A fuzzy misinterpretation of what someone else said is what started your hostilities, so I get it.

Fair enough, but the fourth is “returns”.

The PR-friendly response for why they centralize servers always sounds good, because it’s PR. They push lots more updates than they did in the old days because it’s part of the business model, whereas we used to get sequels and expansion packs that paid for that work up front. This is another way of framing my perspective on this modern business model as being expensive for them and generally a losing bet that’s not worth pursuing compared to how we used to do things.

Again, I disagree with this cynical take.

I don’t even consider that cynical. It’s the only conclusion I can come to based on how these different companies behave. The artist already told me clearly what the intended experience was, and if I bought the damn thing, I should be able to disregard it. Games are also games, and we should be able to run house rules. Getting in the way of that is just making the product worse, regardless of what the art is.

So, yes, there may be a breakdown in terminology here. When I hear someone say they “demand” something from someone, for ex.

In some cases one, in other cases the other, so that might be what you’re reading. In at least one of these cases, we’re talking about consumer demand, what I want as a customer, the customer is always right, yadda yadda.

I’m hearing that you want legislation to require offline play.

Legislatively, I support what SKG is after. My personal desires are for more than that, because the product doesn’t offer enough value to me compared to one that works offline from day 1. And I think whether customers can articulate that well enough or not, they’re making a similar evaluation of the product in front of them, which explains the culture around people making a lot of noise about Steam charts, prematurely declaring “dead games”, and so on. A game like this one that launches as anything other than a phenomenal success looks like a bad investment if other people didn’t already sign on in droves.

Agreed, and there’s no legislation requiring devs to lay out their plan ahead of time, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the people to demand that information.

Without legislation, they could tell me the offline binary is ready to release and all they have to do is hit the button, but I’d have no reason to believe them.

By releasing a dedicated server binary for a game, you are inviting a fractured playerbase.

This is exactly why I believe it wouldn’t fracture very far. It’s going to be far easier to get up and running and playing the game by connecting to official servers. But it will sure be nice have to a safety net.

As for the intended experience, how much does it bother developers that their customers play offline games with mods? Or back in the day we’d use cheat codes. Grand Theft Auto always had missions, but for at least the first four iterations of it, it was more of just a chaos sandbox where people would ignore the main throughline. My favorite way to play Factorio is with aliens turned off. Devs have all sorts of ways to tells us what the intended experience is, but deviating from that should be our choice. I’ll get more value out of a game that doesn’t take that away from me, and I think devs get more information about what their players actually want if they look at how many people choose the unintended experience over the intended one. It’s why Rockstar hired all of those roleplay server folks to officially integrate it into GTA6. The only reason the unintended experience is a detriment to them is because they see it as a threat to their business model.

I think you’re conflating a few things of what I said here. I know what SKG is asking for, and I’m not suggesting they change it.

What I personally want is a game that survives offline today, tomorrow, and indefinitely, for the reasons I’ve stated.

And I think that regardless of whether or not anything changes legislatively, it’s such a losing bet to design your infrastructure for online matchmaking only, since most populations drop off extremely quickly, that you end up with costly retrofits like this in a best-case scenario after that point, so you may as well prepare for low population instead. This game, for instance, went from thousands of concurrent players to hundreds in just two months. It’s not an absurd demand to get a game built for offline play. They still make those. No one is forcing me to buy a game that isn’t built that way, but it’s really fucking hard to know which is which sometimes, even when doing research. The only thing that necessitates a central server that only the company controls, even for an MMO, is the business model, and them not wanting you to remove opportunities for them to sell you subscriptions and microtransactions. Nothing needs one, especially when the odds are your game will end up with low pop in no time at all.

They can have a ladder and matchmaking while still providing a server browser that goes to self-hosted servers. Even then, these are things that you set up with the assumption that your game is going to have a massive population, which is the foolish assumption all these live service games make. MMOs have been self-hosted for as long as pirates have been reverse-engineering the code. The only thing stopping it from happening more is the rights holders’ willingness to allow it. Competitive shooters started from server browsers and self-hosted servers.

