Games as a service has always been a scam. They use literally addictive gambling traps to keep people hooked to a money drip feeder with season passes and loot boxes.
All that only to rip the plug out when the servers are on life support.
Avoid them just like preordering. They are no benefit to the players.
Funnily enough, I want an offline addicting loot machine to play with podcasts or youtube. That’s why I play arpgs, but only-only games, for money? FUCK NO!
x as a service has always been a net negative for the consumer, and a net positive for the seller.
It strips them away from responsibility, because you can sell incomplete dogshit under a promise of future patches, or push something out for a price, and then continue raising the price, as you pump out more stuff into the system.
In the case of games specifically, we’ve all seen the typical outcomes. Low effort slop, with a flood of “micro” transactions at a later date, or complete abandonment
I can’t read anything about this concept without hearing Liz from TrueAnon saying “Bee to bee SaaS” sarcastically
This doesn’t even touch on the fact that nobody gets to own anything anymore. I am guilty of it with Steam myself, but I also recognize the inherent flaw with the model.
Live service is a whole 'nother level above DRM though. You don’t even get to say you purchased a license with a live service game. You can’t install them and run them after the servers shut down. They don’t want us to own things, just keep paying them forever.
Games that are paid for with cosmetics are fine imo. I will never, ever, not once buy a virtual hat for any amount of money. That said, if a game wants to be free and provide consistent updates, and morons riding the meme-train want to subsidise me, that’s just gravy.
Im shocked and appalled that game companies think people are stupid enough to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on pretend clothes and I’m exactly as shocked and appalled that they’re right.
If games want to be free to play, but suddenly im coming up against a guy thats basically invincible because he spent real money, im out.
Honestly, I’m not even a fan of this take. This essentially boils down to “I don’t care if a company has shitty business practices as long as only people dumber than me fall for them.”
Cosmetic and P2W MTX needs to go in all cases. The only thing people should be asked to pay for is additional game content (actual gameplay content, not just cosmetics) developed after launch.
Im not happy about it either, its forced development to stop looking at how to make a game fun and start looking at how to maximise player retention. Which means hijacking weaknesses in our psyche.
I like to think Im immune to it, but I still get turned off a game pretty quick when you load it up and you have to make it past 4 or 5 popups telling you what’s new in the store.
It does seem a lot of games pivoted from cheap enough so everyone will buy it, to whale hunting. They had people run numbers and found whale hunting paid off more, and how much $ they could charge for a skin combined with FOMO before driving the whales away.
It’s just the basic logic of maturing market. They couldn’t really increase the game prices that much more without affecting demands, nor could they improve efficiency of making games (the capital costs and team sizes have only gotten up) so they did the thing they could. Try to turn games from a product that the sell into a service they provide and can therefore lock people into their walled gardens and keep continuously charging fees and subscriptions. Too bad games are more of an art form than a news paper or a some tool maintenance contract is.
Games as a service is a piece of shit except for I can’t figure out how Helldivers 2 could function as anything else and that game is my favorite
Games as a service could work. The issue is that making money isn’t enough. You need to be making more money every year and bean counters have hijacked games as a way to squeeze as much money as possible from players.
The problem is not the functionality, it’s the business model.
