Who in their right mind ever thought there would be enough players and money to keep twelve whole live services from Sony alone going? Where did they think all the gamers with both infinite free time and copious bank accounts were hiding?
They only considered who was paying and you only need something like 5000 whales In game. They forgot the 10000 thousand regular players who spend nothing.
I'm not sure that was the intent. I have a feeling the strategy was more shooting a dozen arrows at a target and hoping one of them was a bulleye. After all, if even one of those games is a Fortnite level success, it doesn't even really matter if the other 11 fail. The thing that I think they forgot about is that if you put out failure after failure in search of that elusive winner, even if you were to find a game that might have otherwise been it, people are going to be so disillusioned about your live service titles that they may not want to play it now anyway.
They didn't think there was some kumbaya enough for everyone hugfest. They just thought that they would win if the invested enough money to be the winner who could take all. That could never happen for everyone and they knew they that were competing with each other. For the longest time WOW managed explosive growth but managed to "win" the MMO market after everyone gave up trying to launch a MMO as a money printing service. And to be fair there was a rational basis that outspending and outdoing could be done. Remember the missing AA studios?
Vast majority of their games are just mid games for consoles only, and those players have very low standards when it comes to games. It's crazy they thought they could put out that much slop and somehow make it work.
@@TheGreatDanish All well and good, but the regular players are the content for the whales. You need that ecosystem of people to defeat to keep the pay-to-win players interested. Same way an actual whale will starve to death if the water it's swimming in doesn't have enough of whatever the whale eats.
What executives refuse to understand is that a game being a live service is _not_ a selling point, but a way to keep an already successful game making money. "Planning" a long-term support live service game before you've ensured its success is like planning to compete with Apple before you've made a single phone. It's a pipe dream, and anyone investing in this kind of development is a gambling junkie, not an investor.
If we drew a venn diagrama between gambling junkies and investors the investor circles would be almost completely engulfed by the gambling junkie circle. The only difference between speculation and gambling is that the speculators wear nice suits and drink champagne.
don't fool yourself, the executives at sony will not be thinking "okay this liveservice thing didn't work, lets get back to making good singleplayer games", they will be thinking "what other ways can we use to drive up in game spending". nature is not healing, nature is starting to crack, and we can see through the cracks.
right on, gamers need to stop deluduing themselves, they will start incentivizing other ways instead now. these executives are a serious problem. they need to either resign or be out of existence of the entire gaming industry, they can go work as mcdonalds ceos, theyre just not made for this industry clearly.
Why would they? It's still true across the industry. Shitty mobile cashgrab/scam games are making millions, while console as per the 90s has been dead and attracts no modern young people. Everyone uses phone, millenials dont have a television. They are trying to compete with China, but mobile games excel at how efficient they are in terms of cost vs income. The idea of a AAA big name live service fancy p2w game is the big dogs' only hope, and they need it to work even if it doesn't.
@@UnknownbronyChannel Keep them out of McDonald's please, there's a good one between my work and my apartment whose franchisee actually cares about quality and I don't want a bunch of video game executives messing that up.
@@wilfredsteampunk5705There is a thing called market saturation. You can only extract that much money from a single market and mobile is already saturated to its fullest while single player gamers are starving for content.
@ every game will eventually die. But if the developers care about their fans, the game could have longevity. Fortnite has had incredible longevity. Marvel Rivals and Helldivers 2 are doing great right now. Hell, Minecraft is also a live service game. If the game is original and isn’t just a crappy cash grab to make a quick buck, Live service games can work. The problem is these greedy executives view almost EVERY game as needing to be live service now, and they don’t ever put as much effort in them as they should. For example, Halo Infinite.
I think there are a lot of issues here. I think part of it is companies throwing out a dozen projects hoping one of them will be "the hit" but what it does is even if that happens, the other 11 failures leave a sour taste in everyone's mouths. Also I have the idea that a lot of these companies are just trying too hard. As a Jets fan, I will make a comparison to their season this past year where, sure, you can collect a whole bunch of good players who, on paper, should make a great team, but if you don't pay attentiont to how they actually work together or do a lot of the other necessary work, you still fall on your face. And I think that is happening a lot here. Companies are working so hard to put together what they think is a winning live service formula that they just forget about the details which makes the few successful live service games, well, successful.
10:00 Live service genre? GENRE? It's a monetization model, not a genre. The fact that executives are thinking of it as a genre explains everything... they were trying pile into "the trend" without realizing it wasn't actually what was trending.
I'm sorry to tell you but that's just not true anymore. What you're saying used to be true some 10 years ago, but after some point the actual design philosophy of these games shifted as a result of this prevalent model. If you look at nearly every live service game on the mobile market, You'll see they all utilize the same types of gameplay mechanics, upgrade systems, timers, item/hero teirs, multiple currencies, and a bilion notifications in 50 different menus, etc. These are all functionally implemented into and affecting of the gameplay. The live service model is functionally now both a monetization model and, in many cases, a sub-genre / game design philosophy.
Given how it completely dominated the online multiplayer scene, it kinda was, after a certain point. I mean, you know it's bad when they start to have the same problems in half the games and keep doing shit that's been illegal since 2012 as if they could get away with it, newsflash, none of them did.
English is the dude's second language just substitute "category" for "genre" & it makes sense. he even hesitated before using the word, but obviously decided to go with it for the sake of pacing the interview. like, consider the variables bro.
I grew up in a poor household. We had a family console and got games twice a year - Xmas and Birthdays (we're all June and July). We used to get meaty games like FFX or Tales of Symphonia and Abyss to pad out the wait. We didn't have our console online before c.2015 when all of us were working enough to pay for Xbox Live, and by then none of us had time to get into online gaming the same way out peers did when they were 12 on Halo 2 and 3. I especially work a heavy person-interactive job and he last thing I want to do when I get home is deal with that shlt again. Neither did my brother or sister. Now I'm 27 and have no desire to play game likes this at all. Live Service games will never sell to me. I don't think these companies realise how many gamers probably have a similar upbringing story. Most of the gamers with the time and energy for LSG are in school most days and don't have the money I (we) do.
Despite the live service games and broken AAA games, I still say this is the best time for gaming. Why? Because of indies and AAs, they are killing it. There are so many games now than ever that its impossible to not have something to a persons liking. I say this as a person who has been gaming since the 80s.
I have the money, don't have the time. Only reason I have money is because I still live with parents and so my disposable income is high. I just invest it because there isn't much to spend it on. My time is limited between full time work and full-time school. Thus, the games i focus on are quality games that respect my time. Warframe, Helldivers, Minecraft, and other single player games i can pick up now and then. I got no time for Marvel Rivals or Path of Exile 2. Even if those are great games. I am already tired of long games like BG3 and witcher 3 even though they are great games. Live Service games are just unappealing.
I'm 20 years older than you are and I remember my childhood games mostly for "things you could play with the kids in the neighborhood when it rained." My brother and I played an entire season of Tecmo Super Bowl with every team set to human control because games were expensive and Mom could only buy a couple of them a year. We also got REAL good at Contra co-op, to the point where the proudest moment of my entire gaming life was my little bro and me, 10 and 12 respectively at the time, beating Contra without either of us dying once in front of all our friends on a rainy summer afternoon. These days, games don't offer experiences like that anymore. It's either online, of much lower quality, or (usually) both.
@@SimuLordThat's very similar to how our games were treated too. But we used to be the ones going elsewhere since our mother wouldn't buy us the cool games at the time like GTA3, which was fair in hindsight. The game I played most as a kid was Test Drive Unlimited and I would kill for a new version that's actually good. Ubisoft came close with The Crew but made it only online so when the servers closed the game died. No point playing 2 for the same reason.
That was the golden era of online live service games. I bought my map packs with lemonade stand money and got my games with saved Christmas and birthday money. Nowadays the games are made through temp workers, contractors, suits and psychologists to take every dollar they can from you with as little effort and care for the customer as possible. I only care about offline games these days too but there's a few indies carrying the torch of couch coop and RPGs like grim dawn. Also rom hacks have exploded into so much better than mainline games it's insane.
The employees who got laid off because they were shoved into live service projects doomed to fail would probably feel hurt by this being called a 'good thing'. This trend has had victims beyond consumer dissatisfaction
@@ShinkajoI know people like this. Their friends are misequating the kind of games they enjoy (valorant, etc.) with the business model they use. A lot of people don't realize you could have your cake (said game) and eat it too (no predatory monetization)
Remember when WoW became a massive hit, and there were endless MMORPGs that came out and failed? They did the same thing again but with Live Service. There has been no "Fortnite Killer" just like there was no "WoW Killer". A "LoL Killer" never came into being either. Will the industry learn the 3rd time around? No, I doubt it.
WoW didn't start the MMORPG trend. It was a product of it. Everquest was one of the first MMORPGs to achieve great success. And WoW was a clone of it. And the only reason WoW was the hit instead of Everquest 2 (which released at the same time) was WoW just did everything a little bit better then Everquest 2. And yes A WoW killer did come along it just wasn't in the same genre, that being Call Of Duty.
WoW is a live service. All MMORPGs are live services, they just weren't using the term yet. They all have servers online constantly with rotating events and whatnot, even if older MMOs did things differently than Gacha games or MOBAs
@@midriffzero Call Of Duty haha. I have bnet balance from selling WoW tokens I could play CoD for free but I dont because it's a disrespect to human dignity. F Blizzard and everything they've touched in the last 10 years. It's sad I have my WoW classic through Wrath original boxes/disks on my mantle but is what it is.
If you're going to be a [big thing] killer, it has to be by swooping in after the big thing has fallen off and started to rot, and everyone else is ditching the concept and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Not when it's at the height of its success, and you're fighting dozens of other copycats trying to copy the success of a successful thing by copying the thing, and ending up with thing minus the success. So if AAA is finally ditching live service, I expect we'll end up with some wildly successful new twist on live service in a few years when the market's not flooded anymore.
@@KalasenZyphurus Live service isn't a genre. MMORPGs were already live service games before this became a term. Fortnite is also just a glorified Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament with them constantly adding more skins to sell. Live service is more or less just a concept for continuously milking the player, no matter if the live service games is a shooter, a MMORPG, Action "RPG" or whatever. A "micro"-transaction selling platform, where actual genre behind it doesn't matter. So, in other words, "a new twist on live service" doesn't really make sense. The whole thing remind me of "cloud", which is just access to online servers, which was already a thing before the term "cloud" was introduced.
