The reason that games are even hosted on “official” servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP’s they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.
That could be one reason, at least in a game such as MultiVersus with different IPs being used.
But they still lock down servers to their own shit when they own it all anyway and it’s because they also sell you crap to have in the game. If you had your own server, you could just give yourself the stuff they sell since all those things are still in the game somewhere and the only barrier between you and the content is their servers checking to see if you paid for them.
Spicy take: I hope they dump 2077’s engine and go Unreal.
I recently followed this guide to try and set up “optimized” path tracing (no raster lighting, with everything raytraced) in 2077, and on my lowly RTX 3090 it runs like cold molasses. Not a chance. Raster + RT reflections is all I can manage, and it looks… good.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been playing Satisfactory (an Unreal Engine game from a comparatively microscopic studio), and holy moly. Unreal Engine’s dynamic lighting looks scary good. Like, I get light bounces and reflections and everything, and it runs at like quadruple the FPS in hilariously complex areas, again, with a fraction of the dev effort.
Cryengine in KCD2 is rather sick as well, though probably less tuned for urban landscapes.
…So why don’t they save a few years and many millions, and just go with one of those instead of poorly reinventing the wheel?
This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.
Games as a Service wasn’t even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn’t handle the project, for one reason or another.
A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.
This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There's no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo's platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.
Another problem is the game director overhyping and saying “any character is possibile” and he wasn’t limiting it to warner bros’s IPs but if you’re going to do that, then they honestly should have made the game launch with at least one 3rd party character.
They're patching it to be playable offline, but only if you've previously downloaded the game.
Why not just leave that version up instead of delisting it? They could even sell it. Would be seen as a success story for preservation instead of another loss, and it's especially baffling because it's a fully avoidable loss.
Do you even have to pay hosting costs, if you put a game on steam or does valve not distribute your game for free?
If I’d have to guess the bigger issues with a game like this would be licensing or that delisting allows some form of tax advantageous asset depreciation.
Valve hosts it for “free” (30 to 15% of every sale), yes.
I’m guessing this game has some phone-home DRM or something, and maybe it’s only required the first time it’s executed after installation ? They could of course just give the game a patch that removes it but I guess they don’t want to anger the line investors and make it go down by working even a second on a “discontinued” game.
Pretty sure hosting costa arent it, the only thing possible woyld be licensing issues for the IP’s otherwsie they could leave it on steam forever and STILL make money off of sales. There are games that do this by making the players host their own servers each match.
Potentially, I don’t exactly know all the rights owners.
But just looking at the roster, I’d assume Arya Stark might be the most complicated. While HBO falls under WB, unsure if ol’ George signed away all rights to the character. And there’s always future deals too, since rights holders can change hands.
GaaS means you have ongoing expenses after launch in a way that normal games do not. The costs are higher, but they keep chasing the much larger reward that only a super small percentage will ever achieve.
Live service games have been failing constantly, so unless the change is happening already I don’t think they’re deterred. That perpetual revenue stream is some exec’s idea of a lottery ticket.
Same here. There’s been a few games I’ve seen on here recently that look interesting, even some “indie” titles, but as soon as I get to the Steam page and it lists online only, I’ve lost all interest.
It’s not going anywhere until people stop playing the games spending ridiculous amounts of money in them.
Fixed that for you. The problem isn’t the casual players, it’s the people spending $500+ worth of skins and battle passes on one game. Those are the reason GaaS are so successful.
If people play, it becomes popular, which attracts more players, which attracts spending. Even if you spend $0, you are still supporting the type of game it is by playing it.
Not to mention the GAAS titles which are competitive in nature. The whales thrive on having a mob of casual players they can crush with their P2W advantage. If the whales were only matched against other whales, they’d win less and play less.
There are a very small number of games where a changing world is a benefit to the game, although sometimes the approach also means skimping on some development before going live.
Helldivers 2 is an example of a game that benefits from the changing world approach of GaaS and it doesn’t have predatory monetization. Playing the game gives enough in game currency to buy optional equipment needed for the changing world even if you only play a few hours a week. Heck, play it more regularly and you can afford most of the thematic warbonds which again and not necessary. The changing world and adding more enemy units keeps the game fresh over time, and the evolving story is like playing a giant semi shared campaign. You play a small part in a shared experience. I don’t think doing the game as a single or coop campaign would have been a better experience.
That said, when they do end the ongoing campaign at some point it would be awesome to have some kind of automated system campaign for people to still do things. It wouldn’t be as focused, but it would extend the game’s life.
MultiVersus was hurt by trying to do SaaS because they added more predatory monetization after the beta where it was bad enough and tried to milk it for everything to the detriment of the gameplay. It is a great example of a game where the SaaS approach was terrible, and that is the case for the vast majority of SaaS games.
We see it most prevalently in games because the gaming industry is massive. But this can also happen to your car… Or your fridge…
Here’s a fun story:
There were these few blind people who volunteered to have cybernetic implants that would help them (partially) see. The company went under, the patent is held by a patent troll, but the people still have those implants in their head… Which have now either shut down or are malfunctioning…
Multiversus was one of the most mismanaged projects I’ve seen. Released in open beta for months, shut down for a year, re-released as literally the same game but worse and with more microtransactions, then quickly died.
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You’ll see this again with 2XKO, even if they’ve got a year’s worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.
The beta was fun, although the monetization was bad even back then.
But the official release made all the wrong decisions to amplify the worst parts of gameplay and dial up the monetization. It was like they got all the player feedback backwards.
The Nickelodeon fighter game is still available I believe, but you’re still right in that there’s still basically nothing to hold a candle to Smash Bros.
I bought the first Nickelodeon game a couple months after it released, and the online was already dead, I literally couldn’t find a match. Just went ahead and got a refund on it.
Just looking up what ‘preproduction’ actually means : They are in the planning stages, but they haven’t started ‘making’ the game yet. Cyberpunk (1) development took four years.
Me here just waiting to also not play the next one.
It’s just another flavor of starfield but somehow so much more shittier. Make me a game that doesn’t release looking like it’s a beta release. Then I may be interested.
In fairness is was full jank on release, the initial patches got it to “bethesda jank” where it was fun with the bugs (provided you could actually play it) but still bug ridden.
It got better over time, until just before the “big patch” came in that fully changed how it all worked skills and mechanics wise (gameplay was mostly the same).
Honestly i prefer, pre-“big patch” but the fully patched game is considerably smoother and more coherent.
So, aside from the years of post release development, completely missing features that are never actually coming (looking at you full transit system), it’s actually pretty good.
An absolutely dogshit way of releasing a game, but if you waited for a few years and bought it on discount , it’s actually a really fun game (provided you like that sort of thing).
TBC I’m not justifying anything about this process , it was a major fuckup and many other dev houses would have gone under from the weight of how badly they fucked it up, but they had that witcher money, so.
largely seamless world, fun combat, hand crafted locations, good writing, good story, good and memorable characters, engaging dialogs, multiple ways to finish quests, cool vehicles, and on and on…
oh and forget forcing the player to fast travel everywhere but traveling around in cyberpunk is actually fun so i pretty much never used it in the game despite having the option.
and it looks like no one directed any part of starfield, it’s literally the same as oblivion in terms of how every encounter and dialog unfolds, while starfield actually has direction and variety, well acted and performance captured interactive scenes. here’s a good comparison of two similar quests involving a trade with shady people. just compare how the lines are delivered, how dynamic the scenes are, what happens when threats are involved, whether the scenes have any development, what you can see when the boxes are opened, literally everything.
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