That’s not really relevant. Different teams. FarCry 7 is going to have multiplayer and single-player like the past few have had. They just now are making it a more developed side. It’s a natural progression to success.
They're different teams, but it's relevant because, according to this article, this spun out into another live service project after HyperScape quickly died and the Ghost Recon game wasn't going to recoup its costs. The entire industry is facing a live service reckoning right now; it can only support so many, and making more expensive games like this isn't panning out.
EDIT: Man, I forgot XDefiant too. If that game isn't cancelled before it officially hits 1.0, it'll likely be shut down within 18 months.
I guess maybe look at it this way, if anything they are still looking to recoup the development costs of those games. So why not use that technology in a multiplayer game that’s surely to sell well? Right?
That said they also stated in the article that this multiplayer game has been changing scope throughout its 7-year development. Sadly, this means they are almost certainly in development hell. Hopefully, they find the path through but we’ll see if and what they release.
if anything they are still looking to recoup the development costs of those games. So why not use that technology in a multiplayer game that’s surely to sell well? Right?
But it's been spun out separately, according to the article...I think we're talking past each other. Ubisoft and Sega are not the same company, but Hyenas was Sega's most expensive project ever, and they still found the best decision to be not releasing the game at all, which makes some amount of sense because live service games have recurring costs. Maybe Ubisoft is staring down that barrel right now, as there's definitely a world where, like with Ghost Recon, a successful franchise's name won't carry your live service endeavor to even recouping any costs as opposed to just killing it in the womb and avoiding the sunk cost fallacy.
It is my hope, and it's possibly the reality, that Ubisoft has discovered that live service games are not guaranteed money printing machines. Then maybe we can get back to an industry that isn't so intent on destroying itself rather than the semi-dark-age we're in right now.
You were originally talking about HyperScape, not Hyenas. Technology in a studio is typically shared between projects. So it’s somewhat likely that Ghost Recon, HyperScape, and this FarCry 7 multiplayer game contain some of the same codebase. Certainly not a guarantee but it’s more likely than not.
That said, Wildlands is still up, the sequel did poorly for a number of reasons, pushing out a sequel to a live service game is always risky, especially within a 10-year period. Live service games are expected to be continuously updated. Overwatch 2 is a great example of how to mismanage your well-received live service game. Overall, Ghost Recon Wildlands is still making enough money to keep it afloat. Breakpoint went too far in monetization and overall too fast in title iteration.
Ubisoft, like many giants, isn’t going to give up on GaaS games any time soon. If anything you’ll see more and more. GaaS isn’t how I want to see the future but I don’t see a games industry future without GaaS being fairly dominate. I don’t think anyone sees them as a guaranteed money-printing machine. There are far better and safer investments than games to get money-printing machines. Real estate is a big one. Ubisoft is still a company of artists but equally, those artists are putting money first because we live in a capitalistic society where rent needs to be paid first and foremost.
Overall, though, I don’t see the industry destroying itself. It’s certainly in a squeeze right now simply due to consolidation. The mass layoffs we are seeing are because a bunch of giants have been buying up companies and expanding. Now the major companies have lots of IPs and brands to work with, they are cutting everyone that doesn’t fit the exact future needs of monetizing those IPs. In the grand scheme of things, it’s actually beneficial to the growth of small indie studios. Now that talent is likely to start and contribute to small indie studios. Hopefully with the business knowledge that corporate structures are only good for those on top. Maybe we’ll see the growth of cooperative studios.
You were originally talking about HyperScape, not Hyenas.
You say tomato, I say...it works better when spoken.
Ubisoft, like many giants, isn’t going to give up on GaaS games any time soon.
Like the above, I'm just saying there are only room for so many. Remember how everyone wanted a World of WarCraft? And everyone wanted a Call of Duty? And everyone wanted a League of Legends? And everyone wanted a PUBG? Those games, and like two of their competitors in most cases, are still around, but there just isn't enough room for more when you're the Nth battle royale (HyperScape) or extraction shooter (Far Cry). No one can predict the future, and my own biases are informing what I'm taking away from my own observations, but you have a problem where the audience now knows that when you sink money into a live service game, it's likely dead in a year, and you're out of pocket $X with nothing to show for it when the servers are gone.
Overall, though, I don’t see the industry destroying itself.
No, it actually is. Not the entire industry but the live service end of it and the games they created. They're designed with kill switches, self-destruct buttons, or whatever other metaphor you like. They're burning down the library on their way out the door, which is why, short of YouTube footage, I don't see how this can be anything other than a semi-dark age for the medium. Semi because plenty of games are not bound to servers or some other form of planned obsolescence, but a lot of high-profile releases most certainly are, and they'll be lost to time. Meanwhile, games from 30 years prior still live on and can be enjoyed by people who weren't even born yet when they released.
I'm totally with you on some studios shrinking, other studios forming, and the circle of life continuing. My prediction for the industry was way faster than the reality of things, but I foresaw that studios like TinyBuild, Embracer, Devolver, Anna Purna, and the like would inevitably come to be and grow, because there are games that the big AAA publishers just don't make anymore, and people still want to play those games.
you have a problem where the audience now knows that when you sink money into a live service game, it’s likely dead in a year, and you’re out of pocket $X with nothing to show for it when the servers are gone.
