Lurker > HylianFox

It gets better after Season 1

Nikki Haley is better than Donald Trump

But to be fair, that's like saying eating vomit is better than eating feces

Superman: "What the- we didn't order this!"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/02/03/live-service-delirium-is-something-publishers-need-to-self-reflect-on-quickly

Theres a new report of questionable validity being circulated that 500 studios, or 95% of those surveyed, are working on live service games in some form. That form may be loose, as it considered live games anything with frequent, ongoing updates, but even if those numbers are skewed, yes, its clearly a trend as stated by those running the likes of Sony, Warner Bros and countless other studios.

The idea, in theory, is that one-off single player games might be able to sell well, but they have no ongoing revenue after the fact, and with big budgets, may barely break even or still even lose money.

But its becoming clear that there may be no faster way to lose money than to go all-in on live service, as depending on the genre, even the successful ones are burning through cash and players at this point.

I bring this up, of course, mainly because of the launch of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a game that appears to be selling relatively poorly, judging by the truly abysmal 12,000 launch day playercount on Steam, albeit well need more data to be sure. There, its easy to see how the idea that the game was live service in the first place was a hard sell, much more so than another standard, standalone superhero game from the Arkham creators would have been.

Meanwhile, also within WB, we just had the release of Hogwarts Legacy, which was the first non-Rockstar game to outsell Call of Duty in a given year in a decade, and now it has 25 million in sales.

And yet, when pressed about its future video game plans, WB CEO David Zaslav can only talk about live games, recurrent revenue and ongoing engagement. But at a certain point, in an effort to print money for long periods of time, you are going to end up lighting it on fire.

Suicide Squad is the best example of this. A Rocksteady Superman game, were one to exist, probably could have easily sold 15 million copies. Here, you have to convince people to pay $70 for a Suicide Squad game, a concept you cooked up so it could function as a looter shooter in the first place, then create a story that has no real ending, and must feed into live content. Then, as youre making the game, and for an indefinite period of time after, you have to make other content, new characters, missions, loot, etc. And in this case, youre not even selling that content, youre selling cosmetics in the shop and cosmetic battle passes each season.

It's a recipe for making both A) a game nobody asked for in the first place and B) something that is massively expensive to both produce and attempt to sustain. And if it fails to launch well (which seems to be the case with Suicide Squad) you have already committed to at least an extra year of content for something that is almost certainly not salvageable as a live game.

This live service delirium is making some studios act wildly out of character. Sony pushed its studios so hard toward live service it blew up spectacularly, with Naughty Dogs TLOU Factions being cancelled, years of work and millions of dollars wasted, and caused them to literally put out a statement saying they would remain a single player studio, as if live service was some sort of disease theyd just expelled from their body.

Its wild to me that a place like WB looks at a game like Hogwarts Legacy, one of the most successful non-sequel game launches of all time as a single-player, microtransaction-free experience and goes but yes we should make more games in the Suicide Squad model. Then you can shift your gaze a few degrees to look at the most explosively popular game of this year, Palworld, a game that yes, is live with online multiplayer and future updates, but there are no seasons, no microtransactions, you can easily play solo and have a great time. And it has gotten 19 million players in two weeks with a budget 2% the size of AAA blockbusters.

It feels to me like the answer to expensive single player games is not to chase after live service, but to figure out how tomake them less expensive, but still fun enough to sell. Throwing your lot in with live service is like playing Squid Game with the rest of the industry. You may have 500 attempts but because of the you must commit to and keep paying for this for months or years concept, only a scarce few will succeed and almost all will crash and burn. It is much, much easier for players to commit to a single player game you play over a few weeks or a month and then move on. And even those, when longer and requiring more playtime, are still potentially massive hits, like Baldurs Gate 3, easy GOTY winner and a largely single player game still putting up hundreds of thousands of players daily on Steam when it was released in August.