What cracks me so much about Sony isn't even that they tried to make a live-service game out of a story driven GoW reboot where I can't even think of a single reason that is not a crash grab on the fans. What cracks me is that Sony, at one point, wanted to release 12 live-service games within 2-3 year period. With most of live-service games you are expected to drop in countless hours into, often treat as a 2nd job and never leave and those idiots wanted to cannibalise themselves by releasing 12 games there were expected to fight for the same player base. The amount of people and free time those people have at their disposal are limited and yet they expected to get the same slice of players to play them all at the same time... How is no one fired for such and idiotic decision?
@@konradzukowski213 they were announced under Jim Ryan, who seemed to be a major force in the idea to do so. He has since left, and sanity seems to be prevailing again at last. But not before Sony 1st party was set back 3-5 years.
@konradzukowski213 The thinking was probably something like this: 1. Release 12 games 2. Profit 3. Gather data on what systems work best to part players and their money 4. Profit 5. Slowly sunset the worst performers 6. Profit 7. Shift resources to the high performing services, implementing all of the "best" ideas 8. Profit Profit Profit
Thanks Concord. You'll be remembered as the game SO terrible, that caused the AAA industry's bubble to pop and kill dozens of studios and projects. Also, when they announced their focus shift to live services, probably the 90% of the playerbase could've saved them hundreds of millions when they said it was a bad idea and IF they've listened.
Live Services aren't dead. They just perfected the formula. The end result is a dead abandoned game. And we went from 10 years with Destiny, to 6 years with Apex, to 1 year with Suicide Squad, to dead on realease with Concord to dead before release. Its corporate efficiency at its finest.
wow, who knew if you ask customers to pay thousands of dollars over years to use your service or play the game they already purchased, they probably wont continue throwing money at you forever. i mean some certainly do, how do you think these companies make any revenue?
They ARE free of consequences. Look how many games in the last year with 9-figure budgets were either complete failures or got cancelled before even being released. No real consequences were felt for said corpos squandering amounts of cash the average person almost can't fathom.
@@raze2012_ I think of the shareholders often, mostly while thinking there should be a T-shirt with a picture of Mario's brother that says "Free Luigi" in the game's cartoony typeface. (I love anything that smacks of "if you know, you know" while regular people don't get it.)
Marvel Rivals shows how live service games aren't a problem, due to how they respect their player base. Its not live services as a whole that are bad, but how souless and money hungry most studios are when making them.
@@Lakrushma also that there is only so much room for live services. The market only has so much time and money to give. If every company is trying to get all of it it becomes unsustainable and most will fail.
Rivals still charges $15+ for skins and they're ran by a dev team known for milking. Make no mistake if you're playing a live service game the #1 goal is to make money. If they care about their player base, it's because they know they have something worth investing in because it will pay out $$$ in the end. Edit: I'm not saying everyone on the dev team is soulless but the ones who make the final decisions definitely are just in it to make money.
@@Lakrushma People dont really think of it this way but, even before Marvel Rivals, Monster Hunter was killing it with a consistently updated live service game that is well-respected. People wont want to call MH a live service, but short of a subscription price and free to try price point, it absolutely is.
I've never been one for live services. Almost always, the quality keeps going down. I personally play single-player, one-and-done (other than replaying) experiences. Usually much higher quality; and I get more out of my limited time I have to play games with them. But to each their own.
I gravitate toward what I call "session games", as in a game you play for a couple hours after work and it's a well-packaged experience (a sports game, a delivery in American Truck Simulator, a quest or short quest chain in a larger open-world RPG, that sort of thing.) Next thing you know, you've got two or three hundred hours (or in ATS's case for me, close to 3,000) in it for one price.
I don't mind replay value, but that comes from having solid gameplay, engaging mechanics, the things you can enjoy again and again, even over a good story. You don't get that when you intentionally design around it having infinite content because that just leads to repetition. There's a ver delicate balance for content and story, but you live and die by gameplay.
Same. I like a game that feels like a game. I'm an adult so I already have daily chores to do, not a fan of dailies and chores to farm currency in game to fill the content holes in that game. I don't have that kind of time anymore.
Up to what dollar amount can be a tax write off? I'm assuming there's an upper amount and I can not imagine that any govt would look at a $400 million dollar "tax write off" and say, "sure, seems legit". If that's the case, that means no dev company can actually ever run out of money. That doesn't make sense, does it?
@@jaredfritsch6833 There's no limit but you're correct that a write-off isn't just free money. The thing to understand is Assets-Liabilities=Equity; Revenues-Expenses=Income. An intangible asset like a trademark/patent/etc has value because you can license merchandise, sell broadcasting and streaming rights, etc. If you deem that the asset has reduced value or no value because the project has been indefinitely cancelled then you can expense the difference against revenues to reduce your taxable income (there are carryforward/back provisions but, trying to keep things simple). So the possible savings of a write-off for a company within a year are its taxable amount owing. Simple terms: you make 80k, you owe 16k in tax, if you have 80k in expenses/deductions against that 80k, you now owe 0 and thus saved 16k but still had to lose 80k in value to save that 16k. To your comment an example of a 400 million dollar tax write off would be like an oil company having an oil rig get destroyed by a rogue wave/explosion/etc. They lost a $400m asset and would expense (write-off) the loss.
@@jaredfritsch6833 Tax write off just means they've made losses. They only tax on profits. It's not some infinite money glitch like some people seem to think it is.
This video makes me all the more appreciative of Larian Studios, FromSoftware, and all the other developers who haven't been caught up in the live service quagmire.
_"Fromsoft is making an Elden Ring Battle Royale Standalone Expansion. Let that sink in"_ @@totallynuts7595 That's a bit disingenous, though isn't it? You know full well that "live service" means monetised to the hilt. Buying skins, weapons, upgrades, perks etc with real money. There is nothing to suggest that Elden Ring Nightreign will be anything of the sort.
0:21 With this quote from Shuhei Yoshida, I can just picture someone else at Sony hearing that and hitting the "Independent Thought Alarm" from The Simpsons.
The live service model only fails because their strategy is: Monetization > game quality. I'm glad that strategy is failing. Nothing of value was lost.
"live service has burst" has been said for over 4 years now. it will never burst. the failure rate has always been the same. there are always stupid ceos chasing the big successes without realizing how much luck it requires
@@wilburtshnookums Was it ever a bubble? It is only a trend now because a lot of games that started development ages ago are now releasing. It's not like there is hype or even a market for a lot of service games at the same time.
@@wilburtshnookums I agree the fact is making a video game for $$$ is always going to be a gamble and live service makes more money more consistently then normal releases. Same with Gacha games they are in general far worse games which require far less development that make more money. Every soulless devil sucking corporate suit would jump on that over a normal release.
They don't care. If they need to make 10 flops (not Concord level flops, but normal "barely broke even" flops) to make 1 Fortnite, they will do it. That's not gonna fundamentally change. Sony's backtracking is a mix of having a Concord level flop and the weakening economy. They aren't taking any risks rn. So less exclusivity deals, canceling anything but the most sure projects, and ofc, cutting out as many devs as legally possible to overwork the remaining. It's rough times.
Not quite, live service will burst but not in the catastrophic way everybody expects. It will be more like a deflation, with most titles failing to return profit which in turn will lead to all the players consolidating around a handful of titles, however, with the ever increasing costs of developing games, it means that every single failed project will hurt the wallets of their publishers at ever increasing rates, and even mighty publishers like Sony or even Microsoft won't be able to keep throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks and what not at random. That will be the "burst" of the live services games, once they become too expensive to simply try to brute force the arrival of the next overwatch, the next marvel rivals, etc., by sheer numbers of projects.
To put this absurdity in perspective it's like that during the era of big MMO games one big publisher would have decided to launch multiple MMO games in rapid succession hoping that some of them would stick. Considering the nature of these kind of recurring revenue games is that you have a very limited market as the players have money and time to invest mostly only one these kind of games. To plan more than one these kind of "it gets good once you spend X amount of money and X*Y amount of time" grinding games is simply insane as they have a barrier of entry by design. They are designed so that once you have paid your initial investment you'll get your taste of things to come for a short while and get more only, and only if you invest more time and money. The pull effect to these kind of games is the same as social networks use: the primary reason players go through the effort is because their friends also play it. Once you have too many games competing this kind of pull effect is completely lost. Okay, live service games are not MMO games, but when you think about the core mechanics is there that much difference in the key areas how these games operate and capture the investment of time and money from players who also have their friends playing the same game?
Yes, I've been thinking about the parallels to the MMO rush as well. World of Warcraft hit the scene as an entirely new kind of game (it wasn't really, but it was the first of its kind to reach such mainstream popularity). Basically, executives saw that players were suddenly pumping billions of dollars into an entirely new market, and thought they could easily get a piece of that market. The problem was that World of Warcraft _was_ the market. There wasn't a billion-dollar market for "MMOs that _aren't_ World of Warcraft". The predictable result was a slew of failed MMO releases over the next 5-10 years.
@@Wishbone1977 It sounds pretty doable when phrased as "capturing 5% of the current market" or something, but the reality is that if you already spent (or are still spending) money on a game then why would you spend more money on a very similar game that you aren't sure you'll even like as much as what you're playing now. If anything, the longevity of WoW proves that people are creatures of habit and need extraordinary incentives to be made to switch out their "main game". That's why FFXIV and Marvel Rivals have been kicking Blizzards ass, because players are "extraordinarily incentivized" to leave thanks to Blizzard ruining the games.
@@Nostradankus But even phrased like that, if the reality is that the product they want to use to capture that market share doesn't actually _belong_ to that market, it's still a stupid idea. The thing is, novelty absolutely makes a difference. This is why the Nintendo Wii was such a smash hit while the Nintendo Wii-U was an abject failure. Nintendo never understood why the Wii got so popular. They thought that people just really liked that sort of control scheme and would certainly shell out money for more of the same, when in reality people found the gimmick fun for a while because it was _new._ That is not to say that you can never be successful copying a new idea that's caught on (whether your own or somebody else's), there are plenty of games that prove that can absolutely work. But in order for it to work there are two requirements: 1) the first iteration of the idea did not only catch on _because_ it was new, and 2) your product has to be _better_ than the original.
It's just so telling that Sony would make the same mistake it made when MMOs were the games everyone was trying to cash into. Just look up the number of MMOs published by Sony and how many of them were released so close to each other. Flooding the market with their own games is something they never learned from.