They are doing voluntarily what I want a Stop Killing Games initiative to require from all studios: just ensure the game continues to work.

If they wait until the game is a failure and about to close shop, I have no guarantee that this update will be its fate. But let’s say I know in advance somehow that the game is going to survive the servers’ decommissioning; I still end up with all the other negative side effects of an always-online game in the interim. Server queues, downtime that I can’t do anything about, no ability to play LAN with friends in a place with lousy internet, etc. SKG is looking for a minimum of preservation that I can get behind, but I don’t think it would be enough for me as a customer unless it was never always-online.

You understand they’re out of business, right?

Looks like I missed it as I scrolled by a block on that page trying to recommend me other articles, as I was looking for the rest of this article.

They’d need to be forward thinking in which technologies they use such that they can be handed over to customers. Open source is always nice but isn’t strictly necessary, and it’s far less likely to happen whenever middleware is involved.

It shows that they’re trying to keep the game in a state where they’re spending no money and still potentially making money, but that may not be mutually exclusive with what you said.

With no insider information, Elder Scrolls VI probably comes 2028 or 2029, as that’s about what Bethesda’s cadence is. That would make Fallout 5 somewhere around 2033 or 2034.

They also could have just done that from the start. Look, this is good news, but the reason you design your servers like that in the first place is because you have the hubris to think you’re going to make Fortnite money. Hopefully their next project isn’t built with the same naivety.

They’ve already got one of those, Fallout 76. They’ve kept it going, and it’s probably even profitable at this point thanks to the TV show, but I doubt they’ve got the appetite for another one of those right now.

From the official press release:

Our teams are now developing The Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 on Creation Engine 3…

Fuck!

I’m not going to get a ton of mileage out of the game if the online doesn’t work for me, regardless of how many files people figure out how to extract.

It was always coming to PC, as will any multiplayer PlayStation title, but the thing I’m concerned about is that PSN is required and has historically not worked via Proton. And then even if it does work, I’m concerned that defense in this game is going to be awful, as there’s seemingly only one not-so-great defensive mechanic outside of holding back to block.

Being a body in the online matchmaking pool adds value to the next player who has a greater incentive to give Blizzard more money because they played with you. Just logging in to play the game helps Blizzard, not to mention the positive word of mouth you spread afterward. That said, OP clearly has an itch to play this game that isn’t going to go away. There are games I won’t touch because they do things that offend me, and I’m not tempted to play them when there’s so much else out there. StarCraft II is one of them, even though it had been one of my favorite games in the past and there’s nothing else quite like it, for what that’s worth.

Ubisoft games put a tower on your map and then reveal other activity icons on your map once you climb it that it expects you to clear. Breath of the Wild asks you to use your eyes to decide what you find interesting from the top of the tower. Elden Ring has different types of rewards tied to certain types of locations, but it expects you to put together what those rules are on your own. There’s a huge difference there.

I guess not according to your unquestionable criteria but you don’t get to say in the seventies is bad.

I said reviewing in the 70s tends to not result in a sales bump. In order to average in the 70s, you’ve got far more negative reviews in the mix than a game that reviews in the mid 80s or low 90s. It doesn’t end up so unanimously praised that people can’t shut up about how much they love it, which drives sales, generally. I’m not here to talk you out of a game you enjoy. I really enjoyed Screamer and Invincible VS this year, and I’d call them both great games, both rated 77 on OpenCritic. Neither sold phenomenally well. If they’re lucky, those projects were scoped accordingly so that they were able to turn a profit and continue employing those developers.

Your first question was “Didn’t both those games review and sell well?” The answer is no. That’s what we were talking about, in this thread about Ubisoft laying off thousands of people.

For what it’s worth, I think they made a number of good games, but there’s far too much that’s far too similar between them. By the time Black Flag came out the first time, I was tired of the checklist open world format, and it’s why something like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring will pop off when it addresses what people like me find lacking in the Ubisoft format. These days when I get into an open world game that adheres to the same principles as Ubisoft (like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, for instance), it’s often despite the format, not because of it.

Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold.

There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.

I don’t care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.

Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.

I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren’t free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that’s still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn’t mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they’re generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.