PC Gaming

I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.

Games as a service don't need to be a scam.

But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.

I think it's a bit more nuanced - for example MMOs. But for the most part yeah.

single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games

True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.

Also, you don't have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There's a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.

Fortnite

Call of duty

World of Warcraft

Apex legends

Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It's the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.

You didn't need $100M to make BG3. You didn't need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that's paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.

For studios that can't fling around nine figures to shout "Look At Me!" during the Super Bowl, there's no reason to follow this model of development.

Minecraft is the ~~most popular~~ best selling game of all time, and the single-player mode is still being updated. Granted, many people play on multiplayer servers, but still.

Sad but true.

Reading the article, where did you get "audience rewards" == "maximal extraction of cash from the audience"?

IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn't lose because you didn't make the most money out of all your competitors.

Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.

Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn't as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.

It's not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on "nearly guaranteed" online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It's kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.

On the one hand, you’re right that the market for micro transaction laden multiplayer games is much larger than single player games. On the other hand, the market for people who want single player games is still very large. You showed that yourself mentioning Rockstar games and Harry Potter.

So while many publishers want a piece of that larger pie, every publisher trying for it just leads to over saturation and greater odds that a game will fail entirely. So there is still incentive for publishers to release large single player games even if the pie is smaller since there may be less competition making it easier to stand out. And what the article is saying is that, within that pie, one way to stand out is to avoid micro transactions. And since it’s discussing single player games specifically, I don’t see a lot of relevance for bringing up multiplayer games that exist in a different part of the gaming world.

Depends on how old the game is and how big the DLC is IMO. Rimworld, for instance, has quite a few DLCs now, but they are all well worth it if you like the base game. OTOH if a game just has cosmetic DLC or the DLC is coming out super near release that's a red flag.

This describes just about all Paradox games made in the past 15 years, sadly. They release with a barebones concept, then slowly drip-feed content for 5-30 bucks a pop, each one usually sitting at "Mostly Negative" because it doesn't fundamentally add or change anything most of the time, and the times it does- meh. Crusader Kings 2 was my bread and butter for a long time. Played Crusader Kings 3, and it felt like almost every helpful mechanic that existed in CK2 was stripped, and then added on again over the course of years. It was so infuriating, that I just don't buy their titles anymore.

Vampire Survivors is an exception.

At the very least, you can still pirate it and play cracked multiplayer with friends.

I made the mistake of buying the game year ago, and bought a bunch of DLC at 50% or greater sales, and now the sunken cost fallacy has taken hold on me, and I still want to buy more . . . . (at least I'm broke so I can't right now hehehaha)

More than that. When you buy a game with microtransactions in it, you're volunteering to be a marketing target and paying for the privilege. Publishers aren't trying to get everyone to buy mtx, only the people who bought the game. You're giving them money and saying, "yes, I want to be targeted, please."

CDPR get this, at least. Phantom Liberty, Hearts of Stone, Blood and Wine. All well worth it.

Wish granted, but it's just 30 dlcs each around a full-game price and you gotta wait til they go on sale for $1 once every year at a random time.

The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren't skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.

Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus "live services games" were born.

It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It's a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.

Who buys them?

• People who dont game buying a present who just go "oh deluxe version, not that much more expensive, lets treat them"
• wealthy people that just pick the priciest option
• people with completitionist tendencies
• streamers and wannabe streamers for whom the extra cost is a trivial operating expense
• children and others that dont understand the value of a dollar
• people whose primary draw to the game is the photomode
• "i like game, I want more game therefore I pay more" (yes this logic is terrible when applied to microtransactions)

The thing about Warframe is it tempts you but doesn't force you to buy. You can sell your time to people who paid actual money, and then buy things you want for that money. The only issue with Warframe is the fomo - them locking warframes behind relics that are "deprecated". Sometimes they unearth them again, but it's an artificial attempt at "I need to buy this or it is gone".

Also the process of getting parts is 100% gambling on low odds. You can get lucky immediately or have to "reroll" by running the same relic over and over and over again. It sucks if you want a very specific thing and often leads to people just buying it outright.

Shoutout to FromSoft still having Bloodborne servers ready for me on my very first runthrough 10yrs after launch

I will point out that this is mainly just a way to get the free preorder bonus though, and has no real gameplay effects. The dlc also contains a digital artbook, digital soundtrack and some character sheets. I feel like that is quite a bit more than the normal micro transactions, though I still somewhat see your point