Consumers already use that metric, there's been loads of amazing games released in the last 20 years. The handful of AAA slop doesn't represent the industry as a whole.
A part of me really loves the idea of games designed to be lived with for a little while, but our current environment was never going to wield that responsibly
Just too many games! 20 years ago, we had less game available and less releases. People keep playing games for years. For myself, I went into a buy spree in the pandemic, and I still rotate between theses games and bought only a couple of games since. I have some upcoming on my radar but I'm not even sure I ll buy them since my current games still bring me hours of joy.
Definitely a factor! I have games I bought 3 years ago that I haven't even gotten around to playing yet. I feel this the most though as a solo game dev now, with an all time high amount of games coming out on Steam, it's tough to even get my RoadHouse Manager (wishlist today and stuff) noticed. And my game's an original design. For games that are 2nd or 3rd copies of trends, like the 5th vampire survivors game released this week, its even harder.
I think what’s most perplexing is how they didn’t make a remaster of bloodborne, you don’t have to remake it entirely, the game would have sold bucket loads for a fully optimised ps5 and pc version, framerate was a problem on ps4 and there’s all sorts of improvements they could have made without a full remake and people would have brought it. most people who have played bloodborne still rank it in their top 3 ps4 games or even top 3 ever.. Sony has been sitting on money for no reason, literally zero reason at all
Charging for any live service is very risky nowadays. Players, for the most part, expect it to be free. It is very hard to defy or change popular sentiment.
Completely wild that WoW still gets away with it, while also having EVERY other monetization avenue on top of their sub fee... I guess that is the privilege of having been around for so long. No way WoW could come out today with Blizzards current practices and be successful.
We live in a age of deteriorating consumer wealth. So unless they plan to fund their entire model on %5 of the gamer population, then this was pretty predictable.
You get it. If you only follow gamer news you might not realize this is a global trend in tech layoffs. But also everyone's rent is no longer just 30% of their income. People just can't budget so many subscriptions right now, even if they'd like too. High rent and high grocery bills hurt the games industry, and that trend isn't about to reverse.
Helldivers 1 was a decent CO-OP game, but they left it in really poor state (most of the weapons and stratogems are really bad after nerfs, retaliation missions and enemy spawns need to be reworked and make galactic conquest less dependent on player counts, because currently there are less then 1000 players constant). it should have got one last massive rebalance patch before leaving it.
Why do companies keep trying to force live service into single player narrative-driven games? Is it really that bad to make a complete experience, free from in-game shops, paid dlc, and online experience bloat?
In my own experience (Playing Destiny/Destiny 2) it never felt like live service games could keep up with player demands or leased DOA. 2017 i started to play single player RPGs only, they feel much more satisfying to play to completion and see all the content, then put in on the shelf. Too each their own, id love to see a pivot back to single player games.
What's odd is that for the western industry's track record of copying whatever is successful at the time, we have yet to see them attempt to copy games like Genshin Impact. They certainly have the budget with all the money they keep burning on projects that go nowhere.
Western executives prefer the Gameloft/Zynga model and it makes them enough money that they don't feel a need to put in the actual effort required to make a compelling Eastern-style gacha game.
genshin impact is lacking one thing for these executives. a system that promotes envy. you can play genshin without ever seeing another player, and so you never see something expensive that you want to have.
Live service games dying is the greatest thing to happen to us as gamers. We've been complaining for years about the overlords nickel and dining us to death with low quality always online garbage, chock full of useless trinkets aimed at people who don't know better. Seeing it blow up in their face and cost them tens of millions of dollars in cancellations is absolutely glorious. Perhaps they'll do what they should've done all along and listened to us. Everything about live service dying is a giant benefit to us, as consumers and gamers, and that's all that matters.
@@Spoopy_manbecause Bloodborne is considered a massive hit while Days Gone was apparently so unsuccsessfull it canceled the sequel Bloodborne also really is just a very outstanding game, meanwhile days gone is just another Zombie slop game
@@cc0767 Not at all surprising, souls games weren't mainstream before DS3, regardless of the quality of Bloodborne it's widely known that it didn't sell a ton.
I mean, everybody was out to whore themselves out with no self-respect for armor core six and it’s sold exactly as well as rabbit kingdoms to a game almost nobody cared about. Soft is more miss than hit with trying to sell any game that isn’t just copy and paste demon soul.
Speaking for myself, the Bloodborn ship has sailed. I'd have given anything to play the game on PC 5-6 years ago... But there's so many other options that if a Bloodborn port did finally release, I don't think I would care. They had a window where everyone who did not have a Playstation was desperate to play it, and that was before Elden Ring came out.
Boy. I have been enjoying your videos for a year now. It has become my breakfast staple. I really want to thank you for the good quality and interesting way you present your videos. It is a pleasure and got me partially more invested in games.
I think developers are forgetting that a good single player game has no extra maintenance costs. Ubisoft makes so much money of their back log. You can always bundle it to sell to players, or use a game to promote your next cutting down on marketing costs.
Ubisoft is not really a good metric for success when alot of their previous games are all similar. Companies should not be copying that method, plenty already worryingly do.
My guess is that company execs don't get promoted for making safe, dependable money. They likely get promoted for taking huge risks that might pay off and jumping on bandwagons.
Imagine Sony just making these games non-exclusive to PlayStation. They could literally almost double sales of their IP. Consoles are usually loss leaders to sell the software. And limiting to PS5 is dumb.
I mean, Marvel Rivals, ZZZ, Helldivers 2, etc... new live service games still release and are successful. The bubble hasn't burst, the bubble was never really there, as there's ALWAYS been failures, probably more than successes. It's just the budgets and investments are being realized to be cut off sooner by publicly traded corporations. As someone else said here, live service games still succeed, but the suits at publishers need to realize live service is NOT a selling point. GOOD GAMES are the selling point. If they happen to be live service? Then that's fine.
Stop saying "Bloodborne remake." As if we don't already have enough games that are exact copies of each other. Just because it's a reliable way to make money doesn't mean it's good for the gamer economy. We want original content. That's why these games being cancelled is a travesty. But your continued appeal to a Bloodborne remake doesn't give me any hope that we will actually see any of it. It's just stupid.
@@beemerwt4185 Yeah, I see everyone spamming for a Bloodborne remake as if the original game is completely un-playable and 30 years old. It's a good game, but I feel like a lot of people just keep repeating this non-sense because everyone else is doing it. It's weird.
@tacos4419 I may personally be a lifelong PlayStation guy but locking Bloodborne behind a PlayStation beyond the first oh, 10 years of its lifespan feels arbitrary
@tacos4419why would people just parrot other people's opinions like that?? I can tell you I would love to see a Bloodborne remake/remaster, I finished the regular ending of the game once, and I'd like to replay it and get the secret true ending but have been put off by the 30fps cap on the PS4 version.
@@Bodgie7878 Idk, the amount of people demanding a remaster/remake seems weird and unreasonable to me. 30 fps never bothered me. To me it's playable with a prob. The graphics still hold up as well. If anything a Bloodborne 2 would be welcome.
@tacos4419 ah well that's a valid take, and I 100% agree with you something new from the bloodborne IP would have me a lot more excited than a remake or remaster, but for my own personal tastes I would welcome that still.
As someone who played the first horizon only... In what world is that game worthy of mmos, lego etc? its a Ubisoft formula game made by PlayStation. What's next, NFT Horizon?
@ : Sure, there are always exceptions. Helldivers 2 has been providing some entertaining videos here on TH-cam. It’s not my bag, but I wouldn’t want to see it fail, since it seems to have been done right and people are getting so much joy from it. I’m talking about games that were never meant to be live service, like Assassin’s Creed, The Last Of Us, and other really compelling character driven, narrative games, relying on open worlds, strong stories, adult themes and grownup thinking. They want to RUIN these great games by turning them into bastardised zombie versions of what they once were, for a market of people who just don’t want that. There’s a huge section of gamers, like me, who play video games to get away from humanity, dealing with other people, having responsibilities, being shouted at if you mess up, or being frustrated with others who mess up or troll the game. Some of us just want to escape the, “real world,” and be free to shoot characters in the face if they annoy us. People who only play the story of the Red Dead and GTA games, without ever going online (not deliberately) to play with other, “people.” We’ve been shunted to the sidelines, even though we were the main pillar holding up the games industry, as they are now discovering. Sure, there are publishers out there who’ve built their whole business model on live services, and they’ve succeeded where others cannot. But they already have all the players. Trying to turn every game into a live service has just resulted in lots of square pegs being forced into round holes, in which they do not fit. It’s like fridge manufacturers trying to move into car manufacturing out of pure greed, with the bosses just assuming that the machinery will work fine, ignoring the workers who are saying, “But we don’t know how to make cars!” And we end up with our favourite Porches hitting the streets with only three wheels and being frosty on the inside. It’s a form of gold rush insanity that has to stop!
I've dreamt of this moment for over a decade now. Sometimes I found myself doubting if it would ever happen. But now the great culling is upon us. The industry collapsing under its own weight. Live service games becoming too risky of an investment. Maybe now things will start returning to the way they once were. Maybe now we'll start getting consistently great AAA games again.
Who has time for putting a lot of time into an MMO anymore? Those of us not working 3 jobs are too old to work 3 jobs or have families to take care of. We don't have time to exercise regularly much less grinding M+ just to be able to navigate endgame content.
I’m sure not all of them deserved losing their jobs but serves them right for being part of this disgusting situation. Like you said this entire situation came from the company as a whole over valuing the strategic decision making when deciding what kind of games to make, they acted as if the players aren’t even a factor at all, honestly disgusting behaviour. This is what you get when you treat people like numbers, you make horrible investments because money comes from people it isn’t just a number. Sony should have made more effort to connect with the community, would have been real simple to find out we wanted a Bloodborne remake for example, the community is very vocal about these kinds of things yet they didn’t even bother to try. This kind of hit obviously sucks for the gaming community like you said that ~200 mill could have been well spent on DLC content for already popular games, remakes of already popular games, etc. and a major game company laying off 900 people isn’t great either but if this is what needed to happen for the industry to finally realize that the players matter I’m glad it happened. Let’s hope something actually changes and these morons stop chasing money and make actual player feedback based financial decisions
I'd rather not have a Bloodborne remake/remaster than having one as disrecpectful to the source material as Demon Souls' Any Bloodborne fan can attest to this. It is currently very playable on the ShadPS4 emulator for the PC.
