MultiVersus officially closes down and is delisted today
The game can still be played offline if players log in before the servers are turned off…
They're patching it to be playable offline, but only if you've previously downloaded the game.
Why not just leave that version up instead of delisting it? They could even sell it. Would be seen as a success story for preservation instead of another loss, and it's especially baffling because it's a fully avoidable loss.
According to the bean counters this will save them $17/month in hosting costs
Yeah, they've just ensured the only way a person can play it is through piracy. Very smart move, WB, very smart...
It's really gross how people's games can just be disappeared these days. GaaS is a terrible business model.
It's not going anywhere until people stop playing the games.
It's not just limited to games...
We see it most prevalently in games because the gaming industry is massive. But this can also happen to your car... Or your fridge...
Here's a fun story:
There were these few blind people who volunteered to have cybernetic implants that would help them (partially) see. The company went under, the patent is held by a patent troll, but the people still have those implants in their head... Which have now either shut down or are malfunctioning...
Hack the planet, indeed.
There are a very small number of games where a changing world is a benefit to the game, although sometimes the approach also means skimping on some development before going live.
Helldivers 2 is an example of a game that benefits from the changing world approach of GaaS and it doesn't have predatory monetization. Playing the game gives enough in game currency to buy optional equipment needed for the changing world even if you only play a few hours a week. Heck, play it more regularly and you can afford most of the thematic warbonds which again and not necessary. The changing world and adding more enemy units keeps the game fresh over time, and the evolving story is like playing a giant semi shared campaign. You play a small part in a shared experience. I don't think doing the game as a single or coop campaign would have been a better experience.
That said, when they do end the ongoing campaign at some point it would be awesome to have some kind of automated system campaign for people to still do things. It wouldn't be as focused, but it would extend the game's life.
MultiVersus was hurt by trying to do SaaS because they added more predatory monetization after the beta where it was bad enough and tried to milk it for everything to the detriment of the gameplay. It is a great example of a game where the SaaS approach was terrible, and that is the case for the vast majority of SaaS games.
The business model isn't terrible, it makes money, but it is terrible for the consumer
The business model isn't terrible, it makes money, but it is terrible for the consumer
I am aggressively opposed to anything that is profitable at the expense of the consumer. That is a terrible business model.
If you aren't already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can't just drop "support" (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.
It will never work
Even if it doesn't work, I'd at least want to let people try and get practice doing something about a problem (even if that's just leaving a comment on social media to direct others to sign a petition that will eventually get lawmakers' attention with enough signatures based on that country's laws, because that still has more chance for good than yet another comment about X Thing Bad. Even though I agree with a lot of Lemmy's X Thing Bad takes), makes them more likely to do something in the future. At least they can walk away saying "I tried". Some people might see no guarantee of results for their time and think of it as time wasted, and that is their choice, but I don't really see a reason to say "that'll never work" without any offer of alternative. Most charitably, you are trying to save them time and disappointment, trying to prevent a "it didn't work, activism does not work, I'll never do anything like that again" attitude if it fails, but I think a lot of people are just seeing the comment as pointless negativity.
Not with that attitude.
What are you suggesting? That on once a game goes online it'll require the company by law to keep it running forever? How many companies would still release games that requires backend if they knew it's a never ending endeavour even if they'll lose money from it?
Running the infrastructure to host the game's baceknd requires money, and releasing the server code as binary or open source is not something that'll happen.
So what is the end goal?
The companies could shut down their servers, if they at the same time would release the software needed to run the servers. This would allow the creation of community servers, without any costs or responsibilities for the companies
There was a time when multiplayer games all came with dedicated server binaries.
Oh for fuck sake, this has never been a good argument, and people who keep repeating these argument-questions (almost like they're a copy paste) either never read what Stop Killing Games demands, or lack the reading comprehension necessary to understand it.
The third option would be malicious sabotage, but I'm hoping it's just one of the two stupidity options.
From the FAQ of stopkillinggames.com website
Q. Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.
Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there's no reason it can't work that way again. It's one of several ways to satisfy the petition.
Required games and games studios to build the game to be played offline or have the ability to self host the server.
As you are not a gamer, I'll try to make it simple.
If a game ask for an online connection, is usually for three reasons:
When the publisher decide to stop the online component, to save a buck, it often mean the game stops working altogether because of the DRM part, as it basically refuses to start without the proper authorization from the now defunct server.
The petition do not ask them to keep running the server indefinitely, but rather to
In both case, the code already exist, and the changes required are minimal, so why not do it? It costs barely anything to the devs/publisher, and gives the game a second life, even without official support.
But they don't. Mostly out of greed, to push people to buy the newest, micro-transaction infused game they wish to sell, sometimes even the same game with half the content replaced by micro-transaction (Overwatch 2 being the perfect example).
They don't want an older, maybe better game to overshadow their new shiny cash grab.
You know you can still play Unreal Tournament online against other people? That game came out in 1999!
The problem you sketch has been solved already.
All it takes is for the game developer to release the server binaries. And for fans of the game to run servers.
It would require devs to start planning for indefinite support during development. Wether that means releasing server software and the source code or not making the game reliant on servers in the first place is up to them.
Better service for the community. Take a look over towards Spellbreak for a second and you'll see a community that has taken what Proletariat had given them after an acquisition by Blizzard and started doing private servers to keep their game functional. I think there's much to learn from this End-of-Service model, perhaps we could have more privately hosted servers to reduce their overhead if companies truly loved their fanbase; might even be feasible to follow that model from the start for f2p games so the official servers are more capable for tourneys and the like. Either way the goal is end user satisfaction, so if those means are preservation or archival like with Yu-Gi-Oh! Cross Duel, then so be it the fanbase does what they want ultimately, but we just ask companies to offer their olive branch so that all their precious arts don't drown in the ever expanding sea of data.
This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.
The worst part, the demo was actually pretty good.
They literally could have released this game with mod support, and sold it for $20 and it would have been a fun party game.
Instead, they kept going on with BS games as a service.
Games as a Service wasn't even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn't handle the project, for one reason or another.
A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.
Multiversus was one of the most mismanaged projects I've seen. Released in open beta for months, shut down for a year, re-released as literally the same game but worse and with more microtransactions, then quickly died.
Shame. It was fun to play for a while.
It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.
The beta was fun, although the monetization was bad even back then.
But the official release made all the wrong decisions to amplify the worst parts of gameplay and dial up the monetization. It was like they got all the player feedback backwards.
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You'll see this again with 2XKO, even if they've got a year's worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There's no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo's platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.
Another problem is the game director overhyping and saying "any character is possibile" and he wasn't limiting it to warner bros's IPs but if you're going to do that, then they honestly should have made the game launch with at least one 3rd party character.
The reason that games are even hosted on "official" servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP's they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.
The only issue was having to have a "matchmaking" server but even then, steam has the tools to replace that entirely.
That could be one reason, at least in a game such as MultiVersus with different IPs being used.
But they still lock down servers to their own shit when they own it all anyway and it's because they also sell you crap to have in the game. If you had your own server, you could just give yourself the stuff they sell since all those things are still in the game somewhere and the only barrier between you and the content is their servers checking to see if you paid for them.
I watched some streamers play it and was just wondering why they weren't anymore. Now I know!
Ya know I was really hoping that when Capcom released Mega Man X Dive Offline that it would become a standard that all live service games would adhere to...
How naive
I don't play these live service games, what happens to your purchases like skins etc in this case, do you just lose that money?
