"How many more Highguards will it take for the game industry to change?"

[kane_magus]

"Publishers keep chasing the Fortnite-esque live-service model even as most attempts crash and burn."

That final paragraph sounds a bit like whingey panic to me. Meanwhile, I'm more like the "YES... HA HA HA... YES!" Sickos guy, looking in from the outside and watching everything burn to the ground (albeit far too slowly).

I mean, sure, I would much prefer the modern video game industry to actually stop doing asinine modern video game industry horseshit, but failing that, I'm okay with it altogether ceasing to exist, too.

Comments

[goldpseudo]

I can't help but be reminded of the old joke:

A beggar is on a street corner selling pencils. A passerby comes up and asks how much they cost. "One million dollars, please," replies the beggar. "Are you insane? That's way too expensive."

"Yeah, maybe, but I only need to sell one."

They know as well as we do that if something does take off, they might as well just be printing money for the next however many years until everybody gets bored and goes off to find the new hotness. So the video game industry is just going to keep throwing shit at the wall until something takes off. Or until they run out of shit, but I doubt anyone expects that well to run dry at this point.

[kane_magus]

I guess maybe the """""best""""" case scenario here would be that each of these gargantuan companies capable of wasting (m/b)illions of dollars for most of a decade on these worse-than-worthless turds (even when they are "successful," they're still turds) will each finally get their one "viable" live-service/GaaS "forever game." They could then entirely exit the game-making/publishing market to focus exclusively on that, leaving the industry behind to those who still care about making actual normal-ass video games. Either way, the end result would be essentially indistinguishable from a triple-A industry-wide crash, at least from my perspective, because I personally will never spend a dollar on or touch with a ten-foot pole or give a single fuck about (except to scorn them) any of these asinine live-service/GaaS "forever games."

Granted, if that really did happen, all it would mean is that we'd just see new companies springing up, formed by all the remaining money vampires who missed out on the first round, explicitly to continue the chase for that same pie in the sky money. As such, the cycle of "dead-on-arrival forever games" would continue apace, regardless. (And, in this hypothetical scenario, they'd actually be less idiotic for trying to chase the trend than the way it is now, here in the real world, where there are far more failures than so-called "successes.")

No, it would actually be better (to/for me) if the industry just legit crashed (by the usual meaning of "industry crash") over this, because I otherwise think, at this point, that we'll never not have money vampires at the heads of massive game studios/publishers chasing trends like this. Even if the live-service/GaaS thing ever did finally fade away (*fingers crossed*), the money vampires will just find something else to latch onto and try to suck dry. *shrug + weary sigh*

Fortnite and its ilk were, collectively, one of the worst things to have ever been inflicted upon the video game industry.