I'm glad you gave a mention as to what happens once they decide these "services" aren't profitable anymore. They're gone forever, as is your money. This entire practice is a nightmare for anyone who wants to play existing games in the future.

Every time someone says "They're corporations, their purpose is to make money!" I respond with "We're customers, our purpose is to stick up for ourselves!"

I'm already having to explain to my 10 year old the difference between DLC, microtransactions and lootboxes. Explaining the concepts of limited vs unlimited ceiling prices, and whether it's a definite transaction or gambling. When he asks to buy premium currency and I say no, he says "But I'll only buy it once". Not the sort of psychological pummeling that a 10 year old should have to deal with.

Jim Sterling keeps traveling to the future and back to warn us, but we don't listen. We never listen.

I had an assignment in College to do where we were supposed to bring up a topic, pick a side, and debate for it. I picked the game industry and triple A publishers as the topic, and used stuff you mentioned and source material you used across different videos, and got an A. I got an Aon my assignment thanks to Jim Sterling videos, thank god for you.

Fun fact: the term Whale comes from casinos and it's used in much the same way. A casino whale is given free food and a free room having upwards of thousands of dollars spent on them because they will drop twice as much on the games

"And that's what games are looking to become now. Less hobbies, less free time activities, but work." That's an interesting way to put it. It reminds me of limited-time events in online-focused games. Want to get cool stuff? Better beat the quest while it's available. Want to get banner heroes? Better get summoning orbs before it's too late. What to fight the new Arch-Tempered Elder Dragon? Better do it before month's end. So on and so forth. It makes me feel like these games are giving me deadlines. I get enough of those from work. I don't want them from my games. I'd rather play on my own schedule.

Jim's a showman that not everybody takes seriously, but he also knows the industry better than most. I feel like a lot of the things he talks about should be common sense, like businesses are out to make money and they're not your friends, but maybe It's just because I've been following him for awhile and I've done my own research into this industry that I love. Despite the dark age gaming seems to be in, I'm more passionate about it and the industry itself than most tend to be still. I wish more people had the thirst for knowledge that people like Jim have, but I guess that's an uphill battle. One of the reasons why I respect Jim so much though, is that he knows that in order to reach people, his videos can't just be educational, they have to be entertaining. That's why he's a showman too, because the simple joy of learning isn't as universal as we would like to think. This way he reaches more people, and his larger than life personality gives people the hook they sometimes need to break into industry news and analysis. He's a success story in this regard and gets a lot of support on Patreon, and thankfully, he deserves it. He pulls no punches and calls industry shit like a veteran journalist, though these companies he lambasts tend to be predictably greedy these days and deserve every jab. Fight the good fight Jim.

That "Live Service" warning sign is brilliant: subtle but unsettling.

We're trending in to a world where indie games will be the only "games" left.

Unlike the road to Hell, the road to Live Services is most certainly never paved with good intentions.

There is a 'perfect game' for me. It's the one that you only buy once, and can get everything available in the game, just by playing the damn thing.

I played over 900 hours of the original Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii, a majority of them spent online. Now with the online service disconnected, all that remains is a haunting screen that says “Online service is over. Thanks for playing!”. There were some monsters you could only experience connected online, and to think anyone who picks it up now won’t be able to see them is... strange. You’d think the internet would make things immortal, but the truth is, digital media only lasts as long as the mechines that run it. I don’t like the idea of that sort of ephemeral nature accelerating in gaming. Like what if I only have a year to beat a game before it’s gone forever? That’d suck.

I like how Dynasty Warriors 9 has taken the place of Aliens: Colonial Marines in the trash can next to the porta-potty.

Another fact to add on top of your stellar points, Jim: This recent trend of "live service" titles also takes away one other important aspect of video games, and arguable any other media: lasting power. I can plug in my SNES and play Link to the Past, or my Dreamcast and pop in the Grandia II disc, but there's no legacy for these titles far off into the future. Eventually the player bases die down, the company decides it's not worth keeping the servers around, and it's lights out. More and more games are going down this route too. You think you'll be able to play the original Destiny 5 years from now? I guarantee you it'll shut down, with no patches to play it single player or P2P with friends, and that's it. Maybe someone 10 years from now will be looking into the series and going, "Hey! Wouldn't it be neat to play the game that started it all?", buy it for $0.25 at a local GameStop and realize they can't do anything with it. And sure, there's videos, reviews for if you want to watch it in action, but playing it? You'd better hope there's a fan made server, and that's not always a sure thing. Publishers are selling the integrity of their long running franchises to turn the fastest dollars they can, and it's only going to hurt them more in the long run while a company like Nintendo or indie devs push their GAMES first, and their services second.

