I was going to finish watching this before posting.
When he started, I thought he was going to bag on games with a online focus or something. Not quite. His problem is one he's talked about before - the gentrification of online-only games as Games As Service and how they're on a lifeline.
Great video, although I have to say the length will cause people to run off
His data on the 4.6% doesn't make sense to me. He says that WoW is excluded from this claim, but if that's the case then why are things like Star Wars Galaxies or Asheron's Call on there? IMO WoW should be included - you pay a base price for the game, same as any other MMO that was included in that list.
That part made me scratch my head, maybe it's because they went to a F2P model? But so did WOW. GaaS servers do also require resource (power) to run, which he does mostly overlook but really, just releasing the necessary packet and encryption documentation on a games shutdown really shoulden't be a lot to ask. It's done! And then it's in the hands of the fans to see it running or not.
Skip to an hour and 10 mins if you don't want to watch the whole thing, he has the key points listed and summarizes. Excellent video aside from the length and the unfortunately random placing of some major points and parts. I highly recommend watching and actually paying attention because he makes a ton of really good points. Watch it or not, spread the word and make some noise about it cause I doubt anything but good can come of spreading this video around.
He makes the point that even if you were to correct the list of any mistakes they made, you could knock it down to Games as a Service being about 94, 95% fraud. WoW is considered a service because you have clear definitions of paying $15 a month to play your game, which means it actually follows the current definitions of what a "service" is, whereas a "Games as a Service" does not.
quit bendin over ya nerd or I'll fist ya myself
Huh, it keeps stopping and throwing up an error from 1:09 onward every time I load the video
Anyone know of anything I can do to avoid that other than the skipping ahead I've seen suggested in the comments (which isn't working for me)?
A defeatist attitude isn't going to make things better.
This is without a doubt one of the best videos I've seen on the matter. Really well put together and thoroughly informative.
The industry has been making a conscious effort to degrade consumer rights for years now and it is clearly time for legal action, especially before streaming becomes widespread.
If you buy these games then yes, it will be the future.
The solution is to not buy them, don't accept this kind of game and they'll get the message, obviously one person alone isn't enough, but if enough people do it then they'll get the point. (In Theory)
It might be easy to accept that this is going to be a thing but it's only going to be this way if you have this attitude and accept it.
I mean it is also possible that some people actually like the concept of games as service while also acknowledging that it has already snowballed out of control to stop until legislation happens.
On paper, I like games as service. Games that developers don't release and forget about it? Continuous content? Player-centric design? Striving community? A lot of it sounds pretty good.
However, games as service isn't designed around limitations, but restrictions. It isn't that it isn't feasible to depend on players to host reliable 24/7 persistent servers, it is that they want to players to have less control over what they have so they could "host" and monetize what used to be accessible. The loss of ownership isn't just the game itself, but the literal level of administration within the game.
So yeah, GaaS is a huge threat to game preservation and leads to more aggressive models. I just wish it was done better.
I just think that he should include WoW if he's going to reference games like Star Wars Galaxies, Asherons Call, Matrix Online, Earth & Beyond, Final Fantasy XI (he also has this one listed twice for some reason), Warhammer Online, and Wildstar. I'm really not sure why he keeps hammering the point that WoW doesn't count in this instance, I think that should be included in this definition. If I go to Walmart, Best Buy, or GameStop right now they've got some sort of hard copy of WoW on their shelves. You're paying a base price for that box copy. How is this any different from buying those other games that definitely had a $15 sub price along with their base price?
Games as a service as they stand now are shit with microtransactions bloat and content being drip fed at a snail's pace. But they can be good if developers weren't scum bags.
I'd rather pay $60 for a game I know will last me more than a few years over $60 for a game I'll play for a few hours and never touch again.
Games as a cervix AT BEST, at absolute factual best is renting a kidney when you have lost both of your own. There is a percentage as there always is, for whom this would be optimal. That is a very very small percentage. For anyone that loves interactive storytelling, commoditized gaming is a sum negative and a corroding force on quality.
It is convenience store "burritos" and "hot dogs."
The "Vote with your wallet" argument hasn't worked with GaaS and pretty much never works in general, Ross even mentions it in the video.
GaaS games are manipulative (because of microtransactions (which this video isn't even really about)) and even then the vast majority of people buying games don't give a shit, voting with your wallet will not work.