Absolutely but that’s also the same with every other endeavor. The issue here is risk vs innovation. All of the games you named are iterations. Everquest, Medal Of Honor, Dota (WoTC), and even PuBG started out as a Day Z mod. The big studios are looking for the least amount of risk with the most amount of innovation. They hope they can tweak things. Games that aren’t still around can still be fairly profitable. Even if it’s just profitable enough to get investments to lift your studio up.
That said I don’t see GaaS going away because it creates consumer buy-in. You put data and accounts into the databases. It means you aren’t just a one-time customer, you are a statistic. You are just a part of this large group that has its hooks directly into your email, and credit card, and can market to you. It’s why so many storefronts are popping up. It forces loyalty, especially when you consider cross-game promotions which may become a thing. They’ve certainly been trying to find a path forward on that with NFTs and blockchain crap.
No, it actually is. Not the entire industry but the live service end of it and the games they created. They’re designed with kill switches, self-destruct buttons, or whatever other metaphor you like. They’re burning down the library on their way out the door, which is why, short of YouTube footage, I don’t see how this can be anything other than a semi-dark age for the medium. Semi because plenty of games are not bound to servers or some other form of planned obsolescence, but a lot of high-profile releases most certainly are, and they’ll be lost to time. Meanwhile, games from 30 years prior still live on and can be enjoyed by people who weren’t even born yet when they released.
Ah, okay as someone who has worked on numerous titles that can no longer be played, I totally see your point here. It’s not that the industry is dying though. It’s history isn’t able to be preserved. This might suck to hear but I’ve worked with multiple large names from the 90s and they have built great studios, that they are now using to target GaaS games. They’ll point to games they made before as inspiration and I’ve pointed out how you can still play those games and GaaS games can be created to be preserved. They just don’t care. Multiple times I’ve seen people say “We are worried about building a game now, not when we can no longer support it. We’ll worry about that when we are shutting down.” Like they don’t already know that there isn’t money to worry about those things when they shut down. With one of them, I worked for 3 years on building a backend we could securely release to the public but they shut the game down 3 months after release without releasing anything. They don’t care to release things so that people can still play them. If they shut them down, they see them as failures. No matter how much money they already made.
That's precisely the thing I hope we've finally hit a turning point on, and that we have some evidence that we've hit that turning point. The metaphorical landfill filled with dead games as a service got so many more games this year. Especially because so many of these games are designed to monopolize your time, perhaps they'll realize there isn't enough time on earth to dedicate to this game when it's already being dedicated to 100 other games. Then they can come to the conclusion that there's more money to be made in 5 short experiences than 1 game that you're intended to play indefinitely.
I hope so too but I feel like we’ve not hit there yet. In some ways the sort of online, account creation requirement will grow and grow. To play single-player games now, you need to login to some random service.
Yeah, that's why I stopped buying EA games and why I didn't buy Tony Hawk. I'm not alone in the forums when asking about that stuff, and we'll see how much momentum that carries.
I think people largely have stopped buying them, apart from very few exceptions, which is why games like Hyenas get cancelled at the finish line and why we've got a graveyard of live services that shut down just this year. Second Extinction didn't make it out of early access. Rumbleverse didn't even last one year.
Marathon was a bit before my time, but I definitely agree, the art style on the trailer for the new marathon looks really cool. But between cod dmz, marauders, the cycle frontier; I’m just a bit skeptical that anyone can properly replicate what makes Tarkov such an interesting and addicting game style.
That being said, definitely hoping for some proper competition to Tarkov as it has some serious issues that I don’t see getting fixed anytime soon.
Not the biggest fan of extraction shooters, but the permadeath mechanic sounds interesting. Although I'm not sure how common that is in this kind of game.
Honestly, I prefer this, as long as the single player option is unaffected by the multiplayer component’s performance, and the resources allotted to the SP game don’t suffer because of the MP.
Historically, some of the best multiplayer components attached to single player games were done with very few resources in a matter of weeks, like Halo and Goldeneye.
True, but that was before mtx became the name of the game. Nowadays when a game has a multiplayer component with no bells and whistles and just works, it’s an outlier.
And now those games just get shut down with no recourse. Eventually, those companies will realize that they're better off making a multiplayer game that doesn't get 5 years worth of updates to chase after bazillions of dollars that never materialize.
Tack Call of Duty Zombies into that list too, but Moonguide has a point. CoD: BlOps 3 was the last really good zombies experience and that was just as they were starting to turn it into an MTx nightmare.
Sure, and game development in general takes longer than it did 20 years ago, but allocating a proportional amount of resources is all you need. If it's a hit, it's a hit. If you want to patch it up a bit to fix some glaring flaws, go ahead. Expecting it to maintain tens of thousands of simultaneous players is going to end up with the dev putting lots of resources into something unlikely to be the next big thing.
I liked how FEAR did it back in the day. The multiplayer was a separate game you could download for free and play. Then, if you liked the game, you could pay for the single player.
