Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Death to Live Service | MMORPG.com
System
Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
Death to Live Service | MMORPG.com
Shank takes a look at the destructive effect of live services and why they must end.
Comments
Live service is fine, if you feel like you need to play it, then that's on you. Like it or not, there is very little difference between a live service game, and a MMO. In fact, they're the same, just smaller lobbies.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
So, because some of us can go into a free sports event and buy no beers, or 1 or 2 beers... you get wasted and spend $100 on 10 crappy beers. Now you want the place to sell no beers for anyone.
Control yourself.
I see that as far preferable to a pay to win item mall where you have to throw ever escalating amounts of money at it to be competitive. I also see it as very different from having to pay $60 up front to buy a game and then also being charged a bunch of money for cosmetics.
I played Dauntless for a while, which uses roughly the model that you're complaining about. And I bought a little bit of stuff, including buying the battle pass mostly just on general principle. Developers have to make money somehow, and paying a modest amount largely as a thank you for making a fun game with a non-predatory business model is a reasonable thing to do. If that business model can't make money, then games will have to go with alternatives, such as the full on pay to win that I don't like.
It makes sense needing to be online for multiplayer games, like MMO's MOBA, FPS, Etc, Etc, that is the whole nature of the game, to be online and playing with other people.
But, games like Skyrim, where it's a single player game, I simply do not get the appeal for needing to be online. For me, Single Player games are the games I play when I can't get online, ideally when my internet service is disrupted.
The other side is, I have yet to see an advantage to these single player games that being online provides me, I don't see updates, bug fixes, and the like happening, I also do not see content updates like I get in MMO's and other Multiplayer games, it's like the worst of all worlds.
I still need to be online to play the game, but receive none of the advantages of it being an online game.
This no doubt is why Phone games are on the rise, as I am sure the gaming community, no doubt, has come to accept that if you are going to force us to be online anyway, regardless if the game is single player or multi-player, the easiest and most dependable access most people have to being online is their phone.
We have been talking about many of the factors on other threads here, myself about how the history of gaming becoming larger in the entertainment sector changed the face of gaming more and more to making money. Which in turn lead to an ever increasing business orientation which has made it the biggest entertainment market. But while that has happened money has become the byword not quality.
To do this games needed a cash shop, which began in MMO's but you will find in nearly every game now, for most it is called Steam. But Steam Store is chicken feed to what a proper cash shop can lead to, a live "service" which serves the gaming company with money.
This is one of the reasons Valhiem has been such a smash hit, you get a really big bang for your bucks. Players are not used to that, they are used to paying $20 for an skin, not twenty dollars for a game! Those five million buyers show you that games can make a mint without taking players to the cleaners for everything and anything in the cash shop. But that's a "risk", a risk that GAAS does not have, which is why EA didn't green light that Star Wars game, even with that sort of IP if the GASS is not good enough AAA companies will say no.
Apart from indie the move to 'monetarization as a game' is firmly with us, how much talk about offers, loot boxes and game passes do you do? We used to just talk about gameplay, longevity, community; thats how far the gaming studios have moved the goal posts.
And this is why: consequences. Devs and Pubs want to be paid for their work. uTrans covers a lot of those bases. If uTrans goes away, something else is going to take its place. That something might very well be much worse than the original uTrans.
As far as cosmetic microtransactions go, it seems like the argument boils down to "people are irresponsible with their spending and need to be protected from themselves, so let's give them fewer frivolous things to buy". I don't buy game cosmetics, but I'm not gonna scoff at someone for buying a $10 weapon skin anymore than I do for someone who buys a mount in WoW. I'll save that disdain for people driving $500k sports cars or wearing $10k watches, even though that's still their prerogative and has nothing to do with me.
Yeah, I thought it was going to be an article about how live service is so hard to get right and many decent games failed by trying to fit into a mold that didn't work for them. Instead I was told that spending 35 bucks for a cosmetic item is wrong.
Funny thing happened the other day. I went to a restaurant and bought a steak. Then they had the nerve to charge me for a soda. They even had the hall to wait until I was almost done with my steak and ask if I wanted to buy desert. Buy desert? Why wasn't it included in the price?
