You activated my 'Uno Reverse' card!
Call me a talking horse from a belovedly demented 90's animated cartoon that perfected gross-out cartoon comedy to an almost surgical degree, because when you ask me how I feel about Live Service games my only response is. "No sir, I don't like 'em." But when it comes to my feelings about the video game industry I consider myself ever willing to experiment in hopes on coming around on something that I once found asinine. Yes, I'm still trying to work my way around on Homeworld- but one day I'm going to stick through that tutorial and I will have a blast with those games, mark my word! As such, I feel like I should be trying to come around on the Live Service side of things, even as it enters a slightly tenuous phase on the wider video game ecosystem. Heck, who knows- maybe I'd discover that I'm secretly their biggest cheerleader and it only took me the time of day to try and care. Let's see...
For one, and this is a biggun- Live Service games tend to be Free to Play. Removing the initial barrier of the purchase is a big part of their business model, because that's how they sneak people into the gameplay in order to get them hooked and eventually wring much more money out of them then they ever would have got out of a one time purch- wait, we're being positive today, aren't we? True, the purchasing price is a built in barrier for any community when it comes to growth, but when we're talking free to play games than word of mouth can be spread as easily as making one person like the game and have them share their feelings with their friends. You can find readily available audiences that never seem to dwindle with Live Service free-to-play games, unless the game itself is an utter disaster. And with that accessibility comes greater potential to meet new kinds of players. So there's that.
Live Service ecosystems are typically the sole home of Online audiences these days, which can go a long way for those who play games for the social atmosphere. The ability to retain audiences for a prolonged period has also largely killed off that awful spate of tack-on Multiplayer games which took over gaming for a while in the early 2010's. Nowadays you can find pretty much any semi-popular Live Service game and be pretty confident it's going to be around for a least a few years, so there's no danger getting invested in it's systems, and audience and levelling up monetisation system specifically designed to keep you coming back day after day for the next hit of the drug- ahem, I mean- solid replay potential and the like... Yeah, we replay because these games are just so darn fun, right? Right...?
Progression systems in Live Service games are typically built specifically to cater for the long haul in mind, disincentivising and devaluing power gamers who speed through everything by instead offering out tri-monthly slices of level up content for players to slowly feed on over the length of a season. This means that theoretically, you can keep working towards something in perpetuity in these games because there'll always be a new carrot at the end of the stick. I know that in actuality this is a comment on 'Season Passes', but point to me a Live Service game that doesn't use a Season Pass and I'll just dig out a purple flying cow that teaches Calculus in order to match this zoo for 'things that don't exist' that we're building. It's a valid comment.
Live Service games also tend to be absolutely resplendent with content being added to the base product at regular intervals, meaning that the game you play is forever expanding and changing as it goes along. Why skirt along the industry groping for games that you might like for a few weeks when you can stay attached to the one that never stops getting new content? I'm talking everything from massive expansions to new characters to even just bug and balance fixing required to keep the core game feeling fair and fun for everyone involved. Live Service games require people to keep visiting semi-regularly and so the new content is a necessity. Which, incidentally, is why the recurrent monetisation model is somewhat justified in order to warrant that continued development.
And from the company's side of the equation, Live Services tend to be a fruitful source of income when delivered correctly to a receptive audience. I've said it before, but it really cannot be understated just how much of Rockstar's insane profit line is generated by Grand Theft Auto Online alone- we're talking Billions on an annual basis! That sort of money can get spread around and funded either back into the service or more widely into the company at large, enabling bigger and more grand projects for everyone off the back of one success venture. Rockstar were already big players before GTAO launched, but in it's wake- they're pretty much the single most advanced studio in the world with an unparalleled level of excellence, and even us who don't care about Online can still benefit from the fruits of it's labour!
Also, Live Service is better than the alternative, as defeatist of a statement as that is to make. Under the banner of 'alternatives' we've seen everything from sports games broken up into subscription fee access, to Ubisoft desperately trying to incorporate NFT products into their game to try and 'change the conversation about game ownership'. (And how did that work out again? All the market's NFTs are now considered worthless? What a shocker!) At the very least, in it's best moments the Live Service model of doing things is built around the perception of openness. Usually games ship with some sort of roadmap detailing the developers intentions over the next few months. Changes are usually made with a back and forth feedback dialogue between developers and fans; there's fewer nasty surprises as we don't typically have to worry about what the cooks are doing in the kitchen that has it stinking up the place so bad. So I guess Live Services are honest. Or rather, they're more honest than the competition.
Finally they're... umm... well you see... what makes Live Service games special is... the way that they're just normal games released years before they're done and slowly pieced into a full fledged product over the space of several years? No- no that's not right... The way they encourage developers to design painful grinding systems that pigeon-hole players into either spending money or wasting an obscene amount of their personal time? Nah, that's not positive! Think 'positive'! Uh... uh... how about the fact that they overright ideal standards of development in order to make way for their invasive systems which limits potentially exciting titles into becoming trite and formulaic? (>Sneeze<Suicide Squad>sneeze<) Argh, I can't do it! There's only so far I can push that rock up the hill before it's tumbling back down again- some people like them and their benefits are debatable but if you ask me, the real me, then I'll tell you time and time again that Live Services are a plague upon the industry and I'm glad they're starting to proliferate to such a point that they're eating each other alive! How's that for a positive outlook on things!?
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