I do support live service games though. I prefer them and that’s pretty much all I ever play.
What they’ve done with handling this game in delisting it is quite frankly fantastic - get rid of all micro transactions and bundle every single one with the game and basically give the game away for free at its end of life. Now anyone what wants to play it like a regular single player offline game can for a few bucks, and I believe are least in pc it uses steam for online play so it will still be playable multiplayer. Everyone wins.
I have played several, and the vast majority have been Microtransaction Hell, and many games that are not live service are still consistently updated.
The fact that there are one or two games that do live service without intrusive and annoying microtransactions that are frequently barriers to progression or end up being pay to win doesn't make the description invalid. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The vast majority of Live Service games have zero pay to win microtransactions or barriers to progression. They’re almost all purely cosmetic microtransactions because that’s been proven to be what people want.
There was a bit of a learning curve for devs to see what people would put up with and what they wouldn’t, and stuff you describe was left on the cutting room floor years ago. Even games like COD now give you all actual content for free and just sell you cosmetics, and it’s wildly profitable for them. Selling map pack dlc got abandoned because it split the player base, whereas cosmetics don’t.
Isn't that literally what they are though? Fortnite, WoW, Runescape, Warframe or Hearthstone are all vastly different genres of games but they are still live-service games at the end. What else could the term mean besides "constantly updated", they are a living, evolving long-term service?
What are you basing this definition on? A rudimentary google search for a definition gives more than one answer and yet none of them have "always online" as a requirement for something to be live-service.
Hitman 3 for example is an example of a singleplayer live-service game, Paradox games like Stellaris are basically that as well, and Minecraft and NMS are often used as examples too. Nobody claimed that a game needs to be online to be updated, that's ridiculous, so not sure who was that clarification meant for.
"In the video game industry, games as a service (GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service.
[...]
Games released under the GaaS model typically receive a long or indefinite stream of monetized new content over time to encourage players to continue paying to support the game. This often leads to games that work under a GaaS model to be called "living games", "live games", or "live service games" since they continually change with these updates."
GaaS monetization can't be achieved without a central online service. Even with Hitman 3 a lot of content is locked behind the online requirement.
You can bend the definition as much as you want but this is what most people mean by" live service games".
Because literally every live service game ever made goes out of their way to constantly dictate your engagement with it in a way that is exclusively designed for the sole purpose of taking money from you.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
That’s strange because I’ve spent about $15 all up on micro transaction since they became a thing yet I have tens of thousands of hours in live service games and I’ve had a ball.
The fact that you can "play them" without spending money doesn't change the fact that every single element of every single feature is designed to make you want to spend money, and every interaction with every menu has ads shoved down your face.
There is exactly one design conceit for live service games, and it's "rob every player you can blind". It's the exact business model of every single one. There are zero exceptions.
Every single element of these games isn’t designed to make you want to spend money 😂. Going by your hate for them along with that terrible comment shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Almost every single live service game now just has optional cosmetics as the microtransactions. That’s the opposite of what you’re saying.
Just because some games have certain content on disk doesn’t mean others would. At some stage a game has to be cut for release and is “content complete” for printing. With live service games they continue creating content to sell in-game. With non live service games they don’t.
If you’re going to bring mods into it then that’s a completely different conversation.
Just because there are many games that do it badly doesn't mean the genre label means something different. I'm playing GW2 and Warframe which are very much live service games and I rarely, if ever, feel exploited or manipulated into giving money to them - if anything it's the opposite and the only occassion when I do spend extra on them is when I'm happy with content or updates and want to support them.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
This is subjective and I believe this might be the case for you, but it is demonstratively absolutely not true for everyone. You framing it like some absolute authority on the subject is just shortsighted and inaccurate.
I’ve been playing Old School Runescape and I must say it’s fantastic. Selling drops os enough to pay for my subscription and there’s no microtransactions.
I’ve been playing Dota more than a decade, the game that technically introduce Battle Pass. I don’t even feel pressured to buy microtransaction, the community even disappointed when Valva stop selling the yearly battle pass
The argument against live service games is that you are dependent on the servers hosted by the developer/publisher (afaik).
