I found a lot of things in this review pretty spot on, and am curious if others feel the same. I do still regularly play one MMO which I love (GW2), but dumped all the others I used to play since I got fed up with their obvious shift to practices he discusses here. While Anet may be guilty of employing some, they are not imho deliberately destroying the play experience just to sell you a workaround since in game achievement tracks are still the primary focus.
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They can also be some of the best, most engaging, and longest-lasting forms of entertainment
Emphasis mine. Longest-lasting is the one thing live service games are guaranteed not to be, which he gets to later.
The thing that really truly makes a live service game a live service are the updates.
Games got updates before live services, and games today that aren’t live services get updates.
Then the author acknowledges the existence of expansions and patches before live service games but doesn’t see this as being at odds with his definition. Expansions certainly didn’t take “several years” to release back then, like he said, and they still don’t take that long now (they still exist, which he also acknowledges). While the updates that came along with World of WarCraft were large and significant, it also wasn’t out of the ordinary for PC games to add content like maps and modes for free, no subscription required, because just like today, new content drops bring players back to check it out.
Magic: The Gathering and Dice Throne get regular updates. These are tabletop games. Are they live services? Of course not. They’re selling you a product, not providing you a service. The regular work the developers do on those games are just R&D that any producer goes through to make a product. The “service” of live service games are that they’re providing the server for you to play on alongside those updates, but the server code is just a part of the product that they withheld from you in order to make you dependent on them and eventually have to spend money. Live services are not services; they’re just bad products, because they didn’t give you everything you paid for.
The author then discusses all of the manipulation that comes along with live service design, and I too find that gross, but from my perspective, that’s just part of the bad product that they built. Chicken and egg. Customers were perfectly capable of the technical requirements of running a vanilla WoW server, and it was only Blizzard’s legal department that stopped them.
I think the industry as a whole should be finding a better way to preserve these games and also to provide some legal avenue for paying customers…to continue playing them even when the publisher has thrown in the towel.
Exactly. This is the problem. These companies won’t do this unless somehow forced though, because that dependency on their servers means you have to play the game with the lengthy grind that they dictate so that you stay subscribed longer (even though the house rules on the community server speed up the grind to be more fun), stay online longer through manipulation, and keep getting opportunities to spend money in their cash shop. Even games that aren’t monetized like a live service do this nonsense, probably out of some attempt to prevent piracy, but it just ends up just making the game worse along with it. I no longer buy or play games that are dependent on an external server; even this definition has some blurred lines with games like Hitman.
It’s okay to make a multiplayer game that people may only play a handful of times before putting down, or a single player game that you play through once that has a deathmatch mode attached to it. Some of the most successful multiplayer games of all time, including ones that are still popular today, started as great single player games with multiplayer attached to it. If it really gets its hooks in people but needs some touching up, put out some patches and expansions for it. It doesn’t need to keep getting new content forever, and thinking that a game can or should do that is what leads to all of this nonsense. Give us the servers. Give us LAN. Give us direct IP connections. Give us same-screen multiplayer. Sever the dependency on a server that I can’t control, or I’m not buying.
Thanks for a thorough sourvey so i dont have to watch the whole video.
Last paragraph is everything i would say too, just i take it a step up - if a game requires an additional accout - im not bying ( unless i get scammed into it, like not reading before getting doom eternal that aside from game store where i bought, i had to have a bethesda account too )
Are you sure? I didn’t play Doom Eternal, but the Bethesda account for Hi-Fi Rush could be easily ignored.
I got it on ps5, was greeted with a log in with your beth acc to start. Someone said play in offline mode and they could be right, i said then im going to look way better before i buy.
One thing that keeping exclusive control of the server does is make a game, or at least the game in multiplayer mode, really hard to pirate. That’s a pretty compelling argument in favor for someone making the game.
It’s also a compelling argument for me to not buy the game, though, because it puts an expiration date on the game. Baldur’s Gate 3 sure had no problem moving copies even though it’s got LAN, direct IP connections, split-screen, and it’s available DRM-free. By contrast, I could have been into Mythforce, but multiplayer is tied to a server in that game, so no thanks. Cherry-picked examples? Sure. But it still doesn’t make the server-tying any more compelling for the consumer.
Magic: The Gathering and Dice Throne get regular updates. These are tabletop games. Are they live services? Of course not.
Well… MTG is as close as a live service game can be as a physical object, including questionable monetization practices. The booster pack is very similar in principle to the lootbox. They also can ensure continuous sales through power creep and controlling what cards are allowed in official competitive formats. It’s not the absolute control that digital live services allow, but it’s nearly there. As a more practical comparison, MTG is more manipulative than card games that allow players to pick full sets that they want.
Then we have MTG Arena that is a Live Service in every aspect. They don’t let you freely host those games either.
I agree on all of the above. But they still don’t provide anything resembling a service. They just call these things live services to disguise bad products.
Live service games aren’t all bad, imo mmos are a good example of a good live service game, I would never have the same enjoyment for RuneScape for example if it were not a live service game, there is a level of authenticity to achievements given by it being a live service. Also it’s a little disingenuous to say non-live games get updates too implying its equal when a good live service game can put hundreds of hours of content per year into the product without worrying about when they would need to release a new game or paid expansion to continue being profitable.
The money to fund those updates has to come from somewhere, and the incentive systems behind those games leads to, inevitably, the game being wiped from the face of the earth. Plus you lose access to the earlier versions of the game, which may have been better; if not for you, then for someone else.
Subscriptions are a sustainable way to do it, or so it seems from the games that have lasted 20+ years with decent player bases. I get where you’re going though, cash grabs are common in games nowadays and making a game a live service is a great way to do more monetizing, but it isn’t necessary.
I agree that it’s bittersweet to see a game change over time, and that is definitely a trade off of MMOs, but imo it’s not a total negative, a game having visible history in the world, when done well, can be a benefit.
I’d still argue that it’s worse than giving the customers the ability to roll out that history. When your incentive is subscription fees, then you’re trying to keep people playing longer, which means making the game grindier. At that point, it’s trivial to add hours and hours of content, because it takes so long to make the numbers go up. World of WarCraft may have lasted 20 years, but I can’t legally play City of Heroes anymore.