I definitely don’t mind the multiplayer being separate. I typically buy games years after their shelf life and their multiplayer is usually dead, so having that MP component be a separate download would save me space for something I can’t even play
I mean the industry is already a cesspool. The consolidation is troubling from a failure of regulators. The games Industry deserves what it gets here though.
Microsoft still support AoE2 after all these years, while Activision more or less fucked the SC2 proscene so hard it’s amazing it’s still going as strong as it is.
Not to mention what they did to the classic WotLK launch. It couldn’t get any worse than that.
The servers were essentially 95-99% of either faction, and they locked migration several times seemingly on random. A lot of people got stuck on servers that were nigh unplayable because of the other faction dominating everything.
It even included paid server transfers on some servers for some weird reason. I got hardlocked on 98% alliance server while playing a tauren resto druid. Their customer service told me to “level another character on a server of my choosing”. Leveled to 80 out of sheer spite and then quit when my game time ran out.
Truly one of the biggest disappointments in my entire life. I know it’s just a game, but I had looked forward to getting to redo wrath since they first announced classic in general, and they completely ruined it.
Damn! That sounds horrible, I remember when WoW’s customer service was seemingly top notch, how far they have fallen. I guess it’s not surprising with how disappointing Diablo 4 was.
Imo microsoft is trying to pump gamepass sub numbers and supposedly its not enough (despite the size). I think they will consider merging the World of Warcraft sub to gamepass to boost sub count for the investors.
The X is trying to compete in a premium space, long with the PS5. The X falls short of the PS5 in almost every category that a premium consumer cares about, and I don’t think premium consumers are interested in value-oriented subscriptions like GamePass.
The S is competing with… Well definitely not the Switch. I wouldn’t say the Steam Deck either. It was competing to an extent with the PS4 and Xbox One, but not anymore. The S has kind of been left in its own market, so this news makes sense.
Maybe the Switch 2 will have some overlap in that market, but assuming it’s a hybrid handheld it might still be differentiated enough to leave the S on it’s own. Sony has been working on lowering the cost of the PS5 but I can’t see that getting anywhere near S territory. So unless something else drops I don’t see the S having competition any time soon.
The S is a stellar emulation box that doesn’t need to be jailbroken. It’s a hell of a lot easier to configure than a custom Linux distro like RetroPie and the hardware packs a punch. I don’t own one, but I’d be more likely to buy a series S than a PS5 or series X.
That’s about using emulators in retail mode which nobody with half a brain thought was gonna stick around. You pay $20 to unlock developer mode and do all your emulation stuff in there. Retail is for playing actual xbox games.
When you’re talking about a premium market in particular, I think most high-end consumers who care about the aesthetics of their living room would prefer the official, matching Dualsense charger/stand over Microsoft’s charging kit.
The exclusives are huge, especially factoring in backwards-compatibility. Xbox is undoubtedly a better value if you already have a library of older Xbox games or you are shopping used. But if you divide consumers up into Budget, Value, and Premium tiers, I don’t think the Premium tier consumers care about playing games that old. The PS4 had way more big-budget AAA exclusives than the Xbox One did, so I think PlayStation has the advantage there.
Weirdly, I think there’s some dissonance with this around disc drives. I would think premium consumers would care less about physical media: they aren’t buying used games and probably have concerns for the aesthetic of storing physical media. I personally prefer physical media, but I consider myself a value consumer who has no qualms buying used and can handle a little bit of clutter. So I think disc drive versions are valued less by the premium segment, but costs more to manufacture. So I think that boosts the sales of the diaclsss PS5. Premium consumers aren’t interested in the Series S at all though, so if they do go Xbox they just get the X and don’t use the drive. I kind of wonder how the market will react if the rumors of Sony selling an external drive end up true.
I'm unsure of these "premium" consumers caring about proprietary vs non-proprietary storage. Or caring about VR in the context of consoles instead of PCs. Or that the charger stand being a concern when the PS5 looks like it does.
“After five rounds of bargaining, it has become abundantly clear that the video game companies aren’t willing to meaningfully engage on the critical issues: compensation undercut by inflation, unregulated use of AI and safety,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator, in a statement. “I remain hopeful that we will be able to reach an agreement that meets members’ needs, but our members are done being exploited, and if these corporations aren’t willing to offer a fair deal, our next stop will be the picket lines.”
The signatory companies stated
“We will continue to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement that reflects the important contributions of SAG-AFTRA-represented performers in video games. We have reached tentative agreements on over half of the proposals and are optimistic we can find a resolution at the bargaining table.”
Well yeah, most people are still using 1080p TVs. Your average console gamer doesn’t need 4K, nor do they care about framerates. They just want to play games*.
It becomes even more confusing when you think about the fact that the Xbox One is not the Xbox 1, which was just the Xbox. And that the Xbox One X, the souped up version of the Xbox One, can be abbreviated as the XBOX, which again, is not the original Xbox.
Not really. If you were going to buy an xbox, you would either just buy the cheaper version, the more expensive version assuming its just better, or look up the difference.
insider-gaming.com
Aktywne