feel how much money and effort was spent for the sole purpose of keeping you playing. And it's so painful that none of these companies seem to understand that if they'd put all that money and effort into making a fun game, people would want to keep playing it by themselves, no extra effort on their part required.
Tfw doesn't even mention Destiny Before it was cool title of Warframe when naming successful live service games. Truly it is the forgotten step child of the industry
Hey all, Nick here! Thanks for the feedback on the first episode. Decided to go with the name Unpacked for the show, and we're working on the branding now for it with Javed! Should have a new episode up every other week going forward on the weekends, discussing big industry topics, some more personal takes on games, and so on. Hope you enjoy it!
It's a plain and easy to understand, simple name. A very good choice in my opinion.
Games from the 90s NEVER had this problem. Sure, some of them have the usual bugs and glitches but you can ALWAYS come back and replay them, even DECADES LATER, WAY past the game's release date. No BS online connection needed too.
Imagine if all this money wasted on Live service games was instead given to Ukraine
A double tragedy
The game isn't supposed to be fun. Fun can be satisfying, satiating, which is exactly what you don't want in a live service game. It doesn't drive revenue.
The business model for live service is addict, then frustrate. Add in artificial limits (like season passes and things where you have to keep repeating levels to progress), or things that block progression until a certain amount of time elapsed (mobile games), then let people pay to avoid the artificial limits.
Love the “Always Sunny” reference
Live services = I can't play the game at my own pace = no game preservation = I don't play this game.
They did say seasonal content will be repayable so you don't miss out on anything
Committing to not time gating content goes a long way for attracting me to the game. But the reality is that I'm actually pretty terrible at gaming despite being a lifelong fan. It takes me a long time to finish games, and I've got books and shows to watch too.
After trying to come back to Destiny 2 after they turned off the expansion I was playing through, I'm not really interested in any live service anything. MMOs are a similar situation; I don't want to feel guilted into playing your game because I dropped thirty bucks on the subscription or battle pass, I want to enjoy my entertainment when I want (or can, really) and not be penalized for wanting or needing to spend time elsewhere. Give me another rock-solid single player or couch co-op game and I'm there.
if the experience is based solely on multiplayer, i can understand why publishers opted for live services and i can tolerate them if they're also free but if i'm buying a $70 game that has live service and also focuses on campaign/single player story experience, we're going to have a problem
You hold yourself to standards like I do. I’m proud of you. Hopefully people will become like you and I and “live service” will die.
@@GreenLantern814
If something demands as much time as a full time job, I better be getting paid. I will spend as much free time on a game if I enjoy it, not because it is pushing FOMO on me. I understand timed modes and cosmetics as long as they show up again within a year.
as Yahtzee says, Executives chasing trends will never capture that lightning in a bottle
Corporations typically chase trends in society, that's normal. What isn't normal is the cynical, if not sociopathic psychological manipulation of these models to get you to spend money in our pretty shitty economy.
It's like creating great music
Be inspired but also be unique and great
didn't fortnite do this?
You know the problem with chasing something, right?
By definition you will always be behind it.
@@AchedSphinx Yes, they did. And no, they didn't. On the surface, they did go after an existing market once they saw the potential of the battle royale formula. But when you recall all the details, they actually _pivoted_ into said formula with an existing, finished product that no one would've developed from scratch as a battle royale game. Fortnite was a third-person cartoon with building mechanics - i.e. nothing like PUBG. I'd say it was less chasing a trend and more lucky seizure of an opportunity. And obviously, luck played a huge role in it. Epic didn't cook up the Fortnite plan. It just kind of worked out for them.
5,033 24 hour peak players on Steam right now and they expect this to last 13 seasons? I don't think this game will last even a month.
helldivers 2 is 150k LOL, sony W
@@wizzenberrythats cuz the devs obviously wanna make it and they had fans for it with helldivers 1. No one wanted rocksteady to make this game. When it was announced i was confused cuz they were suppose to be making a superman game.
"We anticipate this game will still be riding high as the sun itself burns out and dies, billions of years from now."
-Corpos
"We are sunsetting the game as its first quarter was unfortunately less profitable than models predicted. Thank you for your passionate engagement and understanding, we look forward to three more awesome days with you all in our favorite game."
-The same Corpos, three months later
@@SimuLordThat's not what the suits will learn from this. Instead, they will shut down the studios that are struggling too much, and try to replace them by buying some independent AA studios. Those new acquisitions will be given creative independence for a while, then the money machine will start squeezing them to produce more profits sooner, and the cycle continues.
@@Kris-wo4pj The thing is, how do you make a Superman game make sense? He's indestructible and nothing poses a threat to him. He's the ultimate Marty Stu character that doesn't work in a game loop.
I swear the editing team for SW are getting more unhinged and I love them for it.
Love it! Want more wild videos like this
Yep. Sweet Baby are villains
I've always liked to say that "Live Service games will all one day be Dead Service games." They're all created with a tombstone half-chiseled ready for their inevitable demise. There's a generation that just expect this and don't comprehend that a "dead game" doesn't have to stop existing because the developers/publishers stopped funding the servers. But in an era where every piece of software is part of a "subscription" whether you want it to be or not, we don't even own the games we pay for regardless.
Between Cold Take, Extra Punctuation, and now this new series, I'm realizing that some of the best non-ZP material for me on this channel is hearing members of the team just say out-loud whatever interesting thoughts have been bouncing around inside their skulls. Good job with this one Nick, I'm always happy to have another opinion show to add to my diet.
