Watching live service games crash and burn is just so cathartic.
Steam puts the player peak for the episode release at just 559 players, and it’s down to peaking under 500 even on the weekend here.
When you can pack the peak amount of players into a decent sized ballroom, that’s never a good sign for your game’s future.
At this point they’re probably better off just refunding buyers and shuttering the game entirely. Doesn’t feel like this is a salvageable situation.
refunding buyers
Oof
Feels so good to see a live service cashgrab fail
Their apparent solution to this is more live service games (at least from a few weeks or so ago).
"If at first you don't succeed. Fail, fail again."
Nature is healing.
Not until Helldivers 2 dies too. I was tricked into thinking it was healing, and then that game exploded.
EDIT: The truth hurts, but that's still a live service game that's actively working against the interests of consumers and preservationists. The more money and playtime people give it, the worse this situation gets.
I still don't think the enemy is "all live service games" exactly. A lot of us have a style of gameplay we enjoy that makes us go "That was fun! I want some more of it."
Just that Rocksteady made singleplayer games well, and their poor shift just informs us that not all games need to be live service, especially when the gameplay shifts to something no one likes in order to achieve Number Go Up (similar situation with Gotham Knights)
Number can go up without being tied to a server you don't and can't control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating "single player" and "live service", as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn't have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it's tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?
There is some hope for these games. For example Shadow of War works perfectly fine now and doesn't have any of it's "battle pass" stuff in it anymore. It can happen.
Rarely.
If Helldivers 2 gets updated to work offline, including multiplayer, I will no longer wish for its death. I just don't think that's at all likely.
Any numbers in on how much money they lost?
Considering what companies that make live services target for... They'll chalk this up as a loss at the amount of All of the money in the world.
Approximately $200M, but you can get creative with accounting across multiple products, the way they phrased it.
TIL you can update poop
It was so bad that many of them decided to finally touch grass.
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