"I will admit that I have purchased the battle pass on occasion to “level up” and feel a false sense of progression. But I am fortunate to possess enough self-control so as not to spend $35 on a damn knife skin. However, many people do this and in fact defend it"
Some might say buying the battlepass is the actual waste of money. What you've essentially said is that what I value is more important and because it's less money that's ok. But but what they value isn't and look how much they are spending!
Here's the thing, the companies who make these games want to make money. They want to draw players. In an ideal world we would all just pay the same amount but these companies have an idea of how much money they need and how much they want.
And if it's a publicly traded company they want all the money because their investors have invested so they can get a return on that investment.
So they uncap spending, draw a large amount of players, players who have no intention of spending anything and then they rely upon people who are willing to pay for whatever they offer. In some case it's that $35 knife and in some case it's "the whales."
I suspect at this point in time if any company charged a flat fee every month they wouldn't get as many players. I mean, how many businesses out there want you to keep paying every month? Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, your phone, If you want the Microsoft office suite you have to pay a monthly fee, Internet service, etc, etc
So tack on a sub for a game and people are going to balk.
In any case, though I'm more "pro sub" I'm fine with these companies charging whatever they want and I'm MORE fine for player to not patronize their service.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I feel in GGG's case they more than earned that money from me.
I am not inclined to buy cosmetics. I ran around a long time looking hideous in POE before I bought an outfit. I do not do this in other games. I can control myself quite well. However in this case I made a decision to buy the outfits because of how good the game was and because it was F2P.
Fully agree, it's something they came up with to milk the masses, for single player games, however lots of the cows like to defend it now.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Wait until the OP finds out about houses and cars. It's a scary world out there with all these people expecting to be paid for their work.
So often people look at it from THEIR perspective forgetting that their choice only exists if other foolish spenders exist.In otherwords if everyone played for free,your option would disappear.
Cash shops often are worth far more than any FAIR value and far more than any game is worth.Some cash shops contains thousands of dollars to get the FULL game,example SC costs multiple thousands that is total BS.
There is another sort of hidden factor.By supporting such actions and making a game popular you allow the dev and OTHER devs to target that model over and over until consumers have very little choice ,like what is the case right now.
Games existed just fine BEFORE any added costs so there is literally NO excuse.MOST f2p games are very cheap to design and run,they do not need a lot of money.
So it comes down to WORTH and that of course depends on the user but there also has to be SOME common sense.If the entire cash shop has over 100...2000 thousands of dollars in real items,it is NOT treating ANY customer with repsect for supporting their game.Instead the devs are telling you that you are an idiot,we figure you WILL spend more money than our game is worth,that is what devs are thinking about you.
So here is how it SHOULD operate with a variance on no EXACT numbers.
F2p with a lock on monthly spending at 5-15 depending on what the devs are doing for the game in between content updates and if that content is sold or free.A typical cheap ARPG doesn't need but a few employees,maybe there are several investors and such,well that is THEIR problem not yours,you are not obligated to feed greedy rich people.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I don't think anyone is saying that live service is the only way to monetize a game. That's another discussion.
What is on discussion is if "live service" should be a think. I would say that If a game offers "bits" for money it's up to those players to decide if it's worth it it for them.
And again, there are people who will tell you straight up that spending ANY money on a video game is the waste of money. Let alone the time playing them being a waste of time.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
A decent MMO is not what he's talking about here, the writer even said so in the post. The trash is not nice to have in games, wether it's purchased or not.
I agree with the intention you are trying to convey here, it's the money grabbing, for content taken content out of a game and re-sold, for terrible games being released with lack of content or depth with a cash shop to money grab.
If a company produces an awesome game and gives you options to buy "extras" that's on our heads, but stripping back games to make extra is what is happening.
Make a decent game and they will make money the old fashioned way.
But what is a decent game? If we want developers to make money the old fashioned way do they also get to make games the old fashioned way? Do developers get to scale back their staff to 1995 levels and produce a game the size and quality of that era?
I mean, take Valheim for example. 5 million copies sold at $20 each with only 5 developers. Do you think if EA or Bethesda released the exact same game they would have received the same results? No they wouldn't. Gamers would be bitching about the low quality graphics, how there isn't any voice acting, the game is too short, and god knows what else.
There is however a good way to shut down like Magic the Gathering: Duels and give the players all the cards and still be able to play single player vs just killing the game while not providing any peer to peer or offline play.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/