People only have so much time in a day. If you found a live service game that you like, you have no reason to try a new one. Inevitably, they come crawling back to a past favorite. So ultimately, the reason live services fail is the same reason so many MMOs failed.
I’ve been really enjoying Nick’s return to the video stuff. He’s a very passionate and knowledgeable dude who cares deeply about the industry. In this one and the last one; it could have been very easy to get heated and mad, but he stays level headed and insightful. No judgement to fans or haters - he’s just laying out the facts. Excited for more of this series.
Yep. He's got a real "I'm not mad, I'm just deeply disappointed" vibe going on, and I love it 🤣
"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything te-hee-hee"
Doesn't really seem that funny anymore 😞
More like it doesn't need to learn anything as long as it is profiting continuously. Merit doesn't matter in the long run, and thus passion projects are left to die.
😬😬😬
@@classycasual3910 we're all crying on the inside
@@fieryrebirth This is the way it has been. People decide every day whether or not it will continue to be so. Sadly, a lot of people just seem too deep into their sunk cost fallacy arguments of "This must be a great way to make games, I spent so much on all those pre-purchases so I could get the bonuses I don't entirely remember what they were! It's you guys who are crazy, I'm gonna keep being cool over here in coolsville". Still, it's never too late. We should believe they can get there.
What's really wild is that the game includes Captain Boomerang, a character known for using boomerangs, and he's standing on top of a building shooting enemies with a sniper rifle. That's really the only bit of evidence one needs to know that boardroom suits dictated this game's development.
Suit: "We should turn this into a looter shooter live service."
Dev: " That's not the game we want to make and we truly believe that the live service and looter shooter markets are oversaturated."
Suit: "Looter shooters and live services make money. Turn this game into one. Here's a list of popular characters for you to include that market research shows will increase profits."
Dev: *looking over list then stops suddenly* "King Shark? Captain Boomerang? These characters don't really work for a looter shooter. They rarely if ever even use guns."
Suit: "Listen, no one cares about the source material. They're popular characters right now. They'll bring in sales. Use them. It'll be fine." *proceeds to make 1000 other inane demands to ensure the game's failure all while thinking it'll bring in a billion dollars*
I swear to god nothing killed my enthusiasm for this game faster than Captain Boomerang with a gun. Is it so much to ask to play as a goofy Silver Age villain?
That's the main feature it killed the hype for the game for me. When it was first announced, i was excited for all the Arkham style combos and counters i can do with the Suicide Squad characters, i imagined so many boomerang related gadgets and Harley using her bat or hammer for different attack combos, but it was revealed it was a looter shooter, my excitement went to zero. And i love some looter shooters, the Borderlands series is between my favourite games, but for a Rocksteady game, it just doesn't fit.
Thing is, even if they wanted some excuse to sell people loot, they could still stay authentic. Captain Boomerang could ya know, use boomerangs as a ranged weapon and you could easily add some lights or different casings to have variety. Same with King Shark. Oh, he bites people as his main melee attack? Give him grills then. I don’t know what he’d have for a ranged attack, but given this is a superhero world and all sorts of random tech, you could make some justification. Maybe he does some sort of ground slam that sends out a linear shockwave across the ground. Give him brass knuckles or gloves or whatever. But suits probably saw “guns” and said “stick to guns” or they wanted it out faster so there wasn’t a chance to experiment… or the studio is sapped of all/most of its actual talent, and the people involved just didn’t care.
it'd be cool to have a character that has to time their attacks to do more damage and get extra effects. Boomerangs work because you would be able to combo with them as they return @@affsteak3530
@mrshmuga9 give Captain Boomerang a moveset based on the (now dead) Rogues tech. Ice, fire, tornado, lightning, sonic, and a sticky bomb boomerang. Pins on his hat and shoulder patch cosmetics.
King Shark? Tech based hydrokinesis. Also fin based bling.
God it's wonderful to see a video from the man in charge himself. It feels like there's a purposeful diversity in the cast doing the videos on this channel and I'm totally here for it.
Back under The Escapist, I really just had a lot of my creative drive driven out of me by having to report to corporate suits every week and trying to keep people coming to our content so we could stay alive. Now that I don't report to people that don't care about our content in the slightest and just wanted to pump us for money, I'm excited again and have been having a lot of fun just being back in the editing side of things!
@@SecondWindGroup It is kind of amazing (and sad) how much power and authority these people have over our lives, isn't it? I mean, nobody voted for them, they aren't on TV or social media telling us what they are about, we can't ask them their positions on important issues that affect our lives. Hell, most of us don't even know their names or what they look like! But they often have more control over our lives and more influence over our time than the members of government we see on the news constantly...
@@Jedi_Vigilante And best of all, Second Wind themselves prove that these arseholes just aren't needed.
SO much of our entertainment is made bland because of these suits. I'm absolutely sick of them, especially when they go and "remake" some old game or show I love and then fill it with crap because a focus group told them so, and the ever present desire to "expand" for "modern audiences" blabla.
It's like for fucks' sakes, the ORIGINAL game had to appeal to NEW people and it managed, why do you think it still wouldn't do so? AND you have all the original fans there too! Double-win, but nope, not good enough, they then have to make it bland and crap.
