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bbcisdabomb posted:Is there any reason so many games are disappearing this month? Some new law or a CDN shutting down or something? There is nothing particularly interesting about this month. Games disappear every day.
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Feb 8, 2023 18:53
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leper khan posted:There is nothing particularly interesting about this month. Games disappear every day. I imagine just cause it is the start of the year so contracts are expiring and whatnot?
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Feb 8, 2023 19:00
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I imagine the overall economy is a big part of it. Companies are going on cost savings crusades which means cutting everything but the most profitable or core businesses. And a bunch of gaming companies have been reporting decreased revenue and missing estimates so there is some level of consumer spending decreasing, exacerbating the above.
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Feb 8, 2023 19:49
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How many of those were Activision/Blizzard/King-associated games? At least in their case, I could see the argument that without the Chinese market propping them up any more for the foreseeable future, they have a lot of mobile-heavy titles that (in the exec’s eyes) aren’t pulling their weight any more. Yesterday’s announcement that Hearthstone is sunsetting their Mercenaries game mode, for example, was taken by some folks as a tacit admission that the China mobile market was just about the only reason why they had continued developing for that mode.
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Feb 8, 2023 21:53
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How many regular games come out and just sink into obscurity almost immediately? I'm not sure this sunsetting of a bunch of live-service games is actually that meaningfully different from what has long happened already anyway.
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Feb 8, 2023 22:08
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MadHat posted:I imagine just cause it is the start of the year so contracts are expiring and whatnot? For a lot of companies the fiscal year starts around April, so this is the last quarter before they have to reconcile everything.
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Feb 9, 2023 04:17
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koolkal posted:I imagine the overall economy is a big part of it. Companies are going on cost savings crusades which means cutting everything but the most profitable or core businesses. It's also the beginning of a new fiscal quarter, so hopefully the cost-cutting translates to investor confidence and positive end-of-quarter numbers. efb guess I should read the thread
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Feb 9, 2023 10:17
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disposablewords posted:How many regular games come out and just sink into obscurity almost immediately? I'm not sure this sunsetting of a bunch of live-service games is actually that meaningfully different from what has long happened already anyway. The difference is you can still play those games. There are games I payed 50 bucks for back in the day that no one gives a poo poo about anymore that I still fire up occasionally. On the other hand if you dropped $10000 on some live service and it goes down a year later you're just screwed. I mean, you'd be pretty stupid not to foresee that possibility, but it still sucks and is significantly different than some game simply coming out and not making a splash. It's just a particularly noticable example of how increasingly anti-consumer everything is becoming.
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Feb 12, 2023 12:50
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Even setting aside ownership rights, it's very stupid that there are multiple games I spent significant time and investment on in very recent times that are literally fully unplayable. Games made in the past 4-6 years, too. Servers shut down, service abandoned, online only game that reached EoS... meanwhile if there's some old console game I loved, even if I no longer have a copy, there are multiple routes to still playing it, either illegal or legal. Remakes, ports, emulators, finding an old physical copy, etc.
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Feb 12, 2023 13:27
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The Moon Monster posted:The difference is you can still play those games. There are games I payed 50 bucks for back in the day that no one gives a poo poo about anymore that I still fire up occasionally. On the other hand if you dropped $10000 on some live service and it goes down a year later you're just screwed. I mean, you'd be pretty stupid not to foresee that possibility, but it still sucks and is significantly different than some game simply coming out and not making a splash. It's just a particularly noticable example of how increasingly anti-consumer everything is becoming. Oh, that absolutely sucks about them, I just don't think it's an odd thing about a chunk of live-service games to disappear like this because games just fail and swiftly stop receiving support all the time. It's just that these games require constant support in the form of online servers to remain playable at all. Otherwise it's the same basic situation as a single-player game no longer getting patched and likely having issues with later versions of an OS.
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Feb 12, 2023 18:23
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I worked on a technically live service game that really was mostly single player, Microsoft Flight. The game didn't do very well (stuck in a no mans land between hard core sim and pilot wings that nobody asked for). Despite failing as a business the game had some good things going for it and my kids still occasionally ask if they can play it. They can't.  It extremely sucks that this is very likely that fate of every game I work on for the rest of my career.
