Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

I see the the Battlefront post might get some competition for downvotes

I see the Avengers devs decided to aim that repulsor blaster right at their feet today.

Vote rating seems to be disabled on this post, so we'll never know.

Edit: Ah, they're only displaying zero, but there is a semi-sneaky statistic. Currently 19% upvotes. Compared to 28% Yong Yea saw when making his video on this response

Edited by Adannor on Mar 6th 2021 at 2:16:10 PM

AAA will never learn that live services, if they intend to work at all, need many, many years of constant updates and tweaks to keep the game healthy. Devs can barely keep a game functional through Q and A, let alone getting it out in one piece, let alone maintaining that for several years to come.

You can't just squirt out a half-made product and claim it's a fully playable game, but also promise new updates and content, especially without putting in the effort of even a full release. It's the height of a stagnant gaming industry that just assumes it'll be a market success for several years with no drop in the ongoing playerbase and genre trends.

It's important to note that the two live service games that are successful are either indie (Warframe) or had a ton of publisher bullshit forced on it until the developers split off and started supporting it on their own (Destiny 2, apparently Activision wasn't that picky about Destiny 1). It looks like large publishers are toxic for live service games.

Do Mobile Gacha games count as live service?

Because Genshin Impact is doing very well for itself right now. In fact, in terms of overall revenue, it was the biggest game last year.

Sportsball games are also successful by the metric of cash and are technically live service by metric of constant empty promises of new content. They are the model that everybody is trying to chase.

Yeah those are also pretty close parents of the idea of live service gaming.

Edited by Adannor on Mar 7th 2021 at 9:59:20 PM

It has some parallels, but also some differences.

• The microtransaction schemes are more usually RNG based as opposed to something like say, EXP boosts. This doens't preclude such mtx from existing, but they are what is supposed to be the ones most used.
• They also are more common on mobage games. As such mobiles are where you'd find them, whereas Live Services seem to be on consoles and PC (NOTE: Some gacha games have been ported to those as well, such as Duel Links and Geshin AFAIK)
  • A side effect of this is that most games likely woudne't need as much polish as an AAA title, dpeening on the game, meaning that they have an easier time getting a good product out of the gate.
• Perhaps most importantly, Gacha games tend to be Free-to-Play rather than Fee To Play. Frugality would still put you in an immediate disadvantage against high rollers/whales but over a period of times, players can still succeed and the game doesn't require players to buy it to play it.

If anything Gacha devs are more willing to maintain the upkeep than Live Service devs. And as such those game have a better survival rate. In fact I think some games like F/GO are still going strong.

Of course that doens't mean most attmepts at gacha will not flounder and fizzle out, but I'd argue the rate is better compared to Live Service. If I were to estimate, I'd sat at most 80% of gacha games fail compared to the 99% of Live Services.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Mar 7th 2021 at 11:15:51 AM

Do the Splatoon games count as live service?

Yes, they do as Nintendo did keep additional updates to keep players incoming, outside of when they stopped the updates.

Man I wish I could play Splatoon.

I mean I have 2 but I haven’t played it since Nintendo did the multiplayer subscription thing and I didn’t really wanna pay for another fee since I already pay shit for PS Plus.

Fucking corpos.

I pretty much stopped playing on my Switch ever since the online became paid and it's a joke; sure, Nintendo's online service is cheap, but so is the quality of their online. Why pay for it if it's so crap?

Nintendo's sudden paid online is why I can't get into games like the latest Mario Kart and Splatoon 2.

I wouldn't quite call it sudden since they did say back then that the online was gonna go the paid route down the road.

Shows how much I pay attention to VG news

"You must pay extra for multiplayer" is the most hilarious hypocrisy point of "consoles are cheaper!"

Edited by Adannor on Mar 8th 2021 at 4:33:00 PM

There's been a mixture of rumors and speculation Nintendo will be changing up how NSO works after the next fiscal year starts (with the speculation situated around how 3D All-Stars and the first Fire Emblem game are being made unavailable at the end of this fiscal year), but that's all just speculation at the moment.

Also, new Jimquisition. Looks to be around Marvel's Avengers again.

To think Spider-Man is still not playable.

Imagine that after making such a big deal about him being a console exclusive, the game shuts down before he’s made playable.

This game is broken on such a fundamental level that all they can really do is throw it all out.

I still expect most blame to fall on Kamala.

> To think Spider-Man is still not playable.

he's not a cool enough fighter dur,he's fragile

That's an absurd thing to speculate, considering every single criticism I've seen of it has everything to do with the company and not with the characters they're including. The opinions of the tiny portion of alt-right idiots who pay both attention to this game and deliberately go out of their way to obsess over minorities don't count.

Yeah, I think the only people who'd pin the blame solely on Kamala are racists. Although the last thing we need is the devs kowtowing to them either way

NGL, that tentacles song introducing the Sinking City segment got me a little aroused.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 8th 2021 at 9:26:11 AM

That's my point actually. I expect a lot of bad faith arguments about Kamala. Keyword being bad faith. You can see it already in channels where they talk about the bad performance - Kamala is front and center of the thumbnails. If it was a success, you would see Iron Man.

The "games as service" model feels like something of a Sacred Cow to developers because of its potential for huge profit, even though most gamers utterly despise it. There's always deflection when a "games as service" product fails when the answer is usually "it's because you released it as a game as service," a model which by its nature lends itself to grind-heavy gameplay that quickly can devolve into a chore, where the effort/reward ratio skewed in favor of the former, in turn causing people to abandon the product.

Best Buy tried selling Avengers for about 60% off on its usual one-day sales. That speaks to overstocked inventory.

Edited by Beatman1 on Mar 8th 2021 at 10:29:36 AM

That's still ridiculous to expect that there will be a lot of it and that it's the kind of thing even worth paying attention to, unless you're the kind of person idiotic enough to go into the Q Anon trenches and treat whatever updates they have as reputable news and opinions on par with the mainstream.