For me too it became too much of a chore when I was just into Destiny and Division. Trying to keep up with events and seasons just drained me and I can’t imagine playing more at a time. Same with Niantic games, I’ve tried their other stuff thanks to pokemon go but I could never stick with it because each game required…

i mean, there are still teenagers speedrunning mario 1 and tetris. i think minecraft was a big time sea change in the industry and will be around in some form or another forever and has hit that cultural cache level.

That is like Bethesda’s Redfall. Take a single-player dev and force them into making a live service game because it was the hot trend.

and i think it’s worth nothing that fortnite itself was lean enough to be able to pivot from a minecraft ripoff to a pubg ripoff* while it was already basically out, and that leanness and ability to pivot is WHY it became so successful.

There were right wingers who thought The Colbert Report was on their side. No matter how obvious you make your satire, there will always be people who think it genuinely agrees with them.

I would rather have a person managing the tides of war than an algorithm. A person knows how to react to player sentiment and keep things interesting, a computer doesn’t.

This whole thing happened at my place of work, too. I have been WFH since 2020, and while there were some tricky issues at first (learning how to communicate via Slack all the time rather than F2F being the big one), everyone has adjusted and my work responsibilities are very conducive to a WFH experience.

It is…

That’s definitely part of it yeah. I think a lot of game studios would be fine if executives spent less time meddling and trying to get them to chase the latest big money maker and let the team of passionate creative people come up with a game that they are really excited about and let them develop it.

Live service is not a genre. Its a service you can add on to a game. I don’t think anyone minds it, as long as the game its added to is good by itself. And if the game itself is good, it can substantially increase the lifespan of the game.

I question the use of executives every single day.

I like when people pass the baton.  So many talented people never get the shot because the old guard grasps relentlessly o past relevance. Let Druckmann make part 3 and then move on like Bruce.

Ehhhh, the recent success of Hell Divers (and the behemoth that was and is Fortnite) implies that people will play Live Service games. It just has to be.....good.

Also I think the market can only support so many forever games

I’ll go even further with the analogy, and will say that it’s like trying to make a U-turn with a freight train while the tracks still go in a straight line.

ARROW MUST ALWAYS GO UP! ANY DOWNTURN IS FAIL!

Its the MMO thing all over again. Everyone was trying to get inon that sub money WoW had - and no one could really do it. Everyone one of them spent a ton of money and fizzled. It took how many years and a massive reboot before FFXIV came along?? That is a lot of studio time and money dumped in the trash heap.

We’ve reached a point in the games industry where trends are moving faster than development cycles, and the results are calamitous.

I get the appeal for a studio to think that if a live service games catches fire they’ll make bank. But that is a very big if. And while I also understand the inclination to branch out into other genres, most of these studios should probably stick to what works for them. Bioware made their name developing amazing singl…

A smart exec would say, “Hey, this is popular in this moment and won’t be by the time we’re done, so maybe we should make something different.” But then again, when was the last time you heard about an executive that could see past the next fiscal quarter?

It’s basically like opening a restaurant now. Most of them are going to fail in that first year, but investors are going to blindly hope and invest that their product is the one that will break through.