this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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He has some points but the main one, mentioned in the headline, is shite.
There are plenty of gamers to go around for just about any game, if it's worth playing.
If we wanna talk about soulless AAA bullshit like live service, or making trash out of a popular existing IP, that’s a different convo. Taking shareholders out of gaming would benefit everyone.
Taking shareholders out of anything would be a benefit.
Capitalism is humanity's second biggest mistake. Honestly, if private businesses disappeared altogether, I don't think they'd be missed.
I don't think private business is the issue. I think publicly traded business is the issue. In a private business, you don't have quarterly shareholder meetings with the expectation of continuous growth, and then shareholders demanding you fuck everything up.
Many private businesses are also fucked up, but so many others work just fine. Many work great, particularly small business or employee owned business or coops or similar.
X is a private business.
Obviously there are a lot of large privately held companies, many of them owned by billionaires, some of whom are very public assholes. Forbes maintains this US-only list (Twitter is 149th and falling): https://www.forbes.com/lists/largest-private-companies/ But, Twitter notwithstanding, most of these giant companies just quietly go about their business. Some of them become conspiracy theory targets (Koch) due to the flex their owners exhibit on the public sphere. And some of this is clearly incorrect in their table (ie: Cargill is not making $1M in revenue per employee -- they probably used US employee count, but global revenue).
Large private companies should be paying more taxes, imo, but are not strictly the problem. Large public companies are evil almost across the whole spectrum. The large private companies don't typically fire 25% of their staff at Christmas just to massage numbers for the quarterly report.
When you look at small companies though (for example, my company is two people, both owners, no employees), I hope you'll see that we're just trying to make a living :)
I was saying that private control of the means of production are the problem.
Imagine your life for a year without visiting a single private business
I wouldn't go that far, but we could benefit with less of it.
What's wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO's are a live service and many are good games (if MMO's are your thing).
All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn't have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it's going to be live service, because of these incentives.
For real.
One of my favorites was Marvel Heroes. One day it was just gone forever.
Or they don't disappear, servers are released or reverse engineered and the community takes over. Yeah, in many cases it doesn't happen and companies often try to prevent that, but then that's the shitty thing. The fact the game was live service didn't prevent preservation in itself or require the developer to make a bad game. It often goes together, yes, but it's not an inherent property of it.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of dead live service games have had pirate or reverse engineered servers come in to save the day, but my gut feeling is that it's a very, very low number.
what would you day a good live service game is?
I got slowly beaten out of Destiny by their live service model.
I play Hearthstone, but I've had a full collection for 4+ years now and I recognize spending ~$300/year on a single game isn't for everyone, I also recognize in 5 or 6 years they'll close the game down and nothing will remain, and then in 20 or so years even websites and YouTube videos mentioning it will become scarse.
The same is not true for games like Mario 64, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, even Tetris.
Any multiplayer game will die once its community moves on. Whether it's live service or not and one could argue live service helps prolong a game's time in the spotlight.
007 Agent Under Fire came out in 2001, and you can still play it in multiplayer as long as you have a single friend handy. Same goes for Quake, even older. Live service games offer you no way to play them once their servers are turned off.
I see lots of MMOs that become ran by the community on private servers after the developer stops supporting it. It's crap when companies try to stop that, but the game being a live service isn't a problem in itself.
Not servers offered by the developers/publishers (as far as I know, with the one exception of Knockout City), which makes it an unreliable option at best. You can't exactly spin up a private server for Rumbleverse.
I'm still playing Unreal Tournament 2004 just fine with bots. I don't need a community to play Project Zomboid with my SO. Your claim is factually incorrect.
Ok, playing ut2004 with bots surely replicates the original experience...
It replicates it well enough for me to still be playing it regularly 20 years later and well enough to debunk the myth that every multiplayer game must automatically become unplayable with time ("die") solely due to the fact that it's multiplayer.
I can also still play UT2K4 with my friends, should I want to. I can't do either of these with a "live service" game where there is no offline mode or self-hostable servers.
Also, you ignored my mention of PZ, which is a multiplayer-enabled game which also won't die when the developer dies (or abandons the game).
Elite: Dangerous is all right. Buy once, no subscription or other crap, really cool in VR. Or World of Warcraft (I played it over 10 years ago, so not sure about now), had a really good time, don't remember any bullshit from the devs.
WoW itself is probably decent but "Blizzard" and "bullshit" are kinda synonymous for many reasons- although the majority are not in-game reasons.
Blizzard today just has nothing to do with Blizzard back in the day
Somewhat agree but I'd argue "today" is relevant to "live service"
Yeah, my point boils down to "nowadays live service games tend to contain lots of antifeatures and bullshit practices", but the concept of a live service game is not inherently bad.