Absolutely!
Games as a service is a scam.
I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.
Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.
But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.
But they are a scam
Games as a service can be okay, in some situations. Ones we very rarely see due to (primarily) publisher greed.
If you’re paying for the game itself, at any point, GaaS is stupid and extremely exploitative.
If they choose to go that route however, the game needs to be free to play with separate monetization. They need to mebe things that are completely optional and don’t affect gameplay.
This is because we feel we paid for something that expects nothing in return.
When you pay for a game that includes add ons and microtransactions, all of a sudden we‘re back to being a marketing target, and we implicitly know we‘re pushed to spend money.
We play games to escape the real world…
I appreciate the sentiment but the (very shitty) reality is single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games in the current climate. Like no where even remotely close in terms of effort to profit. You can straight up clone call of duty every year, or add a few maps to fortnite, or add a new operator to siege, and monetize every tiny fraction of the game thru micro transactions and people will keep on playing and keep on paying.
Single player games operate pretty much the opposite. You buy it once. Play thru it. Beat it. And generally never touch it again unless maybe some dlc comes out and you might add a few more hours to it and then never think about it again.
I say this as a giant fan of single narrative games, it’s just a much smarter business move to pump out shitty online multiplayer games.
Fortnite was released in 2017, last year it netted almost $6 billion.
Call of duty has been dog water for like a decade. Its been the best selling game every single year since 2009 unless Rockstar releases a game (and Hogwarts legacy randomly dominating one year).
World of Warcraft came out in 2004. Last year they announced they had over 7 million active subscribers… Over two decades later.
Apex legends came out in 2019, last year it made over $3 billion.
The list goes on and on and on. You just can’t compete with weirdos obsessed with showing off a wizard hat on their character in an online game or busting open a loot box to get a new weapon skin or something.
single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games
True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.
Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.
Fortnite
Call of duty
World of Warcraft
Apex legends
Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.
You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.
For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.
Minecraft is the
most popularbest selling game of all time, and the single-player mode is still being updated. Granted, many people play on multiplayer servers, but still.On the one hand, you’re right that the market for micro transaction laden multiplayer games is much larger than single player games. On the other hand, the market for people who want single player games is still very large. You showed that yourself mentioning Rockstar games and Harry Potter.
So while many publishers want a piece of that larger pie, every publisher trying for it just leads to over saturation and greater odds that a game will fail entirely. So there is still incentive for publishers to release large single player games even if the pie is smaller since there may be less competition making it easier to stand out. And what the article is saying is that, within that pie, one way to stand out is to avoid micro transactions. And since it’s discussing single player games specifically, I don’t see a lot of relevance for bringing up multiplayer games that exist in a different part of the gaming world.
Reading the article, where did you get “audience rewards” == “maximal extraction of cash from the audience”?
IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn’t lose because you didn’t make the most money out of all your competitors.
Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.
Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn’t as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.
It’s not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on “nearly guaranteed” online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It’s kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.
If I go to the steam page for a singleplayer game and see a bunch of paid DLC content, I usually skip it. Look at Stellaris, for example
Depends on how old the game is and how big the DLC is IMO. Rimworld, for instance, has quite a few DLCs now, but they are all well worth it if you like the base game. OTOH if a game just has cosmetic DLC or the DLC is coming out super near release that’s a red flag.
Rimworld’s DLCs are kinda assumed purchases for the modding scene, too. I feel like this drives a lot of their sales TBH.
This describes just about all Paradox games made in the past 15 years, sadly. They release with a barebones concept, then slowly drip-feed content for 5-30 bucks a pop, each one usually sitting at “Mostly Negative” because it doesn’t fundamentally add or change anything most of the time, and the times it does- meh. Crusader Kings 2 was my bread and butter for a long time. Played Crusader Kings 3, and it felt like almost every helpful mechanic that existed in CK2 was stripped, and then added on again over the course of years. It was so infuriating, that I just don’t buy their titles anymore.
