• I think people largely have stopped buying them, apart from very few exceptions, which is why games like Hyenas get cancelled at the finish line and why we’ve got a graveyard of live services that shut down just this year. Second Extinction didn’t make it out of early access. Rumbleverse didn’t even last one year.

          • ampersandrew ( ampersandrew@kbin.social ) 
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            They’re different teams, but it’s relevant because, according to this article, this spun out into another live service project after HyperScape quickly died and the Ghost Recon game wasn’t going to recoup its costs. The entire industry is facing a live service reckoning right now; it can only support so many, and making more expensive games like this isn’t panning out.

            EDIT: Man, I forgot XDefiant too. If that game isn’t cancelled before it officially hits 1.0, it’ll likely be shut down within 18 months.

              • if anything they are still looking to recoup the development costs of those games. So why not use that technology in a multiplayer game that’s surely to sell well? Right?

                But it’s been spun out separately, according to the article…I think we’re talking past each other. Ubisoft and Sega are not the same company, but Hyenas was Sega’s most expensive project ever, and they still found the best decision to be not releasing the game at all, which makes some amount of sense because live service games have recurring costs. Maybe Ubisoft is staring down that barrel right now, as there’s definitely a world where, like with Ghost Recon, a successful franchise’s name won’t carry your live service endeavor to even recouping any costs as opposed to just killing it in the womb and avoiding the sunk cost fallacy.

                It is my hope, and it’s possibly the reality, that Ubisoft has discovered that live service games are not guaranteed money printing machines. Then maybe we can get back to an industry that isn’t so intent on destroying itself rather than the semi-dark-age we’re in right now.

    • Moonguide ( Moonguide@lemmy.ml ) 
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      2 years ago

      Honestly, I prefer this, as long as the single player option is unaffected by the multiplayer component’s performance, and the resources allotted to the SP game don’t suffer because of the MP.

        • Tack Call of Duty Zombies into that list too, but Moonguide has a point. CoD: BlOps 3 was the last really good zombies experience and that was just as they were starting to turn it into an MTx nightmare.

        • Moonguide ( Moonguide@lemmy.ml ) 
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 years ago

          True, but that was before mtx became the name of the game. Nowadays when a game has a multiplayer component with no bells and whistles and just works, it’s an outlier.

          • And now those games just get shut down with no recourse. Eventually, those companies will realize that they’re better off making a multiplayer game that doesn’t get 5 years worth of updates to chase after bazillions of dollars that never materialize.

          • Sure, and game development in general takes longer than it did 20 years ago, but allocating a proportional amount of resources is all you need. If it’s a hit, it’s a hit. If you want to patch it up a bit to fix some glaring flaws, go ahead. Expecting it to maintain tens of thousands of simultaneous players is going to end up with the dev putting lots of resources into something unlikely to be the next big thing.

    • aperson ( aperson@beehaw.org ) 
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      2 years ago

      I liked how FEAR did it back in the day. The multiplayer was a separate game you could download for free and play. Then, if you liked the game, you could pay for the single player.