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Feb 12, 2023 20:34
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Going forward if live service games are going to dramatically sunset without warning, assuming the studio/publisher isn't bankrupt, there should absolutely be a legal requirement to do it the way the Knockout City devs currently are.
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Feb 12, 2023 20:56
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bbcisdabomb posted:Is there any reason so many games are disappearing this month? Some new law or a CDN shutting down or something? Tech layoffs probably. Loads of companies are cutting, live service games are very intensive to run well
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Feb 12, 2023 20:58
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I had already stopped playing years before, but I’d imagine that a lot of folks who bought Overwatch were pretty chuffed when OW2 released and so fundamentally changed the game that they had spent cash on, without any (legal) option to continue playing the original.
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Feb 12, 2023 21:28
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absolutely thrilled
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Feb 12, 2023 21:33
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I think right now we're seeing the consequences of the "everything must be a live service with online components" bandwagon that the industry was getting on. Hopefully there is some kind of "does this really need to have a single point of failure built in so we can lose our poo poo when you stop supporting it" pushback, but who knows.
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Feb 13, 2023 01:32
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A large part of the push towards live services is so data can be harvested without having to ask if you want to send usage telemetry, which makes idiot hellfuckers obsessed with THE METRICS salivate. Like, sure, it's nice to know how users are playing your game and it makes it a lot easier to investigate outlying trends, but it also makes the product much more fragile overall because when the servers go down, the game dies. However, that's good for business - it doesn't matter if it's kneecapping the product in question, it's effectively free analytics for future product, which sends us down the road of "just consume product and then get excited for new product".
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Feb 13, 2023 11:24
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Kith posted:A large part of the push towards live services is so data can be harvested without having to ask if you want to send usage telemetry, which makes idiot hellfuckers obsessed with THE METRICS salivate. Like, sure, it's nice to know how users are playing your game and it makes it a lot easier to investigate outlying trends, but it also makes the product much more fragile overall because when the servers go down, the game dies. However, that's good for business - it doesn't matter if it's kneecapping the product in question, it's effectively free analytics for future product, which sends us down the road of "just consume product and then get excited for new product". Can confirm, in some of the QA jobs I've had, the telemetry/metrics bugs were basically the highest priority, second only to something that'd like, brick your console, irrevocably delete a character/save and/or the store going down. Definitely taking precedence over massive gameplay issues, progression blockers and that kinda thing. Always annoyed me but obviously can't disagree with the folks paying the bills.
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Feb 13, 2023 11:35
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DancingMachine posted:It extremely sucks that this is very likely that fate of every game I work on for the rest of my career. I mean on the one hand yeah, GAAS tends to suck, but I feel like there's always been a fair amount of pushback on it from players at large-- there's still plenty of developers out there making pretty high-tier games that are effectively single player or are able to be played in offline mode, even if you've got shitters like 2K retroactively back-patching launchers and accounts into the original Bioshock for the sake of analytics. Middle of the road "single player games with just enough online-required content that they stop being accessible when the servers go down" means that content has to be actually served via that route, which is an expense, and I feel like the number of those floating around as a hard requirement isn't super high; MS Flight Sim and Elite Dangerous are two of the few that spring immediately to mind. Some games certainly can lose some things when the servers go down (like how all physical 3DS games with eshop-only DLC are shortly going to be inacessible if you don't have them already), but the games won't be literally unplayable. On the far side of it, the proper game-as-a-service MMO or There Is No Game Without Online Multiplayer stuff, everyone wants a slice of that pie but unless you win the literal lottery you can't just show up in the space and expect people will play your DAU-driven gacha and no others no matter how much money you're willing to dump into it to kick it out of the nest (see: New World). At this point it seems like most studios realize that self-cannabilizing their GAAS by trying to do five of them at once is a losing strategy, so you spin one up and then do other cheaper one-off stuff that doesn't require ongoing infrastructure investment to keep running on the side, even if it's just remasters and remakes of whatever IP you can scrounge for a quick nostalgia buck. (Or, alternatively, accept all 5 of your GAASes won't all be the next DOTA and coast with a moderate but maybe-sustainable playerbase on each, but the people who are looking at this stuff with dollar signs lighting up their eyes will never be content with anything that isn't infinite exponential growth so)
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Feb 13, 2023 19:39
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The unarchivability of online game parallels things like live theater and stand-up comedy and even museum exhibits. The ephemeral, fleeting nature of the experience have financial motivations and artistic considerations. It’s good money for the corporation but it also lends a kind of charm to it all.
