The controller sucked. It sucked then; it sucks now. But it had ports for four of them, so that console had tons of four-player multiplayer games, and they were great. PS1 could technically support it, but no one had a multitap, and because no one had a multitap, practically no games supported more than two players.
Cartridges were expensive and couldn’t hold much data on them, but you basically never saw any loading times. Long load times were a thing I associated with the PlayStation brand up until the PS5. Loading times were definitely an expensive trade-off for that console, and it didn’t help them in the market, but it certainly made the N64 stick out for it.
Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?
Not until Helldivers 2 dies too. I was tricked into thinking it was healing, and then that game exploded.
EDIT: The truth hurts, but that’s still a live service game that’s actively working against the interests of consumers and preservationists. The more money and playtime people give it, the worse this situation gets.
No, there hasn’t been, but there is a distinction between currently experiencing high inflation and previously experiencing high inflation in the middle of a hardware product’s life cycle.
Very few games do. So few that the ones that hold a high player base or even grow are anomalies. This one is making strange moves like being a fighting game that, at least at launch, can’t be played offline and costs $240 to stock with every character for local tournaments.
I think enough people have been exposed to enough subscription services that customers have started taking inventory of what they’re paying per month that they didn’t used to do, which means often signing up for a month and then quitting. I’m simultaneously surprised and not surprised that the access to online multiplayer only accounts for about 30% of the reason people subscribe to these things, but then those same customers doing that same accounting of their personal finances have probably done the math to realize that, long term, it’s cheaper to just play games online on PC, which is leading to consoles performing the way they’re performing lately.