The boob discourse has got me pontificating on how you can track the decline of the games industry with how woke Lara Croft's bra-size became.
Live service games seem like such a big risk. They’re way harder to balance and upkeep and people are much more likely to pick up a game, play it a bit, and bounce off than they are to get stuck on it long term in the way these companies want.
Back when WoW was huge, a ton of companies tried making own MMORPGs despite them being gigantic money pits to compete for those sweet, potentially infinite subscription bucks
Man I remember thinking Anthem was great and then they just released almost zero content for it after release and let it die.
The flight was so fun, I was enjoying exploring the world, customizing my power armors, etc and then they just decided it wasn't worth supporting and there ended up being like 3 dungeons.
i disagree, for a AAA studio development/maintenance costs are probably quite comparable---it's not like ubisoft is making decisions between funding 10 small titles or one landmark title, they were already going to do the latter, and this is just a way to wring more money out of it. maintaining support & servers is something you had to do for big AAA multiplayer games before 'live service' models anyway.
we'd need to peek at their books to know for sure but i have a suspicion based on how rooted this bullshit is that despite PR failures they're still largely profitable
The issue is that live service games like MMOs or Fortnitelikes are sticky. The kind of gamer who likes them generally plays a very small number of them over and over. And most LS gamers pick the same games, for community or quality reasons. Live service games either make it big or flop completely. There are no consolation prizes like there are for single player games. Most RPG fans will sooner or later buy Starfield, even though it was a bit disappointing. Most live service fans will never buy cosmetics in The Finals or Anthem.
this is all true, but putting out a new title in games is always a bit of a gamble, so putting out a possible(very unlikely) Fortnite Two makes board rooms clap like seals
The reward is greater, but the risk is correspondingly great, if not greater. AAA single player seems lower risk to me, at least with an established IP.
Some variant of this seems to be affecting pretty much all industries. Capitalism does a capitalism, creatives have their creativity suppressed, the average person silently deal with everything-getting-worse-and-expensive, reactionaries loudly cry woke when minority does an exist.
No see, game companies HAVE to focus on live service games because that's the only way they can afford to meet their diversity quotas!
To me this line of thinking is basically reactionary thinking boiled down to its most simple form. Essentially they are able to see the issues and problems with the world. However, instead of reaching a conclusion based on a historical and material understanding, they deny the issues exist by blaming it on a nebulous concept such as woke or "jewery" or Cultural Marxism or whatever other things allows them to acknowledge the issues without they themselves being either the whole or part of the problem.
It's a way to protect their ego, and then they project that thinking on everyone else, determining that anyone who hasn't come to the same conclusion as them must be in on th conspiracy. It's lazy narcissist brain.