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Feb 13, 2023 20:33
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Vegetable posted:The unarchivability of online game parallels things like live theater and stand-up comedy and even museum exhibits. The ephemeral, fleeting nature of the experience have financial motivations and artistic considerations. It’s good money for the corporation but it also lends a kind of charm to it all. I see your point but forgive me that I don't equate the impact of a George Carlin comedy set with the likes of Babylon's Fall.
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Feb 13, 2023 21:27
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Vegetable posted:The unarchivability of online game parallels things like live theater and stand-up comedy and even museum exhibits. The ephemeral, fleeting nature of the experience have financial motivations and artistic considerations. It’s good money for the corporation but it also lends a kind of charm to it all. You can watch recordings of stand-up or live theater performances forever, and museum exhibits only tend to rotate out because the objects on display are being sent to another museum to be put on display there instead. A live service game that gets shut down is completely unplayable forever with no recourse unless someone manages to scrape together enough insider information to put up a private server, which is a process that involves an enormous amount of work and is subject to constant legal challenge and reliance on the goodwill of the company that shut the game down in the first place.
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Feb 13, 2023 22:15
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Kanos posted:You can watch recordings of stand-up or live theater performances forever, and museum exhibits only tend to rotate out because the objects on display are being sent to another museum to be put on display there instead. A live service game that gets shut down is completely unplayable forever with no recourse unless someone manages to scrape together enough insider information to put up a private server, which is a process that involves an enormous amount of work and is subject to constant legal challenge and reliance on the goodwill of the company that shut the game down in the first place.
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Feb 13, 2023 22:58
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But people know that going in. I suppose, if anything, live service games need to be thought of as more ephemeral even than they seem.
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Feb 13, 2023 23:01
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You can theoretically recreate any of those as long as you have the book of the play. I think there's a similar case for things like dead multiplayer games where even though they're "alive", the community around them can never be recreated, or even dead sports where playing them again is impractical, but the actual "source" materials still exist.
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Feb 13, 2023 23:02
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Theatre and museum exhibitions also extract far less money and time from the customer than the average GAAS.
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Feb 13, 2023 23:23
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Feels Villeneuve posted:You can theoretically recreate any of those as long as you have the book of the play. That's sort of like saying you can recreate the GaaS if you have the design doc. A great part of the magic of live theater is the specific actors, the staging, costumes etc. Macbeth's three witches. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VAXElyAJyg vs Macbeth's three witches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5TpecxZL88
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Feb 13, 2023 23:32
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I think a discussion on the ephemerality of certain forms of art is beyond the scope of this thread, but I do think that "preserving" service games by keeping the code and assets is worthwhile even if they might never be in a playable state ever again.
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Feb 13, 2023 23:34
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There are many cases of community-run private-server "preservation" attempts for GaaS that re-implement / reverse engineer the serverside stuff rather than actually using the original code. Mostly just for MMOs afaik.
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Feb 14, 2023 00:36
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Feels Villeneuve posted:You can theoretically recreate any of those as long as you have the book of the play. doingitwrong posted:That's sort of like saying you can recreate the GaaS if you have the design doc. I mean that's part of the fun tangential discussion you can get into with these sorts of things, too-- certainly some GAAS games would have nothing remotely close to the original experience if reproduced in an offline state, but something that's only streaming for the sake of direct asset control, has little or no multiplayer interaction and/or is only using the "online" aspect to gate in-game microtransactions is closer to a book that had a single print run that was intentionally never repeated. Certainly you could argue that the ephemeral nature and artificial inacessibilty is "part of" the original art but you'd probably have far fewer people agreeing with that perspective.
