For almost a decade, live-service features have been de rigeur for most games – but with live-service projects being cancelled or pivoted to single player, it a
I absolutely appreciate your response - I rarely get a chance to discuss this topic and have my ideas on it refined or thrown out through discourse. And hoo boy, it’s another long one but I love talking about stuff like this.
I want to say first that I agree that there might be earlier games that exhibited examples of the philosophies in the definition provided by Valve back in 2008-2011 and my definition, but my stance is that digital distribution platforms made it more feasible for games to be developed in such an ongoing way and lead to it becoming a more prominent idea. A rough parallel could be drawn between the way DOOM popularized First Person Shooters, yet there were definitely games of the genre before it.
Some games were developed that employ similar or the same philosophies to GaaS, but it was less common and easy (I remember getting “official” content for games by having to go to a website, find the download link, download the maps, etc) until the technology caught up.
On Temple of Apshai, I see your points but I don’t agree that it completely breaks my ideas surrounding what makes a Game as a Service… I think I should clarify that I consider a “point of sale” to be when I have to make a purchase to have the content.
I consider the ports and expansion to fall under points of sale, as a result. You are purchasing exactly the products as boxed, and nothing else takes place beyond that exchange. You have the product to play, the developer’s obligation to you is finished.
Expansions are an arguable bit of grey area, since they do technically build upon the earlier game, but I still think of that as a straightforward point of sale; The only content is that which you buy, with no additional content or service provided by the developer beyond them.
I consider Diablo 2 and the Lord of Destruction expansion to be an early example of GaaS, since after the points of sale the game received additional content (I think to online play only).
I acknowledge the water definitely gets muddied with this digital age. Some games receive a stream of paid expansions over time, like Borderlands or Fallout 3. However, I struggle to consider these to be Games as a Service - these items are all independent points of purchase.
If a game has a mix of paid and free content updates, then I’d consider it a GaaS because of the things other than the paid DLC/expansions.
I know that my ability to word my ideas is flawed and limited to my own vocabulary, and there are undoubtedly issues with my definitions. I don’t think my ideas are completely without merit though, and believe I just need to refine them somewhat, which can only be done through beholding a plucked chicken.
I absolutely appreciate your response - I rarely get a chance to discuss this topic and have my ideas on it refined or thrown out through discourse. And hoo boy, it’s another long one but I love talking about stuff like this.
I want to say first that I agree that there might be earlier games that exhibited examples of the philosophies in the definition provided by Valve back in 2008-2011 and my definition, but my stance is that digital distribution platforms made it more feasible for games to be developed in such an ongoing way and lead to it becoming a more prominent idea. A rough parallel could be drawn between the way DOOM popularized First Person Shooters, yet there were definitely games of the genre before it. Some games were developed that employ similar or the same philosophies to GaaS, but it was less common and easy (I remember getting “official” content for games by having to go to a website, find the download link, download the maps, etc) until the technology caught up.
On Temple of Apshai, I see your points but I don’t agree that it completely breaks my ideas surrounding what makes a Game as a Service… I think I should clarify that I consider a “point of sale” to be when I have to make a purchase to have the content.
I consider the ports and expansion to fall under points of sale, as a result. You are purchasing exactly the products as boxed, and nothing else takes place beyond that exchange. You have the product to play, the developer’s obligation to you is finished.
Expansions are an arguable bit of grey area, since they do technically build upon the earlier game, but I still think of that as a straightforward point of sale; The only content is that which you buy, with no additional content or service provided by the developer beyond them. I consider Diablo 2 and the Lord of Destruction expansion to be an early example of GaaS, since after the points of sale the game received additional content (I think to online play only).
I acknowledge the water definitely gets muddied with this digital age. Some games receive a stream of paid expansions over time, like Borderlands or Fallout 3. However, I struggle to consider these to be Games as a Service - these items are all independent points of purchase. If a game has a mix of paid and free content updates, then I’d consider it a GaaS because of the things other than the paid DLC/expansions.
I know that my ability to word my ideas is flawed and limited to my own vocabulary, and there are undoubtedly issues with my definitions. I don’t think my ideas are completely without merit though, and believe I just need to refine them somewhat, which can only be done through beholding a plucked chicken.
Also it is 7am and I should sleep.