"If you’re a gamer who primarily plays single player games, you might be suffering from a constant sense of foreboding as new games get announced. It is the fear that this time it might be your beloved series or studio that is the victim. What exactly is this imminent doom coming to ruin everything you love? I’m talking about online multiplayer games. In particular, the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG)."
Hanzala from eXputer writes "History is witness to their downfall, yet they keep coming."
It's not so much Devs as it is Invested and shareholders, issue is barely anyone has the backbone to stand up to them anymore and say no for the sake of the project.
This is a fairly interesting article that does summarize a bit of the history of this revenue type. But to answer the main question is a much simpler affair: While people will say in the internet that they hate GaaS games. The top revenue generating games are GaaS, so companies will try to have their own. Take Genshin Impact for example, that game alone generated more than 1.5 Billion USD in revenue during 2022. That is almost as much as the 1.9 Billion USD that Ubisoft as a whole generated that year.
It's definitely a risky move because the majority of GaaS games don't reach the level of success Genshin Impact achieved. However, companies can't seem to take their eyes off that tempting prize at the end.
Do you ever think that over the past year or so every studio who makes this shit has started to think
"GaaS is dying out partially because there's so many of them in the market now, I think other developers are moving away from the model now BUT lets stick to our GaaS game and then when it releases we'll be one of the few on the market still which allows us to get more of the market share since every one else has left"
Yet because every developer has that same thought process they've now all got GaaS games on a still over saturated market.
Premiere gaming is dying. With Spider-Man's 300 million dollar budget and Ratchet & Clank's ridiculously low return on investment (8 million Dollar loss) AAA gaming is going to be only filled with even more High profile IPs trying to make the biggest bang for buck. Expect to see more of this stuff.
"AA" level games are now making a big comeback and are usually even more beloved by playerbase now. So hopefully that's the silver lining. Smaller, better games.
New raids, class updates, festivals and more are on the calendar.
Now this makes me feel old! I remember playing the beta while I worked at Gamestop. I honestly didn't even know this game was still online! A quick search showed that it's even F2P now, so I may check it out for nostalgia's sake.
I only subbed at launch for 1-2 months bc I was already caught up in WoW at the time. I love the LotR universe though and would like to see how it's being handled these days.
Navigate your way through 2024 with the World of Warcraft roadmap with Executive Producer Holly Longdale.
The solo centric 'progression' of MMOs ruined the genre. They were amazing when you had to socialise, cooperate and build communities with other players.
Now every MMO seems to be aimed at the casual, and has killed the sense of enjoyment from this once experimental and successful genre.
SWG, old style WoW, Guild Wars, CoH/CoV and Everquest 1&2 were the pinnacle of the type, but it all deteriorated because solo play.
FF 14 is a great game. But one thing they wont tell you about it is that in the end game, making money is VERY VERY hard. Sure, they will tell you that crafting is a great way to make mula. But when there are thousands of other crafters making the same thing or selling the same crafting parts, you dont make much money at all, if any. MOnsters drop barely any gold when you kill them either, if at all. In the beginning you get a good amount of gold for quests. But in the end game, when quests are few and far between, you just don't get any gold. So how do you get that precious gold to buy player crafted armors (extemely hard to make because of rare materials) that is insanely overpriced? You have to BUY gold with real life cash. They are always open for business and always have that amount you need .... for a price. Now if you start going crazy they will, supposedly, run out of gold to sell you. Just to cover their ass as if they are actually farming it. But I'm calling it now, I think SquareEnix is selling it. Just no way they can come up with milllions of gold like that and so fast.
Anyways Final Fantasy 14 is probably the best mmo out there overall. with Guild Wars 2 being a close second. I never heard of anyone buying gold for GW2 before. They probably have though.
Star Trek Online. I solo'd every mission.