I'm having so much fun playing older games, rather than new ones, and unironically watching Kdrama now rather than bland hollywood crap.
And a pleasant voice to listen to 👍
Think live-service games are what killed my passion for gaming for a solid few years, I just didn`t realize it at the time. They aren`t games, they are work, they can never be fun, otherwise the "players" wouldn`t feel the need to buy the pay to win things from the shops. Nowadays I`d never even try a "free" game, there is no point, it`s just exhausting having to be constantly on alert to the many ways how a game company would try to trick me into spending more of my money on their "games". Behind every "chance" event I have to wonder if the odds have been altered specifically against me, to make me desperate enough to give in to just a little microtransaction boost to get me to the good part.
The indie scene is more alive than ever though. There are plenty of great titles to be found that have none of the AAA-game nonsense.
@@clarkmichaels822 Indie games have their own audience. I didn't buy an RTX 4080 to play Shovel Knight.
@@DenyTheWitch There are tons of indie games with more impressive and demanding visuals than Shovel Knight though, if that's what you care about. But yeah, not many that will press a 4080 admittedly. That said, how many actual GOOD AA or AAA games are there out there that can meaningfully utilize a 4080? Even at 4K. Maybe like 1 or 2 a year if you're lucky. I'd assume you're playing most games at 120+ fps, because there's usually not much else to do with that performance.
4080 is worthless anyways
@@backlogbuddies the bottleneck of the whole generation is hardware of current consoles.
Which means until we will be 2 years into next cycle with something like PS6 and XBOX720...
Any game will run and look good on rtx3060/3070 because they will be made with limits of PS5 in mind.
It should be a requirement for the entire "Let's go whaling" conference to play before the intro to every live service game.
You know what games are still fun?
The old Batman Arkham games. And I can download and play any one of them right now from my library, and that (probably...) isn't changing.
MORE players were playing Arkham Knight this weekend on Steam. And MoRE viewers on Twitch too. Arkham games still great, and servers will never shit down.
I'm glad you mentioned "As numbers rain like confetti". I was watching some footage of the game from other RUclipsrs and I felt like the numbers flow like blood decals in Brutal Doom. The impact of a Super Shotgun reducing a Cacodemon to gibs replaced with a stream of digits, the game *telling* me I've done damage in place of making me *feel* like it.
Is this what the modern audience wants? Their upgrades reduced to simply changing the weapons color and making the number go up? Thinking of Project Brutality for Doom, I'm reminded of how *every* weapon you get has a specific use. The starter pistol has a silencer, so you can force some infighting with a little strategy as you bait returning fire. The SMG fires faster with a bigger magazine, the .45 uses more ammo per shot but hits like a truck. Every weapon category has this kind of system in place, making each one special.
The live service model paints an item orange and tells me I got something amazing. The Dragons Breath shells light up the room and lets the combat tell me I got something amazing. "Fire! Fire fire waaaaaaah!" vs "400, 400, 600 (but in orange)"
"bro trust me, this weapon does +0.5% damage against Infantry-type enemies, it's GOTTA be good, AND the name is orange!!"
I'm so glad Cyberpunk scrapped this fucking system and now works like a real video game instead of an Excel spreadsheet with how many numbers there are
I don’t know why, but Borderlands is basically the only time I’m okay with having numbers displayed. Every other game that does it that isn’t an RPG, it feels wrong.
"We'd like you to pay full price for a game that _might_ be good, eventually, if you continue to pump money into it. In the mean time, we're hoping that social pressure from other players will keep you invested and putting a part-time job's worth of time into it, not because it's enjoyable in itself, but because our market plan is counting on it."
I _get_ why a marketing department would think that is a good idea; what I don't get is why they think anyone with two brain cells would buy such a product more than once.
Because they foolishly believe they have “the one”. Not because there’s any reason to, but because they want it to happen.
That comment at the end about Focus Groups was extremely subtle and visceral. I love it.
I expect Nick to up the ante in the future such as, "I hope we players have made your shareholders happy."
I think another layer to all this is that either players have already bought an engagement ring to another live service game and can’t be pulled away, or they’re already been burnt out and they’re savvy to all the tricks another LS game will pull. I’m definitely in the latter camp with Destiny 2.
Or a third thing, they’re interested, but want to see how it’s supported and if it’ll be supported long. If the game is good but they take 4 months to release an update, that initial interest will subside, and proven it’s not worth investing their time.
A lot of the current issues with GaaS are shared with the MMO genre, namely that when you're making a game which commands a lot of time out of your playerbase, it also requires a lot of money and development time to keep the players sated. Once revenue starts to take a hit, content will start to slow down for the game, which encourages leaving the game for new pastures, which only reduces revenue even more, creating an infernal cycle that will continue until shut down. In addition, players only have so many hours in a day to spend playing games, if there are 10 games they want to play which each want them to put 20 hours a week into, expect them to drop all but 1-2 of them.
In contrast, single player non-GaaS games are much better because you get a full experience out of the gate, and those games respect your time much better by letting you be able to get everything you want without forcing you to play 20 hours a week.
But I also think a lot of AAA publishers don't actually know how to design, fund and budget for a Live Service game. Take a look at Genshin Impact or Fortnite, those are the two most expensive games ever made... they spend and keep spending to keep earning. Genshin costs $100 million to develop, and by the time its second anniversary they spent another $400 million dollars in post-content development. But all these AAA developers see the dollar signs of revenue and think they can cut costs, cut corners, cut staff (or lose staff due to poor retention) and crunch.
