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.

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.

I miss EverCrack.
Not the actual mechanics, things have come a long way since then. But the concepts. No end game. Mobs that take 100+ people all day to take down. And that last piece of armor you want, has a 2% drop rate off them. And even when it does drop, there are 10 of your class who wants it, and you have to work out who gets it. Levels took so long nobody worried about getting to cap, and just hung out. The grind and the community were the point. Not the next piece of gear.

$ for hours on VS is insane, even with all the DLC it’s pennies. I feel like I’m stealing from the dev.

I’m of the opinion that Rimworld DLCs don’t actually improve the base game, they simply build an extra layer of isolated complexity ontop of the base game. I like the base game but I didn’t really enjoy the DLCs (at least not the first 2) because they didn’t actually expand the base game. They felt like mods I paid for.

I feel the same about multiplayer games without gated progression and LAN server hosting. (Or local/splitscreen)

These days I can’t even play a multiplayer game with friends somewhere with shitty internet. And because of progression you have to force yourself to only play together, but never with different people or by yourself because then you will get ahead.

Oh and they were what weekly spawn on top of that too that were also open world spawns to boot, so quite often you had competition just laying claim to it.

Our server had some quite… colorful guilds that didn’t play nice and would train attempts, or bum rush it in an attempt to do more damage to steal the claim, among other nastiness. Imagine you spent hours getting 80 people together, prepping, and then getting ganked at the last minute. lol pure chaos.

The GMs were constantly involved sorting out the aftermath. Which was funny in its own right I suppose. Which is probably why they leaned hard into instances in later expansions.

Fun times. Dont think there will be another experience like it was its hayday.

This is pure unadulterated copium. Numbers don’t support this

Regardless, I’m tired of this shit. There is clearly room for both.

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

Neither don’t play them or ignore additional methods of monetization built into the game. It’s like they don’t exist.

If there is too much dlc, it makes me feel like the base game is an empty shell. Even if it’s not true, it turns me off from the game. Look at sims 4 and one of those city builder games.

I don’t buy single player games with other monetization. You want another $30 you add another 30 hours of good content.

And Minecraft has a huge pool of paid content, especially with Bedrock Edition

Yup I do not buy single player games that have monitizacion, indiana jones game was so far game of the year for me

But they are a scam

I would say its less that they’re “rewarded” and more like they’re turning every customer upside down and shaking them until the money falls out

Gamers reward good games

Thing is, I’ve seen funbucks stuffed into various single player games over the years. The first was probably Mass Effect 3, but some of the Assassin’s Creed games have it too.

But who are they for? Who buys them? They’ve never really felt like anything that would be useful. It’s usually just some crappy cosmetics, or something you can get through normal play. It’s like they’ve been stuffed in at the request of management, but also like nobody has ever checked up on what they actually put in, or whether anybody bought it…

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

That info came as quite a bio shock

No, that is what “made for fun”-monetization looks like