I wonder how much fraud is involved in the bubble. If a studio/publisher says "THIS is our flagship" to one investor but that a different game is the flagship to a different investor, are they vulnerable to lawsuits?
I'm older than 40 and have been playing games since I was eight. I have zero interest in live service games, will not play them and despise the focus on them. Not everybody. In fact, MOST gamers do not care about them
Oh please who would get offended? Some may argue there was never truly a bubble to begin with. The pattern of some LS surviving with a niche audience, select few blowing up and 80% getting nowhere has been like that for almost 20 years.
The bubble came with all the big games studios diverting money from games they knew how to make into a game type they had no experience in, when the market could only support a couple profitable ones at any one time. Why would you stop making games you know would make you money so instead you could poor vast amounts of money into a long shot gamble almost guaranteed to fail? Because of the bubble and the mass delusion that goes with bubbles. That’s why
The biggest issue for media companies is that gaming can't be corporate. If anyone wants to have fun with a piece of media, then the piece of media needs to be genuinely artistic and fun. As soon as you begin to micromanage is as a corporate investment to gain revenue, you begin sucking the life out of the media like a vampire. You can do that a little. But if you don't stop, you'll only have a desiccated husk remaining.
Yeah, I disagree with the title, but the bigger issue is the market is quite packed. You need to either fighting something that's stagnated, or is a more unique take.
This is the problem when you decide to just make whatever the numbers say is the best. Executives keep justifying their decisions by using player count and money spent on the in-game store, rather than doing so based on raw audience reception. When you do this, you completely ignore the fact that people will buy a game that looks good, and not know until they play the game that it's bad. When that happens, you get really good sales numbers, but poor reception. The executives then look only at the numbers and decide that because this last game sold well, it must mean that this is what players actually do want, regardless of what they say. This is absurd, and is exactly the reason why they are in the position they are now. Shareholders do not look at ANYTHING besides raw monetary gain, and because of this, they will keep pushing industries by the numbers, which completely ignores the actual quality of the product. When that happens, quality slowly begins to slip, and the bubble bursts as people get tired of poor product delivery.
To me, the most insane aspect of all the hyper-focus on GAAS titles, is that the PCVR2 headset, that costly peripheral, is floundering through simply being ignored. It has less than a dozen exclusive games, and it's missing countless backwards compatible updates with PS4 VR games. If it wasn't for the recent PC adapter that allows you to play PCVR with it, the thing would be a paperweight.
No sympathy on my side for jobs lost in this market. It's simple, you work for shitty companies making shitty products, you get shitty outcomes. What's strange about that?
One of the sadder things coming out of the bubble popping is hearing that Freejam started shutting down a few weeks ago. Robocraft is a game that held a fond place in my heart, even if it had a checkered history and their attempts at a sequel were a developmental disaster.
One of the issues with liveservice games are a bit of a gamble, and an expensive one at that. Although the profit cieling is pretty high, the floor goes very very low.
The one thing that execs dont understand is that on average a person has maybe 4- 6 hours a day to spend on leisure activities and most games take a minimum of 15-30 mins to get into a groove and once you get into the groove those hours disappear so having 12 live service is not a great plan eve 2 or3 is a stretch for a normal person. Most players already have the one or two live aervice games they play and that is all they have time for. So what was the plan with this business model
I worked in M&A. Believe me when I say this, most company managers only look at the discounted cash flows their moonshot project will supposedly give them in a vacuum. Viability relative to competitors is seldom analysed. Dumb customer analysis, dumb market analysis, dumb financial planning. Ergo, dumb valuations and dumb economy.
Saying it's a bubble that bust is implying they are certain it doesn't and can no longer work and they're getting hard punished just for doing. I'm totally unconvinced they think live service cannot work. The only bubble that has burst is the idea that live service is an automated money printer just by existing.
with so many lost hours and jobs on this massive of a scale industry wide. Do you think there will be IDK some sort of reform to how things are done to protect the devs, coders and other artists working on big games in the future?
I recently thought about selling my PS5 because I barely ever used it. It feels like there are just no games compared to all the cool exclusives of the PS4. Now looking at that insane live service graveyard it all makes sense. Where are the single player games Sony?
Its industry wide. You can see a similar trend in streaming land where Netflix has basically won the streaming platform wars. People just can't spend their buck more then once. Pretty much all triple A games turned into live services but people could maybe pay between 1-3 at any one time. Whales are fine but whales are rare and with dozens of live streaming services you will spread the butter very, very thin. What will happen is that ' the best' live streaming services will survive. Those that offer the most bang for the buck in the various genre's that exist in gaming land. The rest will die as there just is not enough sunlight (money) to make them grow. And the companies; their shareholders and CEO's? they knew. They just did not know what the market cap was and always hoped for it to be higher. Now they know. So they need to figure out what live service games do best in their portfolio and scrap the rest. - My fear is that they will not make regular games but instead sit on that one or two successful live services and do nothing else then produce for that. Till of course eventually the wind changes and those too fail.
These companies forget that people have one or two Live Service games MAX that they play. Meanwhile a new one comes out every two months and people don't want to leave their comfort game
a groundbreaking AAA game being developed in LA - a fireman(person) simulator where you try to put out wild fires with no firefighting equipment or water
It is a corporate thing to do.... take on 12 projects in an area where you currently have zero successes. What does Sony have in the live services space at this time?
"I know that this is going to be a bit offensive to some." Good. Whoever is offended by this are the people making the hobby worse. They should be gatekept out of the hobby.
Man, if there's one bad thing about Marvel Rivals it's that the guy running Marathon now will be pointing to it all "SEE? I told you hero shooters are still popular!"
Another aspect of this corporate obsession that affects me more and more is game preservation. Once the "live service" is shut down, the game cannot be played anymore in any legal way. We are effectively killing retro-gaming for future generations - or even for people who were a couple of years late to the party, or wish to revisit the experience later in life.
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Fake news
seeing god of war on the list i was like WHO DAFUQ wanted another ascension shithole
What is fake news @@darugdawg2453
Going from 55% to 60% is an increase in live-service investment. I think? I'm not good at math. 🤓
I've tried this sponsor. Personally I didn't find it to be worth the high price for a gpt wrapper helper
Who in their right mind ever thought there would be enough players and money to keep twelve whole live services from Sony alone going? Where did they think all the gamers with both infinite free time and copious bank accounts were hiding?
They only considered who was paying and you only need something like 5000 whales In game. They forgot the 10000 thousand regular players who spend nothing.
I'm not sure that was the intent. I have a feeling the strategy was more shooting a dozen arrows at a target and hoping one of them was a bulleye. After all, if even one of those games is a Fortnite level success, it doesn't even really matter if the other 11 fail. The thing that I think they forgot about is that if you put out failure after failure in search of that elusive winner, even if you were to find a game that might have otherwise been it, people are going to be so disillusioned about your live service titles that they may not want to play it now anyway.
They didn't think there was some kumbaya enough for everyone hugfest. They just thought that they would win if the invested enough money to be the winner who could take all. That could never happen for everyone and they knew they that were competing with each other. For the longest time WOW managed explosive growth but managed to "win" the MMO market after everyone gave up trying to launch a MMO as a money printing service. And to be fair there was a rational basis that outspending and outdoing could be done. Remember the missing AA studios?
Vast majority of their games are just mid games for consoles only, and those players have very low standards when it comes to games. It's crazy they thought they could put out that much slop and somehow make it work.
@@TheGreatDanish All well and good, but the regular players are the content for the whales. You need that ecosystem of people to defeat to keep the pay-to-win players interested. Same way an actual whale will starve to death if the water it's swimming in doesn't have enough of whatever the whale eats.
What executives refuse to understand is that a game being a live service is _not_ a selling point, but a way to keep an already successful game making money. "Planning" a long-term support live service game before you've ensured its success is like planning to compete with Apple before you've made a single phone. It's a pipe dream, and anyone investing in this kind of development is a gambling junkie, not an investor.
that sounds like it describes most investors
@@SharienGaming Yeah definitely a distinction without a difference.
If we drew a venn diagrama between gambling junkies and investors the investor circles would be almost completely engulfed by the gambling junkie circle. The only difference between speculation and gambling is that the speculators wear nice suits and drink champagne.
@@FiksIIanzOyou’ve finally cracked the code, these are people who love to live on the edge with the GDP of entire countries at stake
don't fool yourself, the executives at sony will not be thinking "okay this liveservice thing didn't work, lets get back to making good singleplayer games", they will be thinking "what other ways can we use to drive up in game spending". nature is not healing, nature is starting to crack, and we can see through the cracks.
right on, gamers need to stop deluduing themselves, they will start incentivizing other ways instead now. these executives are a serious problem. they need to either resign or be out of existence of the entire gaming industry, they can go work as mcdonalds ceos, theyre just not made for this industry clearly.
Why would they? It's still true across the industry. Shitty mobile cashgrab/scam games are making millions, while console as per the 90s has been dead and attracts no modern young people. Everyone uses phone, millenials dont have a television. They are trying to compete with China, but mobile games excel at how efficient they are in terms of cost vs income. The idea of a AAA big name live service fancy p2w game is the big dogs' only hope, and they need it to work even if it doesn't.
@@UnknownbronyChannel Keep them out of McDonald's please, there's a good one between my work and my apartment whose franchisee actually cares about quality and I don't want a bunch of video game executives messing that up.
@@UnknownbronyChannel Go ahead and force them out. You and what army, though?
@@wilfredsteampunk5705There is a thing called market saturation. You can only extract that much money from a single market and mobile is already saturated to its fullest while single player gamers are starving for content.
Thank god
Live service can work, but not every game needs to be live service.
work in what way? The game inevitably dies.
@ every game will eventually die. But if the developers care about their fans, the game could have longevity. Fortnite has had incredible longevity. Marvel Rivals and Helldivers 2 are doing great right now. Hell, Minecraft is also a live service game. If the game is original and isn’t just a crappy cash grab to make a quick buck, Live service games can work. The problem is these greedy executives view almost EVERY game as needing to be live service now, and they don’t ever put as much effort in them as they should. For example, Halo Infinite.
@@bologna3048 5 IQ take lmao
@@bologna3048 Well, duh... the matter is what period of time.
I think there are a lot of issues here. I think part of it is companies throwing out a dozen projects hoping one of them will be "the hit" but what it does is even if that happens, the other 11 failures leave a sour taste in everyone's mouths. Also I have the idea that a lot of these companies are just trying too hard. As a Jets fan, I will make a comparison to their season this past year where, sure, you can collect a whole bunch of good players who, on paper, should make a great team, but if you don't pay attentiont to how they actually work together or do a lot of the other necessary work, you still fall on your face. And I think that is happening a lot here. Companies are working so hard to put together what they think is a winning live service formula that they just forget about the details which makes the few successful live service games, well, successful.
