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2024 was the year gamers really started pushing back on the erosion of game ownership
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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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A bit too optimistic, but hey, at least it's a post pointing people at GOG, which has otherwise been losing big publisher support (SEGA and Sony used to put some big games there and don't anymore, for instance).
I'm also not sure that the big failures of prominent games as a service are an indication of a return to appreciating ownership. I'm afraid it may be rather that the established genre leaders are taking all the oxygen out of that space, just as it happened for causal mobile F2P games a while ago.
If the perception makes players more likely to give up on their forever games and go back to buying piecemeal experiences they get to keep indefinitely I'd call that very good news, but I'll need a bit more evidence before I declare myself optimistic on that subject.
Perhaps in a roundabout way it is. My guess is that this is a reflection of the lack of value that people find in live service games when it isn't an immediate hit, because their value comes from other people valuing it as well. If the game's showing signs of shutting down in a year or two, you're less likely to bother giving it your time and money. Meanwhile, people will rally behind a game that they assume will be popular with those around them. That's how it appears to me anyway. You can say that is or is not valuing ownership, but it's showing that these games have less value inherently, in any case.
I think there is absolutely a sense that some of these games aren't worth jumping into because the longevity won't be there. That doesn't necessarily mean the alternative is people sticking around and playing traditional paid experiences instead, though. What seems to be happening instead is people sticking with a few "forever games" and getting stuck there, sort of out of the market. We've seen that dynamic before, when everybody was trying to come up with a MMO to replace WoW, or in the very stagnant mobile market.
That's at least somewhat self-cleansing though. If everyone else loses hundreds of millions of dollars trying to become the next live service phenomenon, they'll learn that it's unlikely they will be and stop pursuing it. That losing strategy has caused major shakeups at EA and Ubisoft and immensely hurt Bandai-Namco and WB next to their more traditional offerings doing gangbusters. If I'm going to glance five minutes into the future with a dash of expecting current trends to extrapolate into the future, maybe the model that makes everyone happy is more of this "prologue" model that Metaphor and tons of smaller Steam releases have been employing, which is just a roundabout way to return to shareware from 30 years ago.
Well, when the reward being dangled is a Fortnite-sized chunk of the industry worth billions by itself it's hard to suggest that the real answer is more, smaller, less profitable releases. Especially with public companies with a mandate to seek endless growth. It's not like big traditional single player games are a surefire thing, either.
It's a bit of a rough time for the industry right now, frankly. So... on that note, happy holidays everybody!