Hunt Showdown and Marauders are both pretty good. I feel like right now Anthony they can bring to the saturated market won’t matter much. Even though those two are great games, I don’t play them because extraction shooters are more on their way out. I don’t get the spark of joy in them that I did.
Someone else said it better on the Fairgame$ trailer but this also has “Thanks to all our players but we’re unfortunately ending support” 1 year later vibes to it.
Bungie is the sort of the company that won’t actually kill a project 1 year into it despite its flaws, it has money to keep it afloat, but it just feels like a generic extractions shooter as a live service in the sea of extraction shooters as a live service. If any other studio put out this trailer and I would immediately assume it’s just going to be cancelled before launch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
feature complete just means they’ve truly entered a “beta” phase. They’ve made it through production, features have been completed and now the real work can begin on designers tweaking settings and balancing the game for the next year and a half.
Contracting feels like the wrong word. It’s not gaining less money. It’s gaining more. Just companies are now converting their buyouts to simply IP grabs.
Yes, Valve requires price parity across platforms. Sales may or may not matter. The wording is vague enough that sales would in fact need to be paritied too but they don’t seem to go after people for it.
Absolutely, the goal of the player is mutable, and thus really anything, even co-op games, becomes competitive with the right player mindset. I feel like even with co-op that mindset can affect almost any game.