Fuck the Times. Classic shit article.
Video games do, which is why I buy so many story heavy games. If the industry moves more toward live service games, that’s fine, I’m just not going to buy them. There are plenty of non-live service games to choose from that I’m absolutely spoiled with choice to the extent that I’ll never play all the games I own, not to mention games I want to buy.
Yeah, live service games suck, so play games that don’t suck.
My wife and I are playing through the Telltale Walking Dead games right now and shes loving the stories.
Novels offer closure? Ever heard of G.R. R. Martin? How about Patrick Rothfuss? How about 80% of all litrpg?
Any good litrpg recs? I’ve only read solo leveling and it was good
Dungeon Crawler Carl is pretty good and has a great audio book as well. Primal Hunter, Mother of learning (series actually has an ending).
Hmm… title is a little bit clickbaity—author seems to be mainly going after live service games, not necessarily every video game.
Also, novels and movies don’t always end 😂 Not sure why they threw that into the title. Freaking Fast and Furious will surely outlast planet Earth at this point 😂 What about Star Wars? It’ll never end.
I agree with the general sentiment though: I think players are flexible and will be inclined to give your new IP a shot, but capitalism is risk averse, and will obviously disagree.
Nah, Fast and Furious’ days are numbered. They already broke the glass on the storyboard card that says, “Go to space”, and the only one left to break is, “Time Machine”.
Wait there is a space fast and furious?
I only watched the first 2 movies back in the day. They were OK, but I never felt the need to watch them again (or the desire to watch the later ones).
They briefly got a Fierro into space so they could mess with a satellite. Somewhere around the fifth movie, they became very tongue in cheek action movies, with one character whose entire job is to break the fourth wall.
Ok, that might actually be worth watching.
Might have to check it out tonight. Thanks for the recommendation!
And time machine leads to multiverse, and multiverse leads to reboot. Never mind the spinoff potential…
Oh, fair enough. But it’s still only going to have so much gas in the tank, and a cliff-hanger or sequel potential is very different than some continual expectation, either by consumers or the developers that the game can or should be updated forever.
Yes, but it’s also devoid of creativity and takes up space that could be occupied by more creative endeavors, so it’s a similar path at the end of the day.
My point is pointing a finger at Fortnite and Epic Games is fair, but same finger should also be pointed at Universal, Disney, NBC… etc.
And the biggest finger should be pointed at capitalism itself.
I enjoy the Fast & Furious movies. The advantage to them releasing one movie at a time, or in games, one game at a time, is you can more accurately gauge the appetite for the next one, and they don’t have ongoing costs to keep the last one going. The ten F&F movies out there now are not in danger of disappearing if F&F11 bombs. The people who worked on those movies don’t have an expectation for or reliance on employment any longer than the time it takes to make one movie. And outside of Fast X, despite being pulpy and constantly recontextualizing and retconning old events, they all have their own endings with closure. Fast X does have a cliffhanger, and that is a bet that they made with their audience that they’ll be back, but the most likely scenario is that the next one offers closure. In some ways, cliffhangers can be closure themselves, too; I think more highly of Arcane season 1’s ending as closure for the series than I do of season 2, for instance. Meanwhile, the most likely scenario for a live service game is that it doesn’t have an ending or even exist anymore, only a few years in the future.
And all that said, it also doesn’t mean that I don’t understand your perspective, but I do see eye to eye with the author.
Hmm… but isn’t it an “ongoing series”? Like, you can have short or long arcs, but if the continuity is the same, the story technically hasn’t ended.
I agree gaming takes it a step further, but this is like comparing a worse example to a bad one… yeah, one is worse, but they both suck at the end of the day.
I’m glad you like Fast and Furious, but it’s only one example of many. It’s not the only movie franchise being milked to death, and won’t be the last.
It can be an ongoing series, but you can get a sense of closure each time. Star Wars had closure in 1983 and 2005 and 2019 as they kept adding on to it, each time seeming like it was done; and each spin-off had closure by the time credits rolled.
Wanting closure is a preference and does not apply to all games. Counter Strike 2 doesn’t have a story and there is zero closure for example.
The industry trying to force games into a live service model when they shouldn’t be is a problem, sure. There are a few games where the model actually is a benefit though, like Helldivers 2. Other than wrapping up things somehow while winding down the game there isn’t an opportunity for closure while an endless war is going on. The setting itself is why closure isn’t on the table.
So I agree with the overall idea as it applies to games in general, but it isn’t some universal truth.
The closure the article speaks to is also just not turning the game into a perpetual expectation that more is coming. Multiplayer games have always been built around being “endless”, but there was never the expectation that this Halo would be the last Halo and just keep getting updates when you bought it 20 years ago. That expectation has led to sustainability problems we’ve all seen and that the article calls out.
I deeply hate articles like this. They are just exploiting the hellish state of the industry to argue for why the games they don’t like shouldn’t exist.
First and foremost: Clearly the author (and anyone agreeing with the thesis) doesn’t read or watch movies. Publishers and schools basically constantly encourage leaving a hook for a sequel because it is a lot easier to get a follow up in the same universe published. And that has always been true. Same with movies where the vast majority of major studio films are remakes or franchises now. Hell… television is a thing.
But second? It fundamentally ignores what is ACTUALLY facing the video games industry. Making a successful live service game is the holy grail because it is job security… until it isn’t. But it isn’t like releasing a critically acclaimed single player game will protect you from layoffs because your parent company wanted to juice the Q2 numbers. And just listen to developers like Xalavier Nelson Jr about how hard it is to even get funding for a game these days.
Shit like this is disgusting. It is “I don’t like X. I am going to say that X shouldn’t exist because I totally care about the industry that I can’t even be bothered to pay attention to”
There are so many games being made nowadays that it’s not even hard to avoid the shitty “service” games. It’s just that the mainstream gamer/society doesn’t bother looking but there are plenty of games with closure.
Looking at you, Valve.