It's funny cuz when I started the video I thought he was suddenly going to turn into a Jim Sterling but no, his arguments are preservation and right to repair. He actually doesn't care about horse armor or the like.
I feel this kind of misrepresents the games as a service model, though. Continuous content isn't always a good thing, for example. You have some games which are just better off adhering to their original vision. In fact, in the vast majority of genres, developers eventually 'forgetting' about their games and moving on is a good thing. I know you're specifically calling out devs who don't fix up their broken releases, but eventually a game needs to be done with, and fresh material created. GaaS actively discourages that. How long do you think it's going to take for a Rainbow Six Siege sequel to release? It's never going to happen, despite the engine objectively needing some upgrades to account for the games progression.
Plus I have all sorts of things to say about player-centric design, how it's not always an ideal principle or how the term applied in modern game design is more akin to learning how to abuse/manipulate the player - just about the only solid point I can agree on is that it does indeed promote an active community. I just feel that maybe the game should do that on its own merit, and not rely on an external design principle applied to the games distribution and ownership rights.
None of those things you mentioned define GaaS games, they're only present in the majority of such games, not exclusive nor worth the price of allowing harmful GaaS practices to continue.
The benefits of it comes down to the core of the game whether it is made with on-going story and replayability in mind. No model is without flaw, I'm just looking at the merits. Eventually people and resource will move on to something else, and that is when games as service's worst starts to rear its ugly head.
Singleplayers games retooled to be GaaS can go fuck themselves, obviously, go hand in hand with forced tie in multiplayer back in the day.
The best example of games needing to die and come back in a modern engine is Team Fortress 2.
It would do if enough people did it, but that's the problem, most people don't give a flying fuck.
Games as a Service in the form of Season Passes is okay imo, but his points for games being online service will be dead once the support stop is also valid. Good vids overall
No, Ross was very clear on what the definitive trait of a GaaS game was, that it relied on a central server to function. It had nothing to do with DLC or microtransactions, those were only frequently in
GaaS. Dead Space 3 is a game with microtransactions that isn't a GaaS. All of those things you listed as benefits were more common than you might think before the big influx of AAA games as a
service. Expansions were common, patches were becoming easier to distribute with the internet being a household thing. Modding support was something that provided post-release content that's been
almost eliminated from the AAA games industry thanks to the prevelence of GaaS practices.
And as he also mentioned GaaS evolved (or devolved, some might argue) into what we think of them as today. AAA games really didn't even exist until the mid-late 00s, so the first GaaS would've been
AA games at most. There wasn't really a standard for monetizing early AAA games, either, and before AAA companies settled on that standard GaaS didn't have a standard for monetization, either.
That's more of a reason why laws should be put in place so that people can play games after they are gone from the cloud. Games they paid for.
It sucks already we don't have physical boxes, the game being taken away from you whenever the publisher wants it is unacceptable.
Honestly I hope *before* any laws are written that something smaller that qualifies by Ross's definition of GaaS gets a end-of-life plan announced. I want to say something like Payday 2, but that uses Steamworks I believe (so outside of Overkill's control) and not Ross's definition of GaaS due to still being able to be played in singleplayer, albiet in a gimped form that sucks the fun out. By his ruling, that's okay, just not ideal.
It'd be good for some smaller guy to test the waters with a end-of-life plan more to show how easy it can be done. What Ross is asking for is beyond reasonable and to the point. He's also doing way more then bitching, which is more then what I can say about Sterling or the like, who believes all games should be free to play microtransaction fests because "I mean, they're pretty much that anyways"
I've never understood why people were there was never more discontent about most games swapping to centralised servers. Literally all it does is take away player freedoms and give publishers the ability to permanently shut down games.
Because so long as the game is online it's not inconveniencing the player at all, unlike microtransactions and lootboxes which impulsive people seem to have trouble ignoring, and more loudmouthed and annoying game critics can't build a career bashing around
I noticed this video is getting some traction outside of Ross's usual niche, which is nice. It's a incredibly thorough and well-made video with a good point so it certainly deserves it. I'm sure Jim Sterling giving it a shout in one of his recent videos helped a lot, too.
I'm glad Ross is the one to take up issue with this. He's a reasonable and generally intelligent guy, someone I'd trust much more compared to others in the youtube gaming scene.
I like topics like this, but its definitely a nice bonus when Gordon Freeman himself is the one that's giving me the education
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