It really sucks cause their gamea are really good too and nobody else makes anything like that, so we’re stuck dealing with paradox’s crap. Same story with the total war games.
Vampire Survivors is an exception.
At the very least, you can still pirate it and play cracked multiplayer with friends.
I made the mistake of buying the game year ago, and bought a bunch of DLC at 50% or greater sales, and now the sunken cost fallacy has taken hold on me, and I still want to buy more . . . . (at least I’m broke so I can’t right now hehehaha)
The game files are already downloaded in the steam version at least. One could, hypothetically, unlock those dlcs even on a normal copy. Steam would have no way too detect that either. Supposedly. In Minecraft.
Complete games. They are called complete games.
He’s right
Gamers reward good games
Exactly. You make good MMORPG and money will come in droves too. Same for RPG or fuck it, even poker game on crack. Just make good games, but it’s not as easy as it sounds… No one just clicks “make game bad” and often the Microtransactions are dictated by whatever publishing deal they have.
And Multiplayer games like Helldivers 2
Shoutout to FromSoft still having Bloodborne servers ready for me on my very first runthrough 10yrs after launch
It is my favorite software as a service model.
They run a continuous story based experience that is extremely well done. They do offer the ability to buy in game credits, but if you play regularly there is no reason to as they show up frequently in game. Their cosmetic store only has a few items, but they cycle around so there will always be another chance to get them.
And when the devs did fuck up the gameplay, they admitted it and changed course. When Sony forced them to add in the PlayStation login the devs supported the players in pushing back and we now have an official review bomb cape.
Nice, now release Judas >:(
Making inoffensive microtransactions is such a tightrope walk. Just putting an up-front price is so much simpler on their end.
Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient to keep that bullshit out of big-budget single-player games. Publishers can force it upon developers - and will. Once a few games get away with it, the cult of executives will figure they’re losing money if they don’t fuck you as hard as possible.
I love the game, but I’d like to point out that baldur’s gate 3 does have a single microtransaction, it gives you a custom dice skin, a tie in item from divinity original sin and a bunch of low level potions. It costs 12CAD.
I will point out that this is mainly just a way to get the free preorder bonus though, and has no real gameplay effects. The dlc also contains a digital artbook, digital soundtrack and some character sheets. I feel like that is quite a bit more than the normal micro transactions, though I still somewhat see your point
Yup I do not buy single player games that have monitizacion, indiana jones game was so far game of the year for me
I started playing warframe recently. Yes it’s free to play, yes there’s monetization, but I feel it’s one of those games you really don’t need to buy anything for. you can pretty much obtain everything via grinding. I can see how that wouldn’t appeal to a lot of people today but I used to play everquest and anarchy online etc so I know about the grind and I don’t mind it.
The thing about Warframe is it tempts you but doesn’t force you to buy. You can sell your time to people who paid actual money, and then buy things you want for that money. The only issue with Warframe is the fomo - them locking warframes behind relics that are “deprecated”. Sometimes they unearth them again, but it’s an artificial attempt at “I need to buy this or it is gone”.
Also the process of getting parts is 100% gambling on low odds. You can get lucky immediately or have to “reroll” by running the same relic over and over and over again. It sucks if you want a very specific thing and often leads to people just buying it outright.
The community is very open about warframe.market existing though. Like an auction house for player trading across all servers. So if your relics drop bad items. Sell them on the market until you can eventually buy the one you want.
Other games do thinks like soulbound/account bound stuff. Not everything in WF is tradable, but most things are
There is very little FOMO in warframe. The unsealing you speak of is a rotation due to the game having over a thousand of things to unlock so farming specific weapon part when you need 5 parts would be very difficult. It’s there to limit the pool. If you want something specific? That’s what trade is for.
Relic system is quite fair but you do need to somewhat understand the full system to see it.