Making any video game is hard. Making a live service game is becoming more like a death sentence in terms of investment. This is a dollars and cents thing. Companies have seen a few select live games do very well and think all their IP can now be turned into that. But they cant. The industry wont sustain it, the players wont tolerate it. I would say this bubble is bursting, but that already happened. The corpses of Anthem, Avengers, Godfall, Outriders, Redfall werent enough to say that Suicide Squad would fail? Weve been doing this for years and almost no one is making lightning strike here. Make good games. You cannot force players to like something or force an unrelated genre to fit into being a live service. It wont work. It hasnt worked. How many smash hit standalone games do we need to see and how many dead live services must we amass before publishers get the message?

I've been saying for years now that "games-as-service" is a cancer on the industry, and that I'd rather pay 50-70 bucks upfront for a excellent single-player game than be coerced into paying a monthly fee for some crappy online game that'll get shut down in a year or two anyway.

I was gonna say "Skyler = blue"
>_>

KalimariX8 posted...

I really enjoyed Star Fox Assault, but it was generally disliked by most people, yeah? I liked that they tried different things like fighting out on foot, and I thought the multiplayer was fun lol

I liked Assault, too. The gameplay is solid and the story is surprisingly dark. The multiplayer is a blast, with lots of different modes and stages.

But the game is linear and the on-foot missions are something you either liked or hated.
(they're not nearly as bad as Rebel Strike's on-foot missions...)

In the end though, it definitely feels more Namco-y than Nintendo-y.

Alles-Losen posted...

I dont know if i was the only one, but my copy of the game was censored.

Every time that part came up, he would just say "Your daddy screamed reeeeal good-" Then got cut off.

I remember playing at a friends house where it said the whole line and i was like "WTF mine doesnt do that!"

Anyone else have this?

For some reason Pigma's dialog gets cut off by the other Star Wolf team members.
If Pigma is around, but you already shot down the other guys, he'll say the full line.

This is easiest to do with the Fortuna(Fichina)-Bolse route

I don't think this happens in the 3DS version, Pigma always says the full line

FortuneCookie posted...

It's probably because the N64 game is much larger and has an interactive narrative which adds to the replay value. If you lose this battle, you move onto a different path. If you help this ally, they'll show up in the next stage to aid you.

The SNES game has three pre-set paths with increased difficulty. It's the same experience each time.

I love SNES Star Fox to death but the way your actions determine which path you take makes 64 the better game, it adds soooo much to the replayability factor.

SNES has the better soundtrack though, holy shit

RndmNmber1 posted...

Mera is the sound of fire burning in Japanese.

For the life of me I will never understand Japanese onomatopoeia

"Mera" is in no way what fire sounds like
>_>

Hambo posted...

I wanna say Mario RPG or Paper Mario just adds "Super" and whatever to attacks, but I've never played them so idk.

Paper Mario usually just does that to equipment:
(Normal)
Super
Ultra

I live in a sub-level apartment

Does that count?

Skies of Arcadia has
Pyri
Pyres
Pyrum
Pyrulen

You know, like how Final Fantasy gives us
Fire
Fira
Firaga
(I forgot there's also aja but only Dia gets that one, Fire/Blizzard/Thunder cap at aga)

While games like Fire Emblem have
Fire
Elfire
Arcfire
(also forgot the Rex tier of spells:i.e. Rexflame)

and so forth

"The Catholic Church, we've made a few... changes."

Chicken
Corn
Green pepper
Chili
sigh
Onions...

Answer: "Something you use to shoot at the NEW ORDER NATION"

You shall not pass

Londo Mollari?

That can't be a coincidence

Take it from someone who knows: stay the fuck away from married dudes
>_>

Remember, 5 inches is the AVERAGE penis size.

That means half of all men have penises bigger than 5 inches, and the other have smaller than 5 inches.

Always getting nailed by a blue shell mere inches from the finish line

ALWAYS

But they're not because of furries, they're for active shooter lockdowns where the kids can't leave the room to take a shit.

So conservatives are losing their minds over a made-up problem while ignoring the real one.
What else is new?
>__>

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/5/59ce2111.png

I mostly just post here out of habit

I'm guessing it's a hotel for has-beens