10:00 Live service genre? GENRE? It's a monetization model, not a genre. The fact that executives are thinking of it as a genre explains everything... they were trying pile into "the trend" without realizing it wasn't actually what was trending.
When the mechanics and monetisation overlap as much as they do, it’s a genre. Now sign up for my season pass and do your dailies.
I'm sorry to tell you but that's just not true anymore. What you're saying used to be true some 10 years ago, but after some point the actual design philosophy of these games shifted as a result of this prevalent model. If you look at nearly every live service game on the mobile market, You'll see they all utilize the same types of gameplay mechanics, upgrade systems, timers, item/hero teirs, multiple currencies, and a bilion notifications in 50 different menus, etc. These are all functionally implemented into and affecting of the gameplay. The live service model is functionally now both a monetization model and, in many cases, a sub-genre / game design philosophy.
Given how it completely dominated the online multiplayer scene, it kinda was, after a certain point. I mean, you know it's bad when they start to have the same problems in half the games and keep doing shit that's been illegal since 2012 as if they could get away with it, newsflash, none of them did.
English is the dude's second language just substitute "category" for "genre" & it makes sense. he even hesitated before using the word, but obviously decided to go with it for the sake of pacing the interview. like, consider the variables bro.
@@phillystevesteak6982That doesn't nmke it a genre. Those games just have the same monetization
It's like saying single purchase games are a genre
Helldivers 2 showed a live service CAN work but you have to do it right and most of them are just nakedly looking to milk players of money.
Also note Sony still tried their damndest to ruin Helldivers 2 with their PSN stunt.
Warframe it's a 11 years old tutorial on how a live service game can be a gold mine for both developers and the players.
It still crashes and it still bugs out way too often. Youd think they'd spend more money and time on QA.
helldivers would be a better game if it was not live service
@@Day100current version is stable. It crashed only once in about 20 hours.
I grew up in a poor household. We had a family console and got games twice a year - Xmas and Birthdays (we're all June and July). We used to get meaty games like FFX or Tales of Symphonia and Abyss to pad out the wait.
We didn't have our console online before c.2015 when all of us were working enough to pay for Xbox Live, and by then none of us had time to get into online gaming the same way out peers did when they were 12 on Halo 2 and 3.
I especially work a heavy person-interactive job and he last thing I want to do when I get home is deal with that shlt again. Neither did my brother or sister.
Now I'm 27 and have no desire to play game likes this at all. Live Service games will never sell to me. I don't think these companies realise how many gamers probably have a similar upbringing story. Most of the gamers with the time and energy for LSG are in school most days and don't have the money I (we) do.
Despite the live service games and broken AAA games, I still say this is the best time for gaming. Why? Because of indies and AAs, they are killing it. There are so many games now than ever that its impossible to not have something to a persons liking. I say this as a person who has been gaming since the 80s.
I have the money, don't have the time. Only reason I have money is because I still live with parents and so my disposable income is high. I just invest it because there isn't much to spend it on. My time is limited between full time work and full-time school. Thus, the games i focus on are quality games that respect my time. Warframe, Helldivers, Minecraft, and other single player games i can pick up now and then. I got no time for Marvel Rivals or Path of Exile 2. Even if those are great games. I am already tired of long games like BG3 and witcher 3 even though they are great games. Live Service games are just unappealing.
I'm 20 years older than you are and I remember my childhood games mostly for "things you could play with the kids in the neighborhood when it rained." My brother and I played an entire season of Tecmo Super Bowl with every team set to human control because games were expensive and Mom could only buy a couple of them a year. We also got REAL good at Contra co-op, to the point where the proudest moment of my entire gaming life was my little bro and me, 10 and 12 respectively at the time, beating Contra without either of us dying once in front of all our friends on a rainy summer afternoon.
These days, games don't offer experiences like that anymore. It's either online, of much lower quality, or (usually) both.
@@SimuLordThat's very similar to how our games were treated too. But we used to be the ones going elsewhere since our mother wouldn't buy us the cool games at the time like GTA3, which was fair in hindsight. The game I played most as a kid was Test Drive Unlimited and I would kill for a new version that's actually good. Ubisoft came close with The Crew but made it only online so when the servers closed the game died. No point playing 2 for the same reason.
That was the golden era of online live service games. I bought my map packs with lemonade stand money and got my games with saved Christmas and birthday money. Nowadays the games are made through temp workers, contractors, suits and psychologists to take every dollar they can from you with as little effort and care for the customer as possible. I only care about offline games these days too but there's a few indies carrying the torch of couch coop and RPGs like grim dawn. Also rom hacks have exploded into so much better than mainline games it's insane.
"A bit offensive to some"? Offensive to WHO? The fucking executives that keep trying to push live service games nonstop into the market?
The employees who got laid off because they were shoved into live service projects doomed to fail would probably feel hurt by this being called a 'good thing'. This trend has had victims beyond consumer dissatisfaction
Nah some of my friends ACTUALLY want every game to be live service. They can't comprehend that this is LITERALLY not possible.
@@fallendeus the players
@@Snoozy96man I'm glad I'm not friends with people like that
@@ShinkajoI know people like this. Their friends are misequating the kind of games they enjoy (valorant, etc.) with the business model they use. A lot of people don't realize you could have your cake (said game) and eat it too (no predatory monetization)
Remember when WoW became a massive hit, and there were endless MMORPGs that came out and failed?
They did the same thing again but with Live Service. There has been no "Fortnite Killer" just like there was no "WoW Killer". A "LoL Killer" never came into being either. Will the industry learn the 3rd time around? No, I doubt it.
WoW didn't start the MMORPG trend. It was a product of it. Everquest was one of the first MMORPGs to achieve great success. And WoW was a clone of it. And the only reason WoW was the hit instead of Everquest 2 (which released at the same time) was WoW just did everything a little bit better then Everquest 2.
And yes A WoW killer did come along it just wasn't in the same genre, that being Call Of Duty.
WoW is a live service. All MMORPGs are live services, they just weren't using the term yet. They all have servers online constantly with rotating events and whatnot, even if older MMOs did things differently than Gacha games or MOBAs
@@midriffzero Call Of Duty haha. I have bnet balance from selling WoW tokens I could play CoD for free but I dont because it's a disrespect to human dignity. F Blizzard and everything they've touched in the last 10 years. It's sad I have my WoW classic through Wrath original boxes/disks on my mantle but is what it is.
If you're going to be a [big thing] killer, it has to be by swooping in after the big thing has fallen off and started to rot, and everyone else is ditching the concept and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Not when it's at the height of its success, and you're fighting dozens of other copycats trying to copy the success of a successful thing by copying the thing, and ending up with thing minus the success.
So if AAA is finally ditching live service, I expect we'll end up with some wildly successful new twist on live service in a few years when the market's not flooded anymore.
@@KalasenZyphurus Live service isn't a genre. MMORPGs were already live service games before this became a term. Fortnite is also just a glorified Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament with them constantly adding more skins to sell. Live service is more or less just a concept for continuously milking the player, no matter if the live service games is a shooter, a MMORPG, Action "RPG" or whatever. A "micro"-transaction selling platform, where actual genre behind it doesn't matter.
So, in other words, "a new twist on live service" doesn't really make sense.
The whole thing remind me of "cloud", which is just access to online servers, which was already a thing before the term "cloud" was introduced.
What cracks me so much about Sony isn't even that they tried to make a live-service game out of a story driven GoW reboot where I can't even think of a single reason that is not a crash grab on the fans.
What cracks me is that Sony, at one point, wanted to release 12 live-service games within 2-3 year period. With most of live-service games you are expected to drop in countless hours into, often treat as a 2nd job and never leave and those idiots wanted to cannibalise themselves by releasing 12 games there were expected to fight for the same player base. The amount of people and free time those people have at their disposal are limited and yet they expected to get the same slice of players to play them all at the same time... How is no one fired for such and idiotic decision?
@@konradzukowski213 they were announced under Jim Ryan, who seemed to be a major force in the idea to do so. He has since left, and sanity seems to be prevailing again at last. But not before Sony 1st party was set back 3-5 years.
@konradzukowski213 The thinking was probably something like this:
1. Release 12 games
2. Profit
3. Gather data on what systems work best to part players and their money
4. Profit
5. Slowly sunset the worst performers
6. Profit
7. Shift resources to the high performing services, implementing all of the "best" ideas
8. Profit Profit Profit
Someone was fired. Jim Ryan. But the official story is that he "retired". I don't believe that.
I love me some Helldivers, but i look forward to the next few years of Sony and others taking all the wrong lessons from its success.
@@jacksonjacob7791 They also cut 900 employees across various studios in 2024.
Thanks Concord. You'll be remembered as the game SO terrible, that caused the AAA industry's bubble to pop and kill dozens of studios and projects.
Also, when they announced their focus shift to live services, probably the 90% of the playerbase could've saved them hundreds of millions when they said it was a bad idea and IF they've listened.
And people said the genre was dead, in comes Marvel Rivals...
That will never cease to be hilarious.
I wouldn't even give them that honor, the industry goes through this cycle often. Remember when everyone was making their own battle royale?
It's almost as if players aren't made of infinite funds for every trash that makes it to market.
truly the ET of our time
It was already on its last legs before concord released. That game was THIS tone deaf.
Live Services aren't dead. They just perfected the formula.
The end result is a dead abandoned game. And we went from 10 years with Destiny, to 6 years with Apex, to 1 year with Suicide Squad, to dead on realease with Concord to dead before release.
Its corporate efficiency at its finest.
Very much efficient success! 🎉
they´re doing any% speedruns
@@SloMoMonday spot on!!
wow, who knew if you ask customers to pay thousands of dollars over years to use your service or play the game they already purchased, they probably wont continue throwing money at you forever. i mean some certainly do, how do you think these companies make any revenue?
Destiny was the shittiest, biggest disappointment I ever played. And I played breath of the wild on launch, too
Corpos pretending they're free of consequences, again. But still they will not suffer in their golden parachutes.
Your second sentence proves the first. The executives are free of consequences.
CEOs bad >:(
They ARE free of consequences. Look how many games in the last year with 9-figure budgets were either complete failures or got cancelled before even being released. No real consequences were felt for said corpos squandering amounts of cash the average person almost can't fathom.