I don't see EA or WB dropping half-a-billion dollars for a Live Service game, but that is what it takes. (Sony just bought Bungie for that price and hoped for the best, and then immediatly failed.
@@boxhead6177 genshin gets an insane amount of content too. i hav eheard there are 3 seperate teams working on patch content
@boxhead6177 All great points. Gacha are successful because they have a 2-week content loop, which is insane, but they invest a lot back into their games and they are generally of "AA Quality" or lower. Genshin actually fuels, supplements, or subsidizes the development of *three* separate games. Shareholders see the numbers it rakes in and don't realize how much of that money goes back into the games.
Gacha live and die on those 2-3 week content update cycles, and by adding variety. The Live Service western titles are somehow missing that point. Lower development costs (but still crazy reinvestment) is what lets the successful ones thrive. The lower-budget ones are still getting an enormous amount of content. And dozens of gacha die every year, they can't afford 7 year development cycles before launch.
This game makes me so fuckin sad, cuz when I heard “Co-Op Suicide Squad game by Rocksteady where you take down the Justice League,” I thought that would be INCREDIBLE!!!! The variety in the close quarters combat styles, ability to do combos with eachother, fighting big bosses together… And it’s such a dropped ball. And Redfall was the same damn thing last year for me, Arkane Studios is my genuine favorite developer (both Austin and Lyon), and that one still stings.
It reminds me of a joke in the show Silicon Valley where this billionaire was like “oh, digital currency? Yeah no, alotta money in that, did a big push, made like 13, only one worked though, kinda.”
Just been playing Skull & Bones Open Beta. Almost all of your points are very present in that game. What hit hardest is you can see the potential greatness, but it's been pushed aside to make way for the live service.
Just a add information, Marvels avengers when the servers shut down got a patch to remove microtransactions and made all the content playable offline. And the week before shut down got a huge sale.
Proposal: it's not that the industry doesn't learn from its mistakes, it's that projects have so much momentum that it takes years to turn the ship around. Sometimes the sunk cost is too great. See this and Redfall.
Also, it doesn't matter if 9 high budget live services tank and fail if just one blows up and dethrones Fortnite, or one of the other big ones. It's like a gambling addict chasing the big payout. It doesn't matter how much they lose along the way, as long as they win big.
A lot of these games can be summed up as "I already have Borderlands at home, and it doesn't require another $10-15 every month to play"...
There is a lot of dopamine production in the "big numbers, bright colors, lots-o-loot" game model, but just like anything else it has diminishing returns over time. Eventually, the same amount just doesn't have the same effect. You can either try to ramp up the quantity, or look for a different source. Game publishers hate trying anything new because there are fewer assurances of a return on investment, so they go for the ramp up option. The problem is we've already hit critical mass here, and now what was once fun and exciting is now just more grind.
The fact that it is also tied into a financial model that is a never-ending money sink certainly doesn't help...
I had the same thought re: Borderlands, though I suppose that I'm not the target audience
I love Borderlands, i love DC and i love Suicide Squad, but this game just doesn't interest me at all. It's like the game was intended to market for me, but it failed completely. I really hoped this would have had Arkham style combat and less wacky movement (and also no live service), it would have been a day 1 buy for me.
I do think we're coming up on the end of this craze, yah. Feels like a lot of companies saw what those early Live Service successes were pulling in, the notion that you can have all the ongoing sales success of a F2P MMORPG without the MMORPG, and launched big projects to try to take advantage... and they all ran into each other. There's just only so much room for these types of games, and its probably been known for a while that a lot of these games were most likely going to fail, but sunk cost won out in the end.
Folks have to remember that these massive projects are like ocean liners, it takes a LOT of time and effort for them to change direction. Suicide Squad was announced with a trailer in 2020, which probably means they'd been working on the game for a few years already. Probably too late to pivot at that point, and they really only had the options of canceling the game or seeing if they could at least make some of the already massive production budget back...
I think it's telling that the last few massive successes in game design came from smaller (indie) studios or even mods that evolved into huge IPs as they got picked up by big studios.
Fortnite is a modded version of a coop defense game that was made by the Epic developers who were fans of PUBG which was originally a mod of ARMA 3. Dayz was a mod of ARMA 2 which spawned a whole bunch of pvpve survival games. League of Legends is one of many offshoots of DOTA which was a mod of Warcraft 3. Counter-Strike was a mod for Half-Life. Minecraft was made by one guy in JAVA. Binding of Isaac, Vampire Survivors, Dwarf Fortress, Stardew Valley, Undertale, etc.
Point is, you can't really look at big studios to innovate anymore. There are some tried-and-true methods that work well (GTA, Nintendo stuff) but even that isn't about innovation as much as refreshing the same old crap. If you really want something fresh and new, the ones with the most money are the least likely to give it to you. Find the one passionate person in their basement programming their own little game to get something good.
It's telling that your average mobile game feels like it has a less predatory gameplay loop nowadays than a big bucks live service game.
thats because triple A developers LOATH mobile games and want to be like them in revenue gain
@@handson4580 According to Ubisoft, they are now quadruple A developers now... because THAT'S what will drive more interest in their games lol
That why I just play 1.7.10 Minecraft.