The biggest issue with this whole "games as prolonged services" idea is that it falls prey to one of the biggest issues in gaming: aging. When a game is fresh and new, it's looked at more favorably. However, it can only continue to be seen as such as it ages if the game holds up over time. This still applies to games which are continually updated; World of Warcraft, for example, is so damn old that they've had to completely update every single model in the game, and it was long overdue, and that's saying nothing of the continually-outdated older content which is still in the game and frankly required for leveling a character. The issue with Ubisoft is that they just do not give a shit about quality, aside from expense/return maximization. And so once their game stops being relevant, once it falls out of favor, people will stop playing it, and Ubisoft likely won't have a different game lined up to compensate for that.

"So what if I spent $1000 on Microtransactions. It's my choice. It was WORTH IT. *Servers turned off* "FFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-"

Sadly. It’s not just the individual games life service that’s an issue. Remember when PSN got hacked and was offline for upwards of 2 months? All those live services games were fucked. Great video Jim.

So basically, just like how blizzard made bank on the mmo market and everyone copied them only to fail and Activision banked on the fps market and everyone copied and failed.. Now Activision\blizzard made bank on the service model... And everyone is about to copy that and fail yet again.

Imagine going to an art museum that only had 3 or 4 paintings, but to keep you coming back, said paintings were constantly being added to from an unfinished state, and once the canvas was filled, the painting was left up for a week before being taken down and chopped into pieces, with a fresh canvas put up with minimal paint added to it and then added on to with a mixture of new paint and simply gluing pieces of the old painting back onto the new painting. That's what this system is.

You know what, I still have a backlog of great previous gen games to play and finish. I think I can wait out this live service phase.

"That circle is a spiral." damn.

Honestly this is why a lot of games I play has gradually shifted to more obscure Japanese titles and indie games. Those groups are still willing to create new and interesting games that have far fewer examples of predatory practices.

I don't know what you call that glitter slap, but you should totally call it "Seeing Sters"

I can say 1 thing about the “perfect” game. It is not a live service.

Now i know what face Jim makes when he says "Triple A"

I'm glad Warframe jumped onto this service market before all the hyper greedy and uncreative publishers got to it first. I hope the AAA publishers drown in the sea of mediocre garbage that they will create.

I said it before, but I shall repeat myself: what law are they trying to dodge by re-branding games as "Live Services"?

All very important Jim, but what about the droid attack on the wookies? Its a system we cannot afford to lose. Why aren't you talking about that?

It's funny to me how at first when I discovered this channel I thought that the "Thank god for ME" was extremely arrogant but now I actually feel like thanking God for Jim fucking Sterling, son, because there's so much shit in the game industry and he's our best chance at fighting it.

I've got a backlog that will last me years. I will not be participating.

Jim is literally a fortune teller for video game controversies

Live services work well, look at destiny 2 and how it captivated people for an entire 4 months before 90% of its player base decided to go play something else. It lasted the entire lifespan of a dragonfly.

Also relevant to this 'Live Services' topic. Publishers under the umbrella of the ESA are now fighting against museums/historical societies based on games and tech because gaming museums want to showcase games with histoical significance in some sort of playable format to demonstrate said games in action. The ESA is fighting this because they don't want museums to make money off of the games that publishers abandoned. Apparently not realizing that having a game preserved for historical significance is a pretty high honor, and if we wish to hold games as art, well, there you fucking go. Recognition you're shfting simply because it doesn't make you money. The times we live in.

6:20 Whoa, that slide! Increased profit means higher development time, which means increased profit, which means higher development time, which means increased profit?! Hot damn, I gotta invest!

They say "games" are a thing of the past, yet they insist on calling their consumers players still. I don't see how one can play a "service".

As someone who works 40+ hour weeks, I only have time for games I can pick up and play for a bit. With all these “””live services””” I don’t understand how people are going to have the time. Gaming is a hobby and a pastime for me, not something I want to be dragged back to day after day when I have a life as well.

"We will be turning the servers off next month". " but I am still busy with it, what about all the stuff I bought with real Money". "*shrug"

I feel "games as a service" could work if companies didn't treat it as their primary money maker. In my mind, Having a service game under your company's belt should allow you to be more experimental with anything else you want to make, since if it bombs you'll have the GAS money(now there's a term) to absorb the sunk cost. There are definitely the points of "there are game companies that are doing fine without a GAS" and the one Jim brought up of "only so many lifetime games can be successful at one time", but I think if a publisher manages to get a successful GAS, they could be routing the spare dosh into their other studios and saying "Show us something new." Sadly, as Jim also mentioned, these companies seem too shortsighted and greedy to think of this.

The thing with online-only games is that once servers are inevitably shut down, unless there is a ridiculously dedicated and loving following, the game eventually becomes lost media. Gone forever.