@@SimuLordnah, they didn't number go up and now can't buy their 4fh vacation home. Think of the shareholders 😭
@@raze2012_ I think of the shareholders often, mostly while thinking there should be a T-shirt with a picture of Mario's brother that says "Free Luigi" in the game's cartoony typeface. (I love anything that smacks of "if you know, you know" while regular people don't get it.)
Marvel Rivals shows how live service games aren't a problem, due to how they respect their player base. Its not live services as a whole that are bad, but how souless and money hungry most studios are when making them.
@@Lakrushma also that there is only so much room for live services. The market only has so much time and money to give. If every company is trying to get all of it it becomes unsustainable and most will fail.
@@Lakrushma 100% agree!
Monetization > gameplay
Rivals still charges $15+ for skins and they're ran by a dev team known for milking. Make no mistake if you're playing a live service game the #1 goal is to make money. If they care about their player base, it's because they know they have something worth investing in because it will pay out $$$ in the end.
Edit: I'm not saying everyone on the dev team is soulless but the ones who make the final decisions definitely are just in it to make money.
@@Lakrushma People dont really think of it this way but, even before Marvel Rivals, Monster Hunter was killing it with a consistently updated live service game that is well-respected. People wont want to call MH a live service, but short of a subscription price and free to try price point, it absolutely is.
I'm truly sick of live service games, games we can not own, games that can be taken away for any reason at any time, games that are rife with greed.
I've never been one for live services. Almost always, the quality keeps going down. I personally play single-player, one-and-done (other than replaying) experiences. Usually much higher quality; and I get more out of my limited time I have to play games with them. But to each their own.
A short game worth replaying is far better than a bland ass live service barely worth playing
I gravitate toward what I call "session games", as in a game you play for a couple hours after work and it's a well-packaged experience (a sports game, a delivery in American Truck Simulator, a quest or short quest chain in a larger open-world RPG, that sort of thing.) Next thing you know, you've got two or three hundred hours (or in ATS's case for me, close to 3,000) in it for one price.
I don't mind replay value, but that comes from having solid gameplay, engaging mechanics, the things you can enjoy again and again, even over a good story. You don't get that when you intentionally design around it having infinite content because that just leads to repetition. There's a ver delicate balance for content and story, but you live and die by gameplay.
When you make a market and build a game around it... Live service all ways make the game worse.
Same. I like a game that feels like a game. I'm an adult so I already have daily chores to do, not a fan of dailies and chores to farm currency in game to fill the content holes in that game. I don't have that kind of time anymore.
Instead of laying off the talented devs and artist maybe they should be laying off the executives that are calling the shots
The worst part about this is big corps never have to learn from their mistakes since the failure cost can be legally offset as a tax write off.
Business expenses get written off either way, failing to make money always is a kick in the balls for a company, especially publicly traded ones.
Up to what dollar amount can be a tax write off? I'm assuming there's an upper amount and I can not imagine that any govt would look at a $400 million dollar "tax write off" and say, "sure, seems legit". If that's the case, that means no dev company can actually ever run out of money. That doesn't make sense, does it?
@@dongordon2754This.
I dont think people know how taxes work when they think a write off is anything they are okay with.
@@jaredfritsch6833 There's no limit but you're correct that a write-off isn't just free money. The thing to understand is Assets-Liabilities=Equity; Revenues-Expenses=Income. An intangible asset like a trademark/patent/etc has value because you can license merchandise, sell broadcasting and streaming rights, etc. If you deem that the asset has reduced value or no value because the project has been indefinitely cancelled then you can expense the difference against revenues to reduce your taxable income (there are carryforward/back provisions but, trying to keep things simple). So the possible savings of a write-off for a company within a year are its taxable amount owing. Simple terms: you make 80k, you owe 16k in tax, if you have 80k in expenses/deductions against that 80k, you now owe 0 and thus saved 16k but still had to lose 80k in value to save that 16k.
To your comment an example of a 400 million dollar tax write off would be like an oil company having an oil rig get destroyed by a rogue wave/explosion/etc. They lost a $400m asset and would expense (write-off) the loss.
@@jaredfritsch6833 Tax write off just means they've made losses. They only tax on profits. It's not some infinite money glitch like some people seem to think it is.
This video makes me all the more appreciative of Larian Studios, FromSoftware, and all the other developers who haven't been caught up in the live service quagmire.
@@studiovezelle Also, indie games are awesome these days. Cheaper and better experiences than most AAA games.
dont forget capcom and nintendo
Fromsoft is making an Elden Ring Battle Royale Standalone Expansion. Let that sink in
_"Fromsoft is making an Elden Ring Battle Royale Standalone Expansion. Let that sink in"_
@@totallynuts7595 That's a bit disingenous, though isn't it? You know full well that "live service" means monetised to the hilt. Buying skins, weapons, upgrades, perks etc with real money. There is nothing to suggest that Elden Ring Nightreign will be anything of the sort.
Did Sega ever do a live service…?
If you count any of their mobile games I mean I guess
But other than that it’s not really clear.
0:21 With this quote from Shuhei Yoshida, I can just picture someone else at Sony hearing that and hitting the "Independent Thought Alarm" from The Simpsons.
The live service model only fails because their strategy is: Monetization > game quality. I'm glad that strategy is failing. Nothing of value was lost.
It’s funny because they thought that would work a competitive over saturated genre.
"The Live Service Bubble Has Burst.". Thank fuck for that!
Gacha games are fine.
They're still making them They're just getting rid of the one's they think won't work
The title for this video should actually be:
"Sonys live service bubble has burst."
"live service has burst" has been said for over 4 years now. it will never burst. the failure rate has always been the same. there are always stupid ceos chasing the big successes without realizing how much luck it requires
@@wilburtshnookums Was it ever a bubble? It is only a trend now because a lot of games that started development ages ago are now releasing. It's not like there is hype or even a market for a lot of service games at the same time.
@@wilburtshnookums I agree the fact is making a video game for $$$ is always going to be a gamble and live service makes more money more consistently then normal releases. Same with Gacha games they are in general far worse games which require far less development that make more money. Every soulless devil sucking corporate suit would jump on that over a normal release.
They don't care. If they need to make 10 flops (not Concord level flops, but normal "barely broke even" flops) to make 1 Fortnite, they will do it. That's not gonna fundamentally change.
Sony's backtracking is a mix of having a Concord level flop and the weakening economy. They aren't taking any risks rn. So less exclusivity deals, canceling anything but the most sure projects, and ofc, cutting out as many devs as legally possible to overwork the remaining. It's rough times.
The industry is collapsing and consolidating
Not quite, live service will burst but not in the catastrophic way everybody expects.
It will be more like a deflation, with most titles failing to return profit which in turn will lead to all the players consolidating around a handful of titles, however, with the ever increasing costs of developing games, it means that every single failed project will hurt the wallets of their publishers at ever increasing rates, and even mighty publishers like Sony or even Microsoft won't be able to keep throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks and what not at random.
That will be the "burst" of the live services games, once they become too expensive to simply try to brute force the arrival of the next overwatch, the next marvel rivals, etc., by sheer numbers of projects.
To put this absurdity in perspective it's like that during the era of big MMO games one big publisher would have decided to launch multiple MMO games in rapid succession hoping that some of them would stick. Considering the nature of these kind of recurring revenue games is that you have a very limited market as the players have money and time to invest mostly only one these kind of games.
To plan more than one these kind of "it gets good once you spend X amount of money and X*Y amount of time" grinding games is simply insane as they have a barrier of entry by design. They are designed so that once you have paid your initial investment you'll get your taste of things to come for a short while and get more only, and only if you invest more time and money. The pull effect to these kind of games is the same as social networks use: the primary reason players go through the effort is because their friends also play it. Once you have too many games competing this kind of pull effect is completely lost.
Okay, live service games are not MMO games, but when you think about the core mechanics is there that much difference in the key areas how these games operate and capture the investment of time and money from players who also have their friends playing the same game?
Yes, I've been thinking about the parallels to the MMO rush as well. World of Warcraft hit the scene as an entirely new kind of game (it wasn't really, but it was the first of its kind to reach such mainstream popularity). Basically, executives saw that players were suddenly pumping billions of dollars into an entirely new market, and thought they could easily get a piece of that market. The problem was that World of Warcraft _was_ the market. There wasn't a billion-dollar market for "MMOs that _aren't_ World of Warcraft". The predictable result was a slew of failed MMO releases over the next 5-10 years.
@@Wishbone1977 It sounds pretty doable when phrased as "capturing 5% of the current market" or something, but the reality is that if you already spent (or are still spending) money on a game then why would you spend more money on a very similar game that you aren't sure you'll even like as much as what you're playing now. If anything, the longevity of WoW proves that people are creatures of habit and need extraordinary incentives to be made to switch out their "main game". That's why FFXIV and Marvel Rivals have been kicking Blizzards ass, because players are "extraordinarily incentivized" to leave thanks to Blizzard ruining the games.
@@Nostradankus But even phrased like that, if the reality is that the product they want to use to capture that market share doesn't actually _belong_ to that market, it's still a stupid idea. The thing is, novelty absolutely makes a difference. This is why the Nintendo Wii was such a smash hit while the Nintendo Wii-U was an abject failure. Nintendo never understood why the Wii got so popular. They thought that people just really liked that sort of control scheme and would certainly shell out money for more of the same, when in reality people found the gimmick fun for a while because it was _new._ That is not to say that you can never be successful copying a new idea that's caught on (whether your own or somebody else's), there are plenty of games that prove that can absolutely work. But in order for it to work there are two requirements: 1) the first iteration of the idea did not only catch on _because_ it was new, and 2) your product has to be _better_ than the original.
It's just so telling that Sony would make the same mistake it made when MMOs were the games everyone was trying to cash into. Just look up the number of MMOs published by Sony and how many of them were released so close to each other. Flooding the market with their own games is something they never learned from.
Why are they always willing to risk on the most awful dogshit ideas and then use them as excuses not to do anything anyone wants?
The thumbnail makes it feel like Kratos is sitting me down to talk about the live service bubble bursting like a disappointed dad.
Bart Simpson: “Bubbles can burst?!”
Just imagine how many schools, hospitals and roads could have been built with all of that money wasted on live-service?
And Nothing of value was lost
bot
No, lots of value was lot
@nevergonnagiveyouupnevergo2795 Are you sure about that?
