Re: It turns out Live Service Isn't Guaranteed Money after all

On Sun, 20 Jul 2025 09:51:05 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 19/07/2025 17:32, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

    I'm not against live service games; they aren't my favorite thing
but I think they add a certain spice to the hobby. But the way they've
DOMINATED the market over the past five years has made for a much
worse experience over all. If the big-name (and small-name publishers
too) back away from this obsession with making EVERY game a live
service behemoth, I think the overall effect will be good not only for
the play experience, but the industry as well.

>
I'm not against the idea of them but instead the reality of them. They
employ a host of tactics (some of which I think are basically unethical)
that I disagree with to get you to open your wallet and none of those
are designed to make a better game experience beyond we'll give you a
bad game experience unless you pay.
>
Another problem I do see is that even if companies do start backing away
from them do they have the people that can develop decent single player
games any more. I have a horribly feeling that the answer to that is
going to be no.

I read an article a month or two back (long ago that I can't find it
anymore; sorry, no URL footnote this time) that touched upon this
issue. It pointed out that one result of big publisher's tendency to
fire its development teams so quickly after release is that the
developers no longer were building up necessary skills over long
periods of experience.

Instead, they were either dropping out of game development after one
or two products, or jumped in and out of game development (either
doing something other than programming in between, or doing app
development, which required an entirely different set of skills), or
their jobs on each game were so different that there was no overlap
that allowed them to hone their skills.

The TL;DR was that a lot of these companies didn't have the
programmers and artists who had years and years of game development
skill which let them know what made for a good game. It was as if
every game was their 'first game', and that was one of the reasons for
the diminishment of quality in game design. And it was only going to
get worse as attrition takes out the older programmers what had
learned their necessary lessons before corporations started treating
developers as fungible units.

So I don't think we'll see a dearth of programmers who can develop
decent SINGLE PLAYER games... just a lack of programmers who can
develop decent GAMES of any sort.