This is EXACTLY what Extra Credits got wrong. They argued life services were a result of rising dev costs, while it's actually the other way around. Publishers start at the life services and build the entire game around them, resulting in a giant, expensive game meant to last for months if not years. They justify these prices by telling themselves all the money will be made back through life services. The result is fewer games are being made, and more money is spend per game. This model will fail! There is only so much time a gamer has and if every game is fighting for it we will see 3 failures for every success

A spiral you say? Well look at Ubisoft's logo.

“Dead MMOs” rolls off the tongue really well. It’s almost as fun of a word to say as “Lesbians.” Which is odd because Lesbians make the world a better place while Dead MMOs reminds me of my dead childhood. rip lego universe ;_;

A little more than a year later and the term "Live Service" is already tarnished beyond redemption

One note on login rewards in Warframe - they don't reset at any point, so you don't have to log in EVERY day, whereas in some shitty fee 2 pay games they will reset if you log in even a second too late and you forfeit any useful rewards. Also let's face it, -75% on platinum is really neat to get.

*"They're jobs! Except these are jobs where you're the one paying [the company] to do the work."* - The perfect description of games with a deliberately engineered excessive "grind", designed to manipulate frustration in order to drive recurrent transaction (let's face it, there's nothing "micro" about them anymore except for maybe the penis size of the corporate triple aaaaay publishers putting them in our games) sales, Jim. Bloody perfect! How laughably & yet tragically similar the playing (and paying) defenders of some of these games and their corporate masters resemble ant/bee colonies...or cattle being raised & fattened just enough to be led to the slaughter house. "Welcome to the Rockstar farm ladies, gentlemen, children of suspiciously high pitch voices...Welcome! (Disclaimer: Entry fee of $60 US dollars. Entry fee is not a guarantee of the complete experience. Some experiences may vary. Accessories sold separately. Battery is what you'll feel has been done to you after we've got you firmly by the Shark Cards.)"

gaming is a hobby and to you play games to have fun! DO NOT LET GAMES PLAY YOU, YOU PLAY THEM!

I definitely don't have enough time for an MMO let alone a "live service" game that requires boring grinding (not unlike an MMO). I have better things to do now I am an "adult". Ahhh what it was like to have enough free time to play WoW.

metal gear survive survive wasnt released, it escaped

So, they are sort of making games with an expiration date now? With live services... The game dies after a while. At least old games can last forever... Even totally forgotten bad old games still hold a place around the web.

I think this just reinforces #SavePlayer1 - all those multiplayer-only games in 10 years? Gone.

I work for a PPC agency that does a lot of work with gambling companies (bookies & casinos) and it is shocking how much of the terminology for the video game industry is identical

Am I weird for wanting finished, finite games, that I can buy and complete, and then... DONE?!? I'm only in my thirties, I can't be too old for this age already... And I HATE gambling.

AAA Industry: We're offering you lies so you can serve us... I mean live services.

And for the price of unlocking all three save slots in Metal Gear Sickening, you could have bought a Hat In Time instead.

The only 'craze' that publishers chased after that probably had any positive effect on the industry was the 3D platformer craze in the later 90s. A new genre was created, and everyone wanted to give their own spin on it, leading to a lot of variants of just a single core concept. Much different from the mascot platformer craze before it. But that was cashing in for the sake of art. This is cashing in for the sake of cashing in.

The sad thing is that there are actually people unironically defending the $10 save slots. "Hurr, it's optional! Why do you need more than one save anyway?" they say, as spittle dribbles from their slack-jawed mouths.

I've grown to despise the industry. it is very difficult to feel at all passionate about anything in gaming anymore.

I honestly can't think of a videogame I've enjoyed that I want to become a live service.

If they see game as a past then they're no longer game publisher too.

If I was a parent I'd be seriously fucking concerned about how my child is being trained into being a whale in the future. When I was young my parents could just think of games like movies, a finite product, and not have to worry about it being a mechanism to addict & extract further money from the player

Very good point there. What happens when you've spent $1000 on loot boxes for a game that inevitably dies and is no longer supported? I guess you can say even physical things you buy can break eventually and that value is lost, but it still feels like a waste when it's just pixels that were there one moment and gone in the next.

4 years in and countless live service are dropping support like flies.

The consistency of this show is amazing. Nailed it again, Jim

Damn jim. Such a brilliant analysis. I never really thought about it but as a gamer that works 55hrs a week, I've FELT every point you made

Hell, Ross Scott over at Accursed Farms (the Freeman's Mind guy) has been talking about always online games being screwed for years. He saw all this coming, and is saddened. Because when a publisher decides that their always online game - their "Live Service" - has made all the money it'll make for them, they have every incentive to shut the servers down. Which, for a game that _relies_ on a central server to keep running, means that the game just dies. Can't play it anymore. Doesn't matter if you get nostalgic for the title five, ten years down the line, and still have it installed. The servers are down, which means the game is dead. If for whatever weird reason you happened to like Metal Gear Survive, I hope you get all the enjoyment out of it you can _now_ , because you can bet your ass it won't still be playable five years from now. And all that money you sunk into it - including for its additional save slots - will be wasted. At least in the old days, when you bought a game, you owned a fucking game.