Well the big bucks mean they can have psychologists on staff to optimise the Pavlovian conditioning these games overtly leverage to extract money from players.
God, isn't that a scary thought.
I hate this live-service trend. It makes games disposable products
No. Stop thinking, buy the battle pass, finish your dailies, get a new Mythic weapon, like a good CONSOOMER
At this point I don’t touch live service games cause you never know when stuff you paid for is gonna be ripped away. It’s not even a question of if.
Oddly enough the thing that's kept my personal favourite Pavlov going was never a live service, it was the community fostered that enjoy making all manner of new content in terms of maps, weapons, and custom game modes.
Communities make the experience last longer. With both Runescape and Warfraem it was the people I could talk to in various chats that kept me engaged until I eventually still had had enough.
@@CrysJaL Yeah I was gonna say Warframe was a good example of that. I also lost interest, but the community aspect of it with the clans and stuff kept me engaged for 600 hours. Haggling with people in trades etc.
Same with Runescape actually, but like 20 years ago I mean. Runescape is unplayable to me now, even OSRS, because you almost never see anyone talking. The game's playerbase is like 50% bot farms, and everyone else is either chatting in discord instead or just playing it like a singleplayer game. If you played the game in 2004 your friends list was full by the end of the first year because people playing it back then were constantly chatting to each other whilst they did stuff. Some complete random comes up to you whilst you're chopping a tree and asks "WC lvl?", then 5 hours later you were doing quests with him lol. That's basically gone now.
@@yewtewbstew547
That is such a shame, it really seems like Discord, encouraging people to be in their own "social silos" is killing social experiences.
Games with Live Service crap is an immediate turnoff for me.
Can't wait till the industry stops chasing that trend, most people only have enough time to play a couple and the dumbass execs need to realize that.
It's not just about time for me: I've played enough Live Service games to realize that their content, as a general rule is almost always bland, boring and uninspired.
It's not just time consuming - it's a waste of my time in the first place. I can waste my own time just fine without paying for it. I'm actually quite good at it.
@@LadyDoomsinger Agreed, most of them are mid at best.
@@Zynet_Eseled Microtransactions, always online. Not worth my time.
@@Zynet_Eseled Besides, it's some kind of looter-shooter or a similar genre, right? Never cared for those types of games anyway, I find them rather boring, even if they're not Live Service Games.
Give me a narrative driven RPG or Adventure-Puzzle game any day. I'd even prefer some Walking Simulators over Shooters, honestly. But I admit, that just comes down to my personal preference.
@@Zynet_Eseled "well priced" is a nonsense statement to someone old enough to remember a time before content was cut out, repackaged, and sold separately as "microtransactions" and "dlc". Scamming people into paying for cosmetics is pathetic and I have no patience for it - just as I have no patience for the grind designed specifically to wear players down until they spend money to skip it.
I absolutely love the punk, anti-establishment attitude of the second wind crew, finally people saying the things that matter!
i got recommended this after trying out the open beta of Skull and Bones, and being immensely underwhelmed.
I am walking away, still lusting for the pirate parts of Black Flag (sword play, sailing and ship combat, exploration) to be made into its' own full thing. Back to Black Flag, Rogue, and Sid Meier's Pirates! for me.
Meanwhile Deep Rock Galactic is showing them how to make bank AND make a pro-consumer live service game.
And the way they can do it with a fraction of the production, budget or marketing of these AAA live service shills. It just baffles how even after years of repeated flops this still keeps happening.
Pro-consumer live service is an oxymoron, there is no such thing. The entire concept is anti-consumer by design. You pay us forever until you don't at which point no one gets to play this thing ever again. A live service is a dead game walking the minute it launches, it just depends how long until the trigger is pulled by the publisher. That's not good for any consumer ever.
Warframe needs to be in this conversation. They have been churning out absolutely massive updates for 10 years now without any subscription or other bs AND has tradable premium currency.
@@devilmikey00 That's not how deep rock works though. It gets seasonal updates, but after each season the contents of the battle pass go into the regular loot pool. The battle pass is free, too. Also, the game is fully p2p and can be played offline. The only monetization it has is cosmetic dlc packs that release with each season. It really is like, the only pro consumer live service game.
@@Jotil and their tenth year content was some of the strongest ever... and they have very consistent player numbers.
Well Nick, these are great. I dig it. It's honest, forthright, very direct, succinct, and inspired the following tag line for ya...
Let's get this all out in the open, all right?
Man evolve shutting down hurt so much
it had so much potential and looked amazing
This is amazing. BRB sending to 50 people.
liking and commenting for the algorithmn, hope you guys and gals continue to find your pace and find your place in the industry.
Work of countless passionate developers being tossed away as the revenue slightly declines...
Man that hit me hard.
I don't know if we can say for sure that the work put into these "games" had any passion at all.
From what I remember of the interviews of the devs behind Anthem, I believe the devs there were pretty much forced into making the game, 'cus EA was jelly of Destiny and wanted the same thing, more or less.
Even some of the pioneers in 'looter shooter' design like Borderlands have crumbled ino unrecognisable slop, and games like Destiny 2 seem to perpetually struggle with cycles of player burnout and people getting completely fed up and tired with stringing 3 hours of content over 7 weeks of weekly released 'story' missions.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the focus on single-player success stories for a similar reason to why Manga is outselling Comics, people want a coherent, focused story experience without the kind of dross the industry uses to try and create a perpetual money printer. Think of the eternal "reboots" or "events" of comics and look at the 3-monthly "season" cycles of Live Service models, I think they're pushing people away for similar reasons.