The one thing that WF does fairly annoyingly are weapon slots. You have to buy them off the market with platinum so either you buy it at 75% discount or trade prime parts to get it. A single gold part will be worth more than the 2 weapon slot but it’s the one example that makes you “spend money”.
I’m playing since closed beta and have thousands of hours, got my wife and son into it. I must’ve spent maybe £300 in total (maybe more) to show my support, but I could’ve easily just done trading and bought all the cosmetics I wanted that way too.
WF makes you spend money on things you want to, not need to. No bullshit paid for battle pass or battle pass paid for skips etc.
Sealing / unsealing is 100% FOMO and I have seen people go “Ivara Prime is out now I need to play Warframe”. You can easily setup a system where you choose a rotation to go for when choosing a mission. It wouldn’t even split the playerbase since it only affects the rewards at the end. But they don’t, they do this song and dance about removing and bringing back specific weapons and warframes.
They already split it in 4 ways with lith neo meso and axi.
I see your point, but missing out and the fear of it? I’m not sure. But maybe it’s because I’ve played for longer than some of these players have been alive for… There’s just so much that the whole “OMG I need this specific thing!!!” Doesn’t add up as there’s just so much good stuff in there and power creep has been insane prioritising new things or ever green items.
There are various warframes that work completely different when they are prime. And yeah, you spending so much time with the game makes it that the things that it does bad seem normal to you.
You’re right that you can’t personally farm them, but you can still end up getting them from publics. The old relics are still operable. I have hundreds of old relics that I open as fodder, as do other regular players. And ofc trading. The surplus of old relics helps keep down trade prices because they’re still trickling into the market, albeit slower.
A better example is prime accessories. These are real-money only, and can only be bought from Prime Access (when a Prime is released) or a Prime Resurgence (Prime temporarily back for sale a year or so later). Stuff like Octavia Prime’s shawzin/sitar being $35 or gone for (effecively) forever.
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I’ve been playing truth E33. It’s definitely slower than the Action games you list, being a JRPG-like game. It’s your side vs the enemy. Think old Final Fantasy. A closer comparison would be the Mario RPG series. While it is a lot of your turn->their turn->your turn etc, there are timings during both your turn and the enemy turns for button presses to do more damage (or in some cases, any damage), or to negate or even counter enemy attacks. It’s so much more of an engaging experience vs just pressing a button and watching your character do a massive combo. For me, getting really good at the parry timing is so satisfying. Most enemy attacks have multiple hits during their attacks, and if you parry every single one, you launch a counterattack. There is a dodge, but while it has a large window than the parry, all it really does is negate damage. That’s another thing: because you can learn enemy timings, your can take on bosses that are well above your punching weight. I find that part very fun. The characters are well written, in my opinion. For what a dreary story the game writes, there are moments of levity and extra background you have the option of engaging with for each character. The game is a serious contender for game of the year, it at the very least several awards. And for only $50usd, it blows many other AAA(A) games out of the water. Give it a chance and I think you’ll find it well worth your time.
KCD is unique, personally I love it. In some ways it’s kind of the dark souls of first person RPG. The systems are at times a bit clunky, combat is hard, complex, and both you and your character need a lot of training to be profficient.
But that’s the fun of the game. Henry is a useless lump at the start, and you mold him in to what you want.
Personally, I love hardcore challenging single player games, and few in recent years match KCD.
I dont have a system to play KCD2 yet, but from everything I’ve seen, the developer doubled down and kept the majority of the systems in place, just adding scale and polish.
I’m sure the first one is on discount these days, and highly recommend it.
KCD2 is exactly like KCD1 with a few more years of development refining and in some cases expanding the rpg systems, a new map, and a continuation of the story. It feels the same, just a little nicer. In other words, it’s a perfect sequel.
The only fault I have with it is that Henry starts the game bad to mediocre at most things instead of useless, and that beginning stage is my favorite to go through and out of. But being a sequel I can excuse it pretty easily.