Monster Hunter World is my live game of choice since the team running it aren't charging me more to hunt more monsters down the line. Crazy huh?

1:45 I thought he was gonna say the circle has no entry or exit point. Because that's how circles work - everything loops together and goes round and round with anything caught inside growing more and more stagnant.

I'll take as much of _STERDUST_ and his attitude as I can get, thank you very much ;).

I agree. I've been telling people the same thing for a while now. AAA is flying high....for now, but, as you noted Jim, its not a sustainable system. It looks like a speculation bubble in that the market is artificially inflated for the sake of short term profits. These things ALL burst eventually.

The Jimquisition has become so exhausting to even watch, but we totally need you now more than ever Jim. Thanks for not being exhausted as me, Jim. You keep fighting the good fight where others can't.

Seeing you crack the bottle over that dude's head was amazing. The kid screaming "OHHH!!!!" makes it

Games are not and should never be a service

*Glitterslap*

A live service that goes offline becomes a dead service.

Here from the future, a bunch of services have been recently announced to shut down... thank God for Jim Sterling.

Wow, the music game craze! I remember that!! I feel so old now. Anyone else remember those ancient times?

People are gonna get sick of the grind and this model eventually. And thats when tehy will cry and their goddamn stocks are gonan crash to the pits of hell where they came from.

Love how much fun you are having with Sterdust Jim! Back in the day I would've loved to play the same role but with Undertaker, blowing soot into a persons eyes so he can get behind and spin around for a Tombstone Piledriver

It's so pleasant going back and watching these older videos. I know the "Cassandra of Video Games" thing is used cheekily -- but *YE GODS* the actual, prophetic levels of accuracy.

The legend of vengeful mosquito.

The craze for live services actually reminds me way more of 2012/13 where so many publishers declared that they only want to make F2P games now. EA and Crytek especially went all the way on this F2P train. 5 years after that failure, they all try it again without the "free" part.

So, I'm guessing the Oracle of Delphi has inhabited Jim Sterling.

Jim keep getting more fitted with each episode. You go Jim, you go.

When Jim calls it you know it's true ;) A grim-looking future indeed. Good thing indie devs are not giving up.

In my opinion, nothing will ever beat getting a game, putting it into the machine and just playing without any monetization or 20gb patches. Call me old fashioned.

Props to the Pinstripe shoutout! Great KZfaq voice cast too. I wished you were in it!

Here's a real eye opener: Sooner or later we will see a "live service" aimed directly a children. Which is something even I, a man with a genuine hatred of kids, find both disturbing and predatory. Although I must say that I am looking forward to seeing the infamous "think of the children!"-argument being used by gamers for once, and not just by people who've manged to convince themselves that video games are the main reason violence exists in the world. It'll be a refreshing change of pace.

This reinforces my MO of playing old as hell games and indies.

I don't care if EA, Ubisoft, Activision and their AAA ilk move to live services. Their games haven't been for me for years. Thankfully, there's plenty of other devs out there that do make games that are for me. Make a good game, sell it at a fair price and you'll have me as a customer in the future. That is lifetime value, too. Well, until my lifetime expires, I guess.

Love all of your videos and opinions, Jim. So much so that I have started donating to your Patreon :D Keep up the awesomeness.

A Jimquisition plus a coffee equals my perfect morning. Thank you very much for yet another enjoyable video

Live service? More like Dead service, cause it'll die out really quickly.

why are there so many people defending metal gear survive on steam? are there really that many people who are still into these babysitting simulators?

Very well put together Jim.

Jim. You are fraking me out with the reading my mind and saying it word for word thing. So many Jimquisitions follow conversations I have the week prior.

The funniest part of live services combined with digital downloads is they could put the end to publishers. After all the point of a publisher is to promote your product when you release it. To build up hype and get awareness out there in addition to manufacturing the product for retail. Well digital distribution removes the production aspect of publishers and soon with live services a company might only release one game a year or less. Who needs a publisher if your not making new games?

Jim always makes me thing of a benevolent Eggman. He may want to rule over us all, but it would be a nice rule with more wrestling and less AAA industry bollocks

Oh Jim. This is all reminding me of the tragedy of City of Heroes. Fantastic game to bring up during this time I think.

I don't often comment on videos, but it needs to be said: THANK GOD FOR YOU! This is probly one of the best videos on this channel, great train of though and well-crafted arguments. I wish more "journalists" in the game industry would lean toward this kind of reporting. Bravo