It's awesome that you're making content right alone with Frost and Yahtzee! Love all you guys and can't wait for more!
The thing is... Warframe exist.
No battle passes, no extension to buy every 3 months, none of that. And we do get newbies regularly.
And DE (the developer) laid off some people, sure, but it was their publishing branch, nothing to do with the game.
And the game IS good. And propose so many different game loop, it doesn't get stale unless YOU make it stale.
I think live services CAN work, but only if they take inspiration from how Warframe does it, and more importantly, their devs who are fine with people taking a break from it.
These "Live Service Games" aren't games, these are services with games attached. The monetization is the first design objective, everything else has to wriggle around that - which results in basic gameplay loops, since you need "content" that can be easily influenced by your purchase decisions.
5:35 Think my earliest recollection of disliking "live-service" style content would've been way back when WoW 1st came out with repeatable "Daily" missions. It just felt so low-effort. I did them. Ran all the dailies, got all the things. And ye, learned how non-rewarding it all really was.
Half-full glass, we're on the downward slope of the live-service mountain. It'll still be rough, so many devs losing their livelihoods, but at least it's winding to a close much like the MMO race in the late 2000s heh
It's funny that focus groups are mentioned, because - yeah, they probably did focus test this, and what's more, the focus testers might not even be gamers. They drag in people from "a diverse group" to make sure it's not biased, and in turn get people ranging from "never held a controller" to "only played a FIFA one time" and the odds of getting actual gamers is low as hell.
So yeah, those people probably thought the game would make a mint.
I’m just personally surprised that Warfrane didn’t come up once in this video as one of, if not the only game to get this model right
This was a good video and hope the further these videos goes has them with long format.
2:47 "...and even those studios [inaudible] on those games..."
Subscribing to you today brother. Quality content. Respect!
I firmly believe that the Live Service model is dying, at least the side that isn't free to play, but publisher uphold that model because the games were years in development and reworking them into a more sustainable model costs more money.
Sony cancelled quite a lot of their 12 planned live service titles, but sadly not all of them.
Well the one that’s just come out, Helldivers 2, actually seems very promising.
Nice video. These games are fun at first and can honestly get very boring and tiring the first half hour after that it is just fake smiles and trying to get as much fun out of it. Keep up the good work.
It is possible to make the live service model work. Sadly too many companies want the cash at the end instead and not the work it takes to get there. Make good product, make lots of sales. Why is that so hard to comprehend???
Top tier pic for the music.... very nice chill background vibes. Kudos to the DJ on this one =p
Great video! Really looking forward to more of these from Nick
We have been warned about 'Games as a service' for years and it is coming to fruition that many have correctly feared.
The BIGGEST issue will be about personal ownership of games.
In retrospect "Notes from the Editor" would be a cool name to vibe with the whole "online magazine" aesthetic I feel could be a selling point for Second Wind to certain audiences.
I completely agree with you. I see all of these perpetually on-line game series as nothing more than a money-grab which is bankrupt of ideas. More of the same, over and over with a veneer of new skins; I'll play old single-player stand-alone and indie titles. These guys won't get my money.
Thanks for the great video, Nick & team. 😁
Thia is why i stick to single player only games. They got dozens of hours of gameplay. No predatory FOMO tactics. And yea lots of new games are bad now but with little patience you wait a few years the game gets fixed and is 50+% off its finally ready to play and worth buying. In the meantime plenty of older games that are on deep discount during sales still worth playing. Especially if you enjoy open world sandboxy games you can play them forever.
It's good to hear from Nick again, always happy to hear his thoughts on the state of gaming.
What's so silly is it's a live service game, but it's not multiplayer, all the updates are free, and you can go back to old seasons whenever you want. The live service mobius strip is complete. We have wrapped back around to making normal games
Spectacular as always Nick, love your writing, keep it coming.
My personal live service casualty is Dreadnought. Hugely fun alpha and beta with an addictive multilayer loop, that was in 'beta 2' buried under paid services and a dumb tier system
Such a satisfying game to play early on that just got crushed by its service model.
I want to like the Suicide Squad game so much.
It had everything going for it; good main and side characters, good premise, good studio, etc. But then they perfectly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when they revealed it was an always online, live-service gear-grinder with 3 unique mission types repeated infinitely from start to end. Add on a $100 AUD price tag and mediocre gun-play and you've successfully lost me.
The worst part of all is that it wouldn't be impossible to "fix" the game from where it currently is. A few more varied missions that aren't just "go to location, kill everything, obtain loot", an option to play offline to experience the story without the online gear-grinding (maybe even a local multiplayer option in offline mode), more emphasis on the individual characters' combat styles and making them feel like actual classes instead of all of them playing the exact same and shooting the exact same guns (e.g. Deadshot being more critical hits/priority target focused, Shark being more of a tank and having more abilities related to heavy weapons and/or melee, Boomerang being more hit-and-run and running around at top speed drawing agro from the team, Harley maybe pulling more from the Arkham games and focusing on hitting combos and dodging hits, etc.), and I could see this game being upgraded to perfectly average, perhaps even good.
But since it's a live-service game, the plug will likely be pulled in a few months time when the studio decides it isn't worth keeping the servers running, meaning all of the good parts will be thrown out and the issues will never be fixed, condemning this game to being remembered as below average forever.
