It's really gross how people's games can just be disappeared these days. GaaS is a terrible business model.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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It's not going anywhere until people stop playing the games.
I'm not playing them as hard as I can.
Live service games have been failing constantly, so unless the change is happening already I don't think they're deterred. That perpetual revenue stream is some exec's idea of a lottery ticket.
It's not going anywhere until people stop ~~playing the games~~ spending ridiculous amounts of money in them.
Fixed that for you. The problem isn't the casual players, it's the people spending $500+ worth of skins and battle passes on one game. Those are the reason GaaS are so successful.
If people play, it becomes popular, which attracts more players, which attracts spending. Even if you spend $0, you are still supporting the type of game it is by playing it.
Not to mention the GAAS titles which are competitive in nature. The whales thrive on having a mob of casual players they can crush with their P2W advantage. If the whales were only matched against other whales, they'd win less and play less.
It's not just limited to games...
We see it most prevalently in games because the gaming industry is massive. But this can also happen to your car... Or your fridge...
Here's a fun story:
There were these few blind people who volunteered to have cybernetic implants that would help them (partially) see. The company went under, the patent is held by a patent troll, but the people still have those implants in their head... Which have now either shut down or are malfunctioning...
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There are a very small number of games where a changing world is a benefit to the game, although sometimes the approach also means skimping on some development before going live.
Helldivers 2 is an example of a game that benefits from the changing world approach of GaaS and it doesn't have predatory monetization. Playing the game gives enough in game currency to buy optional equipment needed for the changing world even if you only play a few hours a week. Heck, play it more regularly and you can afford most of the thematic warbonds which again and not necessary. The changing world and adding more enemy units keeps the game fresh over time, and the evolving story is like playing a giant semi shared campaign. You play a small part in a shared experience. I don't think doing the game as a single or coop campaign would have been a better experience.
That said, when they do end the ongoing campaign at some point it would be awesome to have some kind of automated system campaign for people to still do things. It wouldn't be as focused, but it would extend the game's life.
MultiVersus was hurt by trying to do SaaS because they added more predatory monetization after the beta where it was bad enough and tried to milk it for everything to the detriment of the gameplay. It is a great example of a game where the SaaS approach was terrible, and that is the case for the vast majority of SaaS games.
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They're patching it to be playable offline, but only if you've previously downloaded the game.
Why not just leave that version up instead of delisting it? They could even sell it. Would be seen as a success story for preservation instead of another loss, and it's especially baffling because it's a fully avoidable loss.
According to the bean counters this will save them $17/month in hosting costs
Do you even have to pay hosting costs, if you put a game on steam or does valve not distribute your game for free?
If I'd have to guess the bigger issues with a game like this would be licensing or that delisting allows some form of tax advantageous asset depreciation.
You don't pay anything to steam other than the initial 100 bucks or so, and the cut they take
Valve hosts it for "free" (30 to 15% of every sale), yes.
I'm guessing this game has some phone-home DRM or something, and maybe it's only required the first time it's executed after installation ? They could of course just give the game a patch that removes it but I guess they don't want to anger ~~the line~~ investors and make it go down by working even a second on a "discontinued" game.
Pretty sure hosting costa arent it, the only thing possible woyld be licensing issues for the IP's otherwsie they could leave it on steam forever and STILL make money off of sales. There are games that do this by making the players host their own servers each match.
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Yeah, they've just ensured the only way a person can play it is through piracy. Very smart move, WB, very smart...
I would venture to guess it's to avoid potential licensing issues that could arise down the road that they don't want to deal with.
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If you aren't already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can't just drop "support" (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.
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This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.
The worst part, the demo was actually pretty good.
They literally could have released this game with mod support, and sold it for $20 and it would have been a fun party game.
Instead, they kept going on with BS games as a service.
Games as a Service wasn't even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn't handle the project, for one reason or another.
A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.
Multiversus was one of the most mismanaged projects I've seen. Released in open beta for months, shut down for a year, re-released as literally the same game but worse and with more microtransactions, then quickly died.
Shame. It was fun to play for a while.
It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.
The Nickelodeon fighter game is still available I believe, but you're still right in that there's still basically nothing to hold a candle to Smash Bros.
Rivals of Aether II is a more realistic contender to Smash. It had a really good turnout at Combo Breaker this year.
I bought the first Nickelodeon game a couple months after it released, and the online was already dead, I literally couldn't find a match. Just went ahead and got a refund on it.
The beta was fun, although the monetization was bad even back then.
But the official release made all the wrong decisions to amplify the worst parts of gameplay and dial up the monetization. It was like they got all the player feedback backwards.
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You'll see this again with 2XKO, even if they've got a year's worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There's no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo's platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.
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The reason that games are even hosted on "official" servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP's they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.
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