Beware the f2p broke mf will come after you 🤣
The opportunity and capital to make good single player games was lost. Make a Killzone 4 ffs instead of doing 12 shitty live services
The SLOP market has crashed
for now. get exciting for and buy slop 2.0 in 10 ish years
8:26 “… a Last of Us extraction game.” OH YEAH. There was like three months where execs thought extraction games would be the Next Big Thing.
Can we finally go back to good long lasting gameplay being the basis for games again finally? ffs it's been a 20+ year nightmare for some of us.
No.
@TheGreatDanish Get better bait 🥱
Consumers already use that metric, there's been loads of amazing games released in the last 20 years. The handful of AAA slop doesn't represent the industry as a whole.
No they will be looking at other ways to extract money now.
[opening their switchblade] Buy the battle pass and skins, piggy. We are no longer asking.
A part of me really loves the idea of games designed to be lived with for a little while, but our current environment was never going to wield that responsibly
Just too many games! 20 years ago, we had less game available and less releases. People keep playing games for years. For myself, I went into a buy spree in the pandemic, and I still rotate between theses games and bought only a couple of games since. I have some upcoming on my radar but I'm not even sure I ll buy them since my current games still bring me hours of joy.
Definitely a factor! I have games I bought 3 years ago that I haven't even gotten around to playing yet. I feel this the most though as a solo game dev now, with an all time high amount of games coming out on Steam, it's tough to even get my RoadHouse Manager (wishlist today and stuff) noticed. And my game's an original design. For games that are 2nd or 3rd copies of trends, like the 5th vampire survivors game released this week, its even harder.
Lol, shameless plug haha
@@Crablover132 100% 😀 my game's so invisible I try to sneak in a mention whenever I can 😀
I think what’s most perplexing is how they didn’t make a remaster of bloodborne, you don’t have to remake it entirely, the game would have sold bucket loads for a fully optimised ps5 and pc version, framerate was a problem on ps4 and there’s all sorts of improvements they could have made without a full remake and people would have brought it. most people who have played bloodborne still rank it in their top 3 ps4 games or even top 3 ever.. Sony has been sitting on money for no reason, literally zero reason at all
Charging for any live service is very risky nowadays. Players, for the most part, expect it to be free. It is very hard to defy or change popular sentiment.
Not to mention if destiny 2 released a couple years ago it would be deader than concord
Completely wild that WoW still gets away with it, while also having EVERY other monetization avenue on top of their sub fee...
I guess that is the privilege of having been around for so long. No way WoW could come out today with Blizzards current practices and be successful.
Now if only we can remove battlepasses from $70 games (cod) we will be good.
“Deader” 😆
@@e56hdyhdfgh that games been around for 2 decades. They got a community very entrenched in their favor
We live in a age of deteriorating consumer wealth. So unless they plan to fund their entire model on %5 of the gamer population, then this was pretty predictable.
You get it. If you only follow gamer news you might not realize this is a global trend in tech layoffs. But also everyone's rent is no longer just 30% of their income. People just can't budget so many subscriptions right now, even if they'd like too. High rent and high grocery bills hurt the games industry, and that trend isn't about to reverse.
Helldivers 2 succeeding from a studio that primarly did multiplayer experiences before should not be surprising.
Helldivers 1 was a decent CO-OP game, but they left it in really poor state (most of the weapons and stratogems are really bad after nerfs, retaliation missions and enemy spawns need to be reworked and make galactic conquest less dependent on player counts, because currently there are less then 1000 players constant). it should have got one last massive rebalance patch before leaving it.
Why do companies keep trying to force live service into single player narrative-driven games? Is it really that bad to make a complete experience, free from in-game shops, paid dlc, and online experience bloat?
In my own experience (Playing Destiny/Destiny 2) it never felt like live service games could keep up with player demands or leased DOA. 2017 i started to play single player RPGs only, they feel much more satisfying to play to completion and see all the content, then put in on the shelf. Too each their own, id love to see a pivot back to single player games.
What? Creating less immersive games full of toxic players and hoping it would be super profitable didn't work?
What's odd is that for the western industry's track record of copying whatever is successful at the time, we have yet to see them attempt to copy games like Genshin Impact. They certainly have the budget with all the money they keep burning on projects that go nowhere.
Western executives prefer the Gameloft/Zynga model and it makes them enough money that they don't feel a need to put in the actual effort required to make a compelling Eastern-style gacha game.
genshin impact is lacking one thing for these executives. a system that promotes envy. you can play genshin without ever seeing another player, and so you never see something expensive that you want to have.
@@simpson6700the excs can't be that stupid right. They can def see the numbers genshin pulls in
Live service games dying is the greatest thing to happen to us as gamers.
We've been complaining for years about the overlords nickel and dining us to death with low quality always online garbage, chock full of useless trinkets aimed at people who don't know better.
Seeing it blow up in their face and cost them tens of millions of dollars in cancellations is absolutely glorious.
Perhaps they'll do what they should've done all along and listened to us.
Everything about live service dying is a giant benefit to us, as consumers and gamers, and that's all that matters.
I find the idea that Days Gone and Bloodborne sold the same personally offensive. That just doesn’t sit right.
Why?
@@Spoopy_manbecause Bloodborne is considered a massive hit while Days Gone was apparently so unsuccsessfull it canceled the sequel
Bloodborne also really is just a very outstanding game, meanwhile days gone is just another Zombie slop game
@@cc0767 Not at all surprising, souls games weren't mainstream before DS3, regardless of the quality of Bloodborne it's widely known that it didn't sell a ton.
@@Spoopy_man yeah but like I know 0 people who played Days Gone
I mean, everybody was out to whore themselves out with no self-respect for armor core six and it’s sold exactly as well as rabbit kingdoms to a game almost nobody cared about. Soft is more miss than hit with trying to sell any game that isn’t just copy and paste demon soul.
Dude, from 5:56 to 6:10, you tripped me out changing your jacket and shirt. Great editing. Flawless. Like MAGIC. 😉
Speaking for myself, the Bloodborn ship has sailed. I'd have given anything to play the game on PC 5-6 years ago... But there's so many other options that if a Bloodborn port did finally release, I don't think I would care.
They had a window where everyone who did not have a Playstation was desperate to play it, and that was before Elden Ring came out.
Boy. I have been enjoying your videos for a year now. It has become my breakfast staple. I really want to thank you for the good quality and interesting way you present your videos. It is a pleasure and got me partially more invested in games.
I think developers are forgetting that a good single player game has no extra maintenance costs. Ubisoft makes so much money of their back log. You can always bundle it to sell to players, or use a game to promote your next cutting down on marketing costs.
Ubisoft is not doing so well
@@madkoala2130 Ubisoft is not doing well. But their backlog has been a stable source of income.
Ubisoft is not really a good metric for success when alot of their previous games are all similar. Companies should not be copying that method, plenty already worryingly do.
@@TheNitrean That's not even true today, single player games get DLC's 100 patches because the games are always buggy ect...
@@danymend5797 those are far more limited and easier on the budget and optional
3:04, the sponsorship ad ends.
My guess is that company execs don't get promoted for making safe, dependable money. They likely get promoted for taking huge risks that might pay off and jumping on bandwagons.
That's exactly how it works, and that's why some people want to put an end to the bonus culture at companies, that promotes such behavior.
Always excellent coverages. Small lighting tip: the entire right side of your face is shadowed. Some light on it will go a long way (:
Imagine Sony just making these games non-exclusive to PlayStation. They could literally almost double sales of their IP. Consoles are usually loss leaders to sell the software. And limiting to PS5 is dumb.
I mean, Marvel Rivals, ZZZ, Helldivers 2, etc... new live service games still release and are successful. The bubble hasn't burst, the bubble was never really there, as there's ALWAYS been failures, probably more than successes. It's just the budgets and investments are being realized to be cut off sooner by publicly traded corporations. As someone else said here, live service games still succeed, but the suits at publishers need to realize live service is NOT a selling point. GOOD GAMES are the selling point. If they happen to be live service? Then that's fine.
His title is misleading 😂😂😂on console n PC the top playing games is nothing but live service…CoD Fornite Marvel Minecraft Roblox GTA
Imagine working on a project for years only for all your work to go up in flames in an instant....live service? More like smoke service!
That's like any game that fails
I don't have to imagine it :/
Finding work after your studio closes is hell right now. Having spent years on a game no one will ever play is crushing.
Stop saying "Bloodborne remake." As if we don't already have enough games that are exact copies of each other. Just because it's a reliable way to make money doesn't mean it's good for the gamer economy. We want original content. That's why these games being cancelled is a travesty. But your continued appeal to a Bloodborne remake doesn't give me any hope that we will actually see any of it. It's just stupid.
@@beemerwt4185 Yeah, I see everyone spamming for a Bloodborne remake as if the original game is completely un-playable and 30 years old. It's a good game, but I feel like a lot of people just keep repeating this non-sense because everyone else is doing it. It's weird.
@tacos4419 I may personally be a lifelong PlayStation guy but locking Bloodborne behind a PlayStation beyond the first oh, 10 years of its lifespan feels arbitrary
@tacos4419why would people just parrot other people's opinions like that?? I can tell you I would love to see a Bloodborne remake/remaster, I finished the regular ending of the game once, and I'd like to replay it and get the secret true ending but have been put off by the 30fps cap on the PS4 version.
@@Bodgie7878 Idk, the amount of people demanding a remaster/remake seems weird and unreasonable to me. 30 fps never bothered me. To me it's playable with a prob. The graphics still hold up as well. If anything a Bloodborne 2 would be welcome.
@tacos4419 ah well that's a valid take, and I 100% agree with you something new from the bloodborne IP would have me a lot more excited than a remake or remaster, but for my own personal tastes I would welcome that still.
Haven't clicked a notification with so much hope since Silksong announcement
5:00 yeah because EVERY piece of trash company is DOING THAT, not because WE WANT THAT.....
As someone who played the first horizon only... In what world is that game worthy of mmos, lego etc? its a Ubisoft formula game made by PlayStation. What's next, NFT Horizon?
It’d be nice if these companies hosted community polls and have their communities pick what game they should work on next.
Hooray! Live services have been RUINING video games. Greed has all but destroyed the triple A industry. Down with Live services.