Lovin the wide variety of stuff comin out
One of the things Pat and Woolie have talked about that makes the most sense is the reason studios never give up trying to push themselves into a market so saturated is because it only takes one really good success to make back all that was lost. It's sorta like the gambler's fallacy, if they just keep sinking money into it, the hope is it'll finally pay off with the jackpot, so they'll burn as many projects and people as it takes chasing it. The prospect of near infinite money is too tempting to pass on, even if the chances of success are as low as the actual lottery.
That and these big live service games take years to make and by then the market is already saturated. You can't just make something as bland and generic like KTJL, it needs to stand out.
At least Pat is having fun with Helldivers 2 (after the whole sync to psn kerfuffle) gonna be a fun podcast next week.
Here's the thing though. Anthem had the building blocks to be an amazing singleplayer game. Solid combat and traversal, a good story with high stakes, an insanely detailed world and lore. It was all there.
The requirements of liveservice killed Anthem. It could have been the third main Bioware singleplayer IP, alongside Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
That's not even getting into the mobile side of the live service equation which completely collapsed last year. Much like MMO's there is only a finite amount of time and money people can spend and only a handful of games can succeed when time and money are constantly demanded by a game. By the time any studio is chasing a money sink multiplayer trend of any kind, it's already too late.
It's just so depressing man. Artists and programmers had to design and code the game, to meet the bare minimum corporate wanted Rocksteady to reach.
And what's the result? Suicide Squad barely even reached the numbers Crystal Dynamic's Avenger's had on the first day.
The more companies lose money on dead end projects like these the better. We should always vote with out wallets and buy games we're really interested into.
The contrast in the near adjacent launch of suicide squad and granblue fantasy relink shows how people will still enjoy games with some of these traits if they're given the appropriate care, uniqueness and respect for the player. By focusing the game much more on cool bpss fights it avoids the generic trash mob slop most of these games fall into and manages to feel more like monster hunter, while being mpre fast paced and approachable.
I'm doing my own independent work trying to catalogue all the tech layoffs, but it's fascinating to me how No Man's Sky, Fortnite, and League of Legends all kinda popularized this bill of "make the least game for the most profit and sell it CONSTANTLY."
I don't remember battlepasses before Fortnite took off, and I know Tencent owns like all of the properties that function like this.
3:10 your point about the "end goal" is SO true. Noah Caldwell-Gervais, Folding Ideas, and Hbomberguy ALL enjoyed No Man's Sky at launch, they found joy despite the situation. Their opinions now exist for a game that is completely unrecognizable. It filled its "launch promises" but lost the simple, understated quiet that it had. Ever since, it feels like other major AAA companies are assuming they can just do the same thing.
I already played Borderlands 2 for over 100 hours, I wish they'd stop trying to fill that void with a soulless re-creation of what made that game fun.
The industry's always been sink or swim, but suddenly sinking means your hard work disappears forever and swimming means iterating on that hard work at the exclusion of all else... until it disappears forever. I just hate to think how much money needs to be lost before these developers have a chance at an outcome that isn't completely void of meaning.
The main problem I see with live service games, and I say this a lot, is playing one is like having another job. A person really only has the time and money to play one. I play Warframe. It's a flawed grindy mess with a story and art style I like, with some fun gameplay. I've sunk too much money into it (free to play but cosmetics ain't cheap) and way too much time (over 3000 hours, I've been playing it for about 6 years now). Now I can only speak for myself, but I imagine any player of a live service game must think the same, but if a new game wants to grab my attention it has to have enough content, and be a good enough game to not only be better than the one I'm playing, but also overcome the cost I've already sunk into my current live service game. And Suicide Squad just isn't it. Neither was Avengers. The amount of effort needed to create a live service game that can compete in the current market of live service games would be better used to make a solid single player experience. But companies just see "Fortnite make lots money, we want lots money" and run their heads to the same brick wall over and over again.
As someone who barely has free time anymore & who is only invested in 4 Live Services (Fortnite, Pokemon GO, Monster Hunter NOW & Pikmin Bloom) everything Nick is saying resonates with me. I would love to play a King Shark videogame in the style of something like XMen Origins: Wolverine or the Deadpool game from the PS3 era, but since Fortnite & Destiny make billions of dollars, AAA companies obsessively chase after that end point, even though it's already been fulfilled by those games. It's kind kf like how Square Enix & Ubisoft both chased after NFTs after they thought they could make money off them, only for the massive financial losses & backlash to steer them away. Also yes, I'm counting Niantics biggest 3 games as Live Services since even though they're phone games that require constant battery life tk play, they also only work if you're connected to the Internet & have a GPS signal. So the servers need to be Live for it to be a working Service (or Pedometer in Pikmin Bloom's case).
Soap Opera Games. No ending just a constant stream of tune in next time with a release schedule designed to never give you time to stop and think and move on.
Unfortunately the root of all these live service games is quite simple - corporate greed. So long as that exists, cash-grabs will remain endemic to this industry, alongside many others. Values have to change before behaviour does, and all that follows from it, and that kind of transformation can take centuries, so I think corporate short-sightedness is here to stay for most of our lifetimes!
"I don't know what focus groups told you that it is, but they must be rich by now." Good brutal honesty as always Nick💖
I must ask. What is the name of the song that starts at 0:58, that is used throughout the video? It sounds good! I didn't see it credited anywhere in the video.
