this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Let's be honest. It's not about the 5v5. It's not about the CC. It's not about the balance changes. It's not about the cancelled single player.
It's about the free stuff. Blizzard took away the free stuff, and everybody's angry about it. Now you have to pay for a decent amount of cosmetics, and getting a new hero requires a grind (a big grind for current-season hero, small grind for past ones) unless you want to pay.
There are two viable business models for service-based games (and running servers and paying moderators is service, that's why they're called servers):
Sell a game and then support it right up until everybody's already bought the game, then sell the sequel and repeat. Otherwise how do you fund development when nobody is paying you anymore?
Sell a game and then harass your players into giving you recurring payments.
don't make the game a service. The game is a product and not a service, the service is the bare minimum to keep the master server up. Players run dedicated servers, make the expansions through modding, etc. This is how it used to be for everything before Xbox Live.
I get that it's disappointing, but when you get angry about not getting enough post-release content you're asking for 1 or 2. And the industry has pretty much moved away from type 3 -- I can't think of a modern popular game that isn't a decades-old institution like Minecraft Java that fit into that category.
Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don't really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.
But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don't miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.
Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to 'outraged' unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don't know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.
I think what's more important is a real shift towards your 'type 3' games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it's had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was 'dead'. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money's worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be 'dead'?
Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I'd love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that's what will actually make a difference, it's what's actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.
I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We've basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.
Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate doesn't use centrally-run game servers?
It has direct connect multiplayer. I'd assume any server-based comms are for multi-platform, which is understandable.
Well that's a good sign then. That should mean the masterserver is cheap to run, and good chance that the game can be hacked to be fully p2p in the event the masterserver gets taken down. P2p means far less server side code that has to be reverse-engineered.
There are still type 3 games eg. The Witcher, Baldurs Gate 3, etc.
There's an article about this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/08/12/the-main-lesson-frombaldurs-gate-3-should-be-people-hate-microtransactions/
Define “harass”. LoL and Fortnite don’t “harass” you into giving recurring payments. You can make f2p-friendly games, especially on pc, if you want. Blizzard just doesn’t want.