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Feb 14, 2023 01:22
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:There are many cases of community-run private-server "preservation" attempts for GaaS that re-implement / reverse engineer the serverside stuff rather than actually using the original code. Mostly just for MMOs afaik. There's also stuff like private networks hosted for lobby games that relied on services such as gamespy which no longer exist. Team shooters, RTS, etc. It is far from all of them though.
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Feb 14, 2023 02:21
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Personally, I'm perfectly fine with some media being lost, even media I really enjoyed or worked on. There's tons of lost media in literature, film, radio and television, why would games be any different? I feel like obsessing over preserving every single thing is kinda unhealthy. Like do I think future generations need to experience the Britney Spears mobile game I worked on that is no longer supported on any modern OS? Nah, that game can fade away.
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Feb 14, 2023 02:39
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You think that but then archaeologists scramble for the poo poo that normally got thrown away because it provides insights into everyday life that people took for granted.
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Feb 14, 2023 03:27
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It's good to err on the side of archiving, you can always delete things later but you can never undelete them.
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Feb 14, 2023 04:04
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Bucnasti posted:Personally, I'm perfectly fine with some media being lost, even media I really enjoyed or worked on. There's tons of lost media in literature, film, radio and television, why would games be any different? I sincerely believe our descendents need to know that the Nokia Ngage happened, and that it was designed with its cartridge slot behind its battery. The Homer of video games existed, and it could happen again if we don't learn from the experience.
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Feb 14, 2023 04:26
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HopperUK posted:But people know that going in. I suppose, if anything, live service games need to be thought of as more ephemeral even than they seem. As stated, if you go to see a stand-up act or a play or a concert, it's understood that those things last for a specified amount of time and then are over. There might be recordings to see them later, there might not, but it's understood by everyone involved that they are temporary. Every single live service game is launched under the assumption that they're going to run it for as long as they're making sufficient amounts of money. What qualifies as sufficient varies wildly from publisher to publisher and developer to developer, and how long a game lasts is almost completely random. There are gacha games and MMOs that have limped along with extremely tiny dedicated fanbases for a double digit number of years and there are brand new GAAS games that don't even make it a year before receiving an end of service announcement despite having several times as many players as the aforementioned ancient gachas and mmos. Facebook/Meta just arbitrarily decided to end service on Echo VR despite it still having tens of thousands of players and an active competitive scene because of an executive change where the new executive doesn't like supporting smaller projects despite the outgoing executive(John Carmack!) publicly saying that sunsetting the game like this out of nowhere was a bad idea. This dovetails in an ugly way with the inherent design of most live service games demanding significant amounts of player investment in the form of both time and money. How can you simultaneously expect players to invest heavily in your product while also expecting those players to consider it ephemeral and capable of disappearing permanently at any time? Kanos fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 04:31
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thebardyspoon posted:Can confirm, in some of the QA jobs I've had, the telemetry/metrics bugs were basically the highest priority, second only to something that'd like, brick your console, irrevocably delete a character/save and/or the store going down. Definitely taking precedence over massive gameplay issues, progression blockers and that kinda thing. Always annoyed me but obviously can't disagree with the folks paying the bills. If the major gameplay bug were such a big deal there would be metrics to that effect, ipso facto
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Feb 14, 2023 11:40
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Sort of relevant to this thread, Double Fine just released a 32 part documentary on the production of Psychonauts 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKoy_KMVIyU For those who've worked in the industry, how closely does this track with your development experience at other companues?
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Feb 15, 2023 22:28
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The Saami Council has demanded that Square Enix remove a costume set from Final Fantasy 14. https://twitter.com/SaamiCouncil/status/1626247612092252162 quote:This is not about sensitivity or whether the depiction is appropriate. These elements are Sámi cultural property and Square Enix has infringed on our rights, says President of The Saami Council, Áslat Holmberg.
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Feb 17, 2023 18:47
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Didn't the Maori's win a big settlement from Lego for using a bunch of their mythology and culture in the Bionicle line? Like the story I heard was that the Maori IP'd up their own culture and then Lego came along and stole it all so the Maori took them to court and won.
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Feb 17, 2023 19:42
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