The idea that players will just drop whatever live service game they've already invested countless hours of their time into to swap to your product is a thought these kinds of developers and publishers need to forget ASAP. Suicide Squad isn't going to do Destiny numbers because the Destiny players aren't going to play it.
"Same studio" in name only. All the people who were responsible for Arkham games being good left a while ago.
the irony of people being less willing to get these games out of fear it wont exist in a year, making it more likely it wont exist in a year
Do you have a copy of Salo on your shelf? That is a... Tough watch
Haha just generic b-roll footage
The live service gold rush feels like the MMO gold rush from the 2000s
Skull and bones is in beta right now and you can already add that to the failures list too.
I think an issue with the philosophy behind these games is that on release, you're arguably buying the game at it's lowest point. Every live service game launches at it's weakest state, then (supposedly) gets better with content updates, balance patches, DLCs etc. It's just not a very enticing sell to play something like suicide squad and finish the campaign when it's essentially in an extended beta still. You'll have to play through all of it again when there's new characters, new missions etc. so why even bother in the first place.
My fear is that they won't learn anything from this and that they'll do what other studios did: blame the industry for being too competitive, blame the developers for not making the game good enough, or worse and most insulting, blame the players for not spending enough money when they had the chance.
The problem with the industry is that they've made so much money that they can blatantly insult their audience to their faces and then just go on to the next project expecting that either we'll listen and feel bad, or we'll have forgotten about what they said.
And up to now, it's actually worked.
"For just a moment, let's assume I'm not a chief and editor of Second Wind".
Oh you and your humble brags Nick ;)
Live service endeavours are looking less like wild goose chases and more like Coyote and Road Runner skits.
I constantly tell people that live service games, or anything with microtransactions, simply cannot be good. Because the entire game has to be designed around those systems from the very beginning for them to actually work. And those systems are always anti-fun. Even if you don't notice it, every part of the game is negatively effected by the mere existence of those systems. So like a house built on sand, its incredibly difficult to make anything solid on top of such a weak foundation.
Now, this doesn't mean you can't enjoy these games at all. They almost always have at least some small part that's still fun. That's the hook that gets you in the door, and hopefully willing to ignore the mountain of intentional problems surrounding the good parts. Not to mention how these games are anything but permanent. Either because the servers got shut down, or because a patch comes out and ruins everything you liked about it, they all inevitably become unplayable. And that point is coming faster and faster every day.
And because all these flaws are intentional, they will never improve. Its pointless to wait and hope that any live service will ever become more fun, because that's simply not what companies behind them ever want. So the only thing we can do is abandon the whole idea, and let it starve to death.
Layoffs have nothing to do with game performance in the marketplace and *everything* to do with management maintaining its socioeconomic distance from labor. This is especially notable when a game performs well, as the resulting layoffs reify and sustain the myth of infinite growth while also offsetting the expense of stock buybacks (which, remember, used to be illegal for almost exactly the same reason that they lead to layoffs) such that executives receive bonuses.
I never undestand how anyone can buy live service games with price of normal game. For me myself I never bought this type of games, couse i don’t see a point spending money on base game where everything is behind wallpay. Its like buying house where is mostly nothing in it at same price of Perfectly furnished and nice painted.
Gunning down hordes as Beeg Numbers rain like Confetti needs more than just that to hold interest.
Even the great ones in the genre (hello Warframe) need something that can genuinely hold the long term interest, and can make the grind feel worth it (in Warframe, that's the collection aspect, and the fact that basically any weapon and Warframe can be viable, where the more stuff you gather, the easier it is to experiment with new builds. It's not a treadmill, it's a staircase.)
And given that I barely have time or interest even in Warframe, after the 1,300 hours I've put into it... If even one of the great games in the genre isn't keeping me locked in, what hopes does something like Suicide Squad have?
The "wasting so much work" part is what really hurts. Suicide squad looks amazing, the animations and the charm the characters have when moving around is extremely good. The sound design is incredible too from what I've seen. We could've had a great game if they weren't constrained to the endless replayable live service model.
But all of that art. All of those months of work are going to be tossed into the trash, never to be played because WB thought that, even though this is a game you can play completely in single player, you can't do that without an internet connection.
Gosh, moving past thinking as a consumer/gamer really makes all the work thrown out from live service games being removed/delisted hurt a lot :c
Live service games have no business being priced 70$. You either make it free with micro transaction (like genshin impact) or 20-30$ and 2-3$ for each new content.
Great opening. There is so much of a struggle now when you sit down on a Friday night to find a game worth playing. Every highlighted release is just a waste of time so I think the average AAA customer just rebuys a game they new was good from the last generation rather than scroll for an hour through Skinner box and Skinner box
To me what fundamentally makes pretty much kills every live service game is the fact that they are very obviously more concerned about keeping me playing it than entertaining me. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if you couldn't literally feel how much money and effort was spent for the sole purpose of keeping you playing. And it's so painful that none of these companies seem to understand that if they'd put all that money and effort into making a fun game, people would want to keep playing it by themselves, no extra effort on their part required.
Whenever I see discussion about online shooters, I just miss Unreal Tournament and Quake 3
Tfw doesn't even mention Destiny Before it was cool title of Warframe when naming successful live service games. Truly it is the forgotten step child of the industry