Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has launched Episode 2 of its first season which, as you might expect, has not exactly burned the barn down in terms of playercount
    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3535·
      6 months ago

      Not until Helldivers 2 dies too. I was tricked into thinking it was healing, and then that game exploded.

      EDIT: The truth hurts, but that’s still a live service game that’s actively working against the interests of consumers and preservationists. The more money and playtime people give it, the worse this situation gets.

      • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        296·
        6 months ago

        I still don’t think the enemy is “all live service games” exactly. A lot of us have a style of gameplay we enjoy that makes us go “That was fun! I want some more of it.”

        Just that Rocksteady made singleplayer games well, and their poor shift just informs us that not all games need to be live service, especially when the gameplay shifts to something no one likes in order to achieve Number Go Up (similar situation with Gotham Knights)

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
          144·
          6 months ago

          Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?

          • TachyonTele@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            There is some hope for these games. For example Shadow of War works perfectly fine now and doesn’t have any of it’s “battle pass” stuff in it anymore. It can happen.
            Rarely.

            • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              If Helldivers 2 gets updated to work offline, including multiplayer, I will no longer wish for its death. I just don’t think that’s at all likely.

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      23·
      6 months ago

      Considering what companies that make live services target for… They’ll chalk this up as a loss at the amount of All of the money in the world.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      6 months ago

      Approximately $200M, but you can get creative with accounting across multiple products, the way they phrased it.