In normal circumstances, they are able to stop you from playing or alter the terms at any time however they like.
This is a dominant/subordinate relationship which is quite risky. Especially for young people who are still learning what a healthy relationship looks like.
The alternative is a equality relationship where you decide if you buy something based on the price.
One argument against that would be that you can „rent“ an apartment as well. But legislature has shown that states will intervene on a vendor (landlord) redefining the terms of the contract. Not so much with gaming.
Now you are arguing that the game is taken off live service and you will be able to play it offline. I don’t know if that is the case but if so then buying it now would actually send the message that doing the right thing after all boosts sales.
TL;DR: Live service games are badly legislated imo but truly making such a game offline playable with all dlc would be a good thing in my book.
Sorry you got downvoted by this Lemmy circlejerk. There's a certain toxcicity in these parts; basically anything not Linux and offline with the slightest hint of privacy issues is downright hated here.
Which is funny since the fediverse by its core principles has 0 consideration towards privacy.
It is really astonishing how reddit-like the hivemind here has become already, people don't care about even objectively discussing the terminology if they can circlejerk about "GaaS is bad ehmahgerd" instead, just going straight for extreme viewpoints and seeing it black and white. Really thought I got away from that when I joined here...
Live service games represent lazy, copy and paste style game mechanics. They’re insulting to the gaming consumer’s intelligence, and they’re basically just jobs. Daily inconsequential tasking that eventually allows you to do an inconsequential raid, where you have a 1 in 1000 chance of dropping a rare item. All so you can stand around in the game world’s hub and show off your meaningless cosmetic item that isn’t really all that useful because you’ve accomplished all of your mundane, copy and paste goals. Oh, and the casino mechanics that psychologically incentivize buying microtransactions.
The game being “constantly updated” isn’t the issue. The issue is that the “constant updates” are basically nothingburger, repetitive tasks that you’ve already done a thousand times.
Do I care enough to go on a crusade and slap boxes out of people’s hands? Fuck no. But they are a stain on gaming
I don’t know about that. The game has now removed all of the live service elements, so I would say it’s showing that there is interest in this type of game without the live service.
Kind of mixed on this one for me. On one hand it’s a win against microtransactions, since a big name like Marvel isn’t enough for people to buy it, so much that it has to be delisted. I think that’s a huge win and I think it’s worth mentioning.
On the other, preservation is a thing and I’m wondering if this game could somehow still be played if it’s taken off the store. Granted I’m not familiar with this game so I don’t know if physical copies work, or if they’re just codes with a plastic shell. Or even if this game would be playable once the servers go down. I know it’s not the best game to keep around, but history deserves preservation, etc
I disagree. I think games are definitely worth preserving, even if they aren’t that fun. Regardless, this game has historical significance and should at the very least be playable after it’s delisted.
What is and isn’t worth preserving is not something that can be known at the time of preserving. The point of preservation is so things can be accessed later if and when they’re needed. Even shitty games like Avengers may be relevant in many ways in the future, even if just to reference as ‘a shitty game’.
I recently saw this video about the British Library. They collect everything that’s published in the UK (books, magazines, papers, leaflets, flyers, …). One of the librarians makes a pretty good case about the use of collecting and preserving everything. Even (or especially) the things you don’t think are worth preserving.
“Good” is not the metric for preserving things. “Important” is. Marvel’s Avengers is important to preserve because this failure is a major historical milestone.
Like, imagine if somehow every copy of ET for the Atari 2600 vanished. Would anything fun be lost? Of course not. But would we lose some critical context in an important historical event? Yes. Very much so.
Fortunately, Atari games aren’t the kind of ephemeral media where we have to worry about that like cloud-service games or pre-code cellulite films.
Is preservation of GaaS actually important though? We’re not talking about niche shovelware that somebody is nostalgic for, we’re talking about preserving a thing that wasn’t meant to ever be preserved, that hurt the gaming industry and represented gaming’s modern backsliding into corporate greed.
This game was mocked when it was announced as late to the party, mocked when it was demoed as looking like some wish.com avengers characters, mocked upon release as being a shallow experience, and now it’s being delisted. My backlog remains resilient. Thank God I put on my Himalayan Walking Shoes!
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