There are good ones too Warframe, Rivals, Genshin I hear
@ : Sure, there are always exceptions. Helldivers 2 has been providing some entertaining videos here on TH-cam. It’s not my bag, but I wouldn’t want to see it fail, since it seems to have been done right and people are getting so much joy from it. I’m talking about games that were never meant to be live service, like Assassin’s Creed, The Last Of Us, and other really compelling character driven, narrative games, relying on open worlds, strong stories, adult themes and grownup thinking. They want to RUIN these great games by turning them into bastardised zombie versions of what they once were, for a market of people who just don’t want that.
There’s a huge section of gamers, like me, who play video games to get away from humanity, dealing with other people, having responsibilities, being shouted at if you mess up, or being frustrated with others who mess up or troll the game. Some of us just want to escape the, “real world,” and be free to shoot characters in the face if they annoy us. People who only play the story of the Red Dead and GTA games, without ever going online (not deliberately) to play with other, “people.”
We’ve been shunted to the sidelines, even though we were the main pillar holding up the games industry, as they are now discovering. Sure, there are publishers out there who’ve built their whole business model on live services, and they’ve succeeded where others cannot. But they already have all the players.
Trying to turn every game into a live service has just resulted in lots of square pegs being forced into round holes, in which they do not fit. It’s like fridge manufacturers trying to move into car manufacturing out of pure greed, with the bosses just assuming that the machinery will work fine, ignoring the workers who are saying, “But we don’t know how to make cars!” And we end up with our favourite Porches hitting the streets with only three wheels and being frosty on the inside. It’s a form of gold rush insanity that has to stop!
@@lightdarksoul2097 Doesn't mean it's a good thing. A game being good in spite of a live service MTX based marketing strategy is rare for a reason.
I've dreamt of this moment for over a decade now. Sometimes I found myself doubting if it would ever happen. But now the great culling is upon us. The industry collapsing under its own weight. Live service games becoming too risky of an investment. Maybe now things will start returning to the way they once were. Maybe now we'll start getting consistently great AAA games again.
If you say so. Given "live service" is ultimately just the same old MMO rush from years ago repeating itself, if ya say so.
Jim Ryan: "Thank God I went away the moment I did, otherwise I'd be caught in this financial bloodbath of epic proportions".
If the LS Horizon game flops, damn if Herman Hulst is not fired..
I actively hope for all of these projects to flop hard
Bean counters, and shareholders destroying every company on the planet. This-has-to-stop.
Who has time for putting a lot of time into an MMO anymore? Those of us not working 3 jobs are too old to work 3 jobs or have families to take care of. We don't have time to exercise regularly much less grinding M+ just to be able to navigate endgame content.
No one is so busy that you don't have 15 -30 minutes in a day to do some damn push ups.
@@glens2019 i dont think zoomers nor gen alpha has the attention span or resources to invest on a mmo like vanilla wow (not the current classic).
@@glens2019 Lots of people are.
I love adding more and more subscriptions to my list. Just love it
can i just say ..... FINALLY!!
I’m sure not all of them deserved losing their jobs but serves them right for being part of this disgusting situation. Like you said this entire situation came from the company as a whole over valuing the strategic decision making when deciding what kind of games to make, they acted as if the players aren’t even a factor at all, honestly disgusting behaviour. This is what you get when you treat people like numbers, you make horrible investments because money comes from people it isn’t just a number.
Sony should have made more effort to connect with the community, would have been real simple to find out we wanted a Bloodborne remake for example, the community is very vocal about these kinds of things yet they didn’t even bother to try. This kind of hit obviously sucks for the gaming community like you said that ~200 mill could have been well spent on DLC content for already popular games, remakes of already popular games, etc. and a major game company laying off 900 people isn’t great either but if this is what needed to happen for the industry to finally realize that the players matter I’m glad it happened. Let’s hope something actually changes and these morons stop chasing money and make actual player feedback based financial decisions
I'd rather not have a Bloodborne remake/remaster than having one as disrecpectful to the source material as Demon Souls'
Any Bloodborne fan can attest to this. It is currently very playable on the ShadPS4 emulator for the PC.
I wonder how much fraud is involved in the bubble. If a studio/publisher says "THIS is our flagship" to one investor but that a different game is the flagship to a different investor, are they vulnerable to lawsuits?
As a one man army studio working on a big online project (No live service BS) this puts a smile on my face.
I'm older than 40 and have been playing games since I was eight.
I have zero interest in live service games, will not play them and despise the focus on them.
Not everybody. In fact, MOST gamers do not care about them
This is why they released the PS5 Pro scam.
It's not a scam, it's just a bad value. It makes little sense to buy one when for the price you can have a capable gaming PC.
Would be good if you made each episode as a podcast as well :)
Oh please who would get offended? Some may argue there was never truly a bubble to begin with. The pattern of some LS surviving with a niche audience, select few blowing up and 80% getting nowhere has been like that for almost 20 years.
The bubble came with all the big games studios diverting money from games they knew how to make into a game type they had no experience in, when the market could only support a couple profitable ones at any one time. Why would you stop making games you know would make you money so instead you could poor vast amounts of money into a long shot gamble almost guaranteed to fail? Because of the bubble and the mass delusion that goes with bubbles. That’s why
The biggest issue for media companies is that gaming can't be corporate. If anyone wants to have fun with a piece of media, then the piece of media needs to be genuinely artistic and fun. As soon as you begin to micromanage is as a corporate investment to gain revenue, you begin sucking the life out of the media like a vampire. You can do that a little. But if you don't stop, you'll only have a desiccated husk remaining.
Live service bubble has burst yet theres more of them than ever.
🤦♂ nobody tell 'em
oh yikes
my guy...
I don't mean sony i mean in genral
Yeah, I disagree with the title, but the bigger issue is the market is quite packed. You need to either fighting something that's stagnated, or is a more unique take.
This is the problem when you decide to just make whatever the numbers say is the best. Executives keep justifying their decisions by using player count and money spent on the in-game store, rather than doing so based on raw audience reception. When you do this, you completely ignore the fact that people will buy a game that looks good, and not know until they play the game that it's bad. When that happens, you get really good sales numbers, but poor reception. The executives then look only at the numbers and decide that because this last game sold well, it must mean that this is what players actually do want, regardless of what they say. This is absurd, and is exactly the reason why they are in the position they are now. Shareholders do not look at ANYTHING besides raw monetary gain, and because of this, they will keep pushing industries by the numbers, which completely ignores the actual quality of the product. When that happens, quality slowly begins to slip, and the bubble bursts as people get tired of poor product delivery.
15:05 weird take. like wildly weird take; nearly soul-less corporate take in fact.
???
To me, the most insane aspect of all the hyper-focus on GAAS titles, is that the PCVR2 headset, that costly peripheral, is floundering through simply being ignored. It has less than a dozen exclusive games, and it's missing countless backwards compatible updates with PS4 VR games. If it wasn't for the recent PC adapter that allows you to play PCVR with it, the thing would be a paperweight.
No sympathy on my side for jobs lost in this market. It's simple, you work for shitty companies making shitty products, you get shitty outcomes. What's strange about that?
One of the sadder things coming out of the bubble popping is hearing that Freejam started shutting down a few weeks ago. Robocraft is a game that held a fond place in my heart, even if it had a checkered history and their attempts at a sequel were a developmental disaster.
One of the issues with liveservice games are a bit of a gamble, and an expensive one at that. Although the profit cieling is pretty high, the floor goes very very low.
The one thing that execs dont understand is that on average a person has maybe 4- 6 hours a day to spend on leisure activities and most games take a minimum of 15-30 mins to get into a groove and once you get into the groove those hours disappear so having 12 live service is not a great plan eve 2 or3 is a stretch for a normal person.
Most players already have the one or two live aervice games they play and that is all they have time for. So what was the plan with this business model
They want a live service, they have Twisted Metal rotting with people waiting for another season. What a wasted of ideas.
I worked in M&A. Believe me when I say this, most company managers only look at the discounted cash flows their moonshot project will supposedly give them in a vacuum. Viability relative to competitors is seldom analysed. Dumb customer analysis, dumb market analysis, dumb financial planning. Ergo, dumb valuations and dumb economy.
Saying it's a bubble that bust is implying they are certain it doesn't and can no longer work and they're getting hard punished just for doing. I'm totally unconvinced they think live service cannot work. The only bubble that has burst is the idea that live service is an automated money printer just by existing.
About darn time!
with so many lost hours and jobs on this massive of a scale industry wide. Do you think there will be IDK some sort of reform to how things are done to protect the devs, coders and other artists working on big games in the future?
it is baffling to me how are they still going forward with Fair Game$...
I recently thought about selling my PS5 because I barely ever used it. It feels like there are just no games compared to all the cool exclusives of the PS4. Now looking at that insane live service graveyard it all makes sense. Where are the single player games Sony?
Its industry wide. You can see a similar trend in streaming land where Netflix has basically won the streaming platform wars. People just can't spend their buck more then once. Pretty much all triple A games turned into live services but people could maybe pay between 1-3 at any one time. Whales are fine but whales are rare and with dozens of live streaming services you will spread the butter very, very thin. What will happen is that ' the best' live streaming services will survive. Those that offer the most bang for the buck in the various genre's that exist in gaming land. The rest will die as there just is not enough sunlight (money) to make them grow. And the companies; their shareholders and CEO's? they knew. They just did not know what the market cap was and always hoped for it to be higher. Now they know. So they need to figure out what live service games do best in their portfolio and scrap the rest. - My fear is that they will not make regular games but instead sit on that one or two successful live services and do nothing else then produce for that. Till of course eventually the wind changes and those too fail.
These companies forget that people have one or two Live Service games MAX that they play. Meanwhile a new one comes out every two months and people don't want to leave their comfort game
a groundbreaking AAA game being developed in LA - a fireman(person) simulator where you try to put out wild fires with no firefighting equipment or water
It is a corporate thing to do.... take on 12 projects in an area where you currently have zero successes. What does Sony have in the live services space at this time?
"I know that this is going to be a bit offensive to some." Good. Whoever is offended by this are the people making the hobby worse. They should be gatekept out of the hobby.
Gatekept? More like driven. Exiled. Forced to leave.
Man, if there's one bad thing about Marvel Rivals it's that the guy running Marathon now will be pointing to it all "SEE? I told you hero shooters are still popular!"
Another aspect of this corporate obsession that affects me more and more is game preservation.
Once the "live service" is shut down, the game cannot be played anymore in any legal way. We are effectively killing retro-gaming for future generations - or even for people who were a couple of years late to the party, or wish to revisit the experience later in life.
a god-of-war live service? nothing of value was lost.