#oneaday Day 154: Live Service

I'm not generally a big fan of modern-day PC Gamer, but there was an interesting article over there today that I think is worth discussing. The gist of it was that the expectation modern games have set is that there will be a continual drip-feed of new content beyond launch, and that when players don't get this they get pissy and companies' precious bottom lines suffer.

I don't deny that this is an issue, but where I take slight issue with the article is the implication that it is a universal problem. Once again, we have an example of a publication considering that the big-budget, triple-A side of things is representative of the entire industry, both from a development/publisher perspective and a player/consumer's perspective.

I'm not a fan of live service games (with the possible exception of MMOs, which are something of a special case); I'm of the belief that you buy a game, you play it, you set it aside when you're done, you move on, you perhaps revisit it another time if you feel like it for one reason or another. When I see the end credits roll and/or complete everything a game has to offer (the two are not necessarily the same thing, as any good RPG fan will tell you!) I have zero further expectations. I don't need or want anything else. I'm done. Finished. Time to move on.

And for the vast majority of games I play these days, that's exactly what I get. Sometimes there is some DLC available, but it tends to be cosmetic content, "cheat" items or perhaps an additional dungeon or two. Very rarely is it anything meaningful; much of Death end re;Quest's DLC was free, and I don't feel it added anything particularly worthwhile to the game. I mean, I didn't hate the new dungeons or anything, but it felt like stuff that had been slotted in after the fact, and didn't develop the main point of the game beyond what you got on the disc. I wouldn't have missed it if it wasn't there, meaning that if I want to revisit Death end re;Quest in [x] years' time when the PSN servers are no longer serving up PS4 content, I won't miss it then either.

In the triple-A space, though, we have games that you outright can't play if you're not connected to the Internet. We have games that "expire". We have games that are unrecognisable from their original forms. We have games that, in their packaged versions, are all but unusable without substantial patches. This absolutely is a problem, but it's not the fault of the players.

No-one asked for this. Gaming enthusiasts showed resistance to this sort of thing when EA first tried its "Online Pass" nonsense in the mid-360/PS3 era, and continued to criticise exploitative DLC practices, microtransactions and the seeping in of free-to-play and mobile-style retention and monetisation models into full-price packaged releases. Even the Fortnite kiddies didn't ask for this, either; they simply grew up in a world where this shit had, somehow, become normalised, and thus didn't know things could be any different.

The solution to all this seems simple — release a game and be done with it — but it involves greedy companies cutting off a significant source of revenue; the PC Gamer article cites the example of EA, who are now making more money per annum from fewer released games when compared to half a decade ago. Why would they give that up to make people happy? Making people happy doesn't make the cash money. Not directly, anyway.

And besides, if Steam reviews are anything to go by, being "done" with a game won't necessarily make people happy, anyway; at this point, there are countless user reviews of games that developers have decided they're done with that claim the game is "abandoned" or "dead". This is the end result of these expectations that have apparently been set; of the Fortnite kiddies being confronted by something with a definitive "end". An oddly alien concept to some, but one we really need to recapture.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: live services and continual updates represent a real crisis for game preservation and archival. What good is a packaged hardcopy of something if it has gigabytes of additional or modified content over and above what is on the disc in order to work as intended or expected?

Thankfully, as I say, the vast majority of games that I enjoy seem to be relatively immune to this side of things, but I can't pretend I don't worry about this sort of thing seeping down from the "big boys" to the smaller developers and publishers. Something's gotta give sooner or later.