Editorial: All Work and No Play

All work and no play

          The game industry likes their big, impressive-sounding buzz words. They adore filling E3 presentations with stuff like “innovative”, “unprecedented”, “high-quality”, and the like. In fact, some companies seem like they’ll do anything in their power to avoid referring to fun video games as…well, fun video games.

          This week, a new buzz word entered the fray. Thanks to a Ubisoft report from a recent shareholder meeting, we now know that they are referring their upcoming releases not as games, but as “live services”. According to the report, Ubisoft alongside other major third-party developers (mostly the more infamous ones such as Activision and EA) want to continue to push secondary revenue sources into their games in the form of microtransactions. Along the way someone figured that the best way to encourage sales of microtransactions to players is to keep them coming back to the game over and over for not months, but years.

          Clearly they’re looking for a World of Warcraft level of player engagement and revenue stream here, but I don’t know if they’re gonna be getting it with the stunts the Triple-A industry’s been pulling as of late.

          When I think of a game being a “live service”, the first one that comes to mind is Splatoon. Here’s a game that costs the $60 up front, but is then followed by a near weekly stream of new content for over a year for absolutely free. That, to me, is a game that is worth coming back to many times.

          On the other hand, these “live services” seem more concerned in creating fake jobs that gamers clock into after a long day at work. You boot up the game, do some mundane, repetitive tasks to earn rewards, and then go play something else. Except, unlike a real job where you get paid to do these things, instead you have to pay the publishers for the privilege to play their “live services”.

          In fact, it looks like Ubisoft isn’t even looking at their major titles as games anymore. One of their most prominent slides is titled “From Game to Platform”, and lists all the ways that the old style of games are a thing of the past and now all they’re interested in making are platforms to peddle more secondary economies.

          Sounds like a real moneymaker, right? Well, here’s what the industry has missed. Sure, you might be able to get a few extra goldmines off of the Day 1 microtransaction purchasers, but what happens when they realize that your “live service” has no substantial value as a video game and copies begin to flood the GameStop used games shelf?

          If you look at all the games from last year that tried the “live service” angle, they all ended in disaster. NBA 2K18 was rallied against by casual and hardcore fans alike, Forza 7 was quickly dismissed, Middle-earth: Shadow of War was derided for being one of the worst sequels to a legitimately good product in recent memory, and there really is nothing left to say about Star Wars Battlefront II. All four of those were “live services” that served as little more than to shove microtransactions at unsuspecting players from behind a familiar franchise name, and all four of those failed to please consumers because they weren’t real video games.

          I don’t know why publishers are trying to ride this train so hard. The biggest missteps gaming saw in 2017 were all thanks to “live service”-style games, but this looks to be the buzz word of the year. Don’t fall for this stuff, guys. Your money is worth more than spending it on a slot machine in disguise.