The business these days is that keeping people online provides value to other players who are considering being online. A big online population means new players have reasons to jump in and play. How do they make sure there’s a large population? They create psychological hooks to make sure you keep coming back, rather than making a multiplayer game that’s satisfying, that you could play with friends whenever you wanted with small group sizes and your own servers. Because the business is to monetize that pool of players over and over again rather than to keep making new experiences via new games every couple of years.

It is a bad deal. I got into a game called Fantasy Strike. It’s a fighting game that boils the genre down to basics and gets you right into the fun. I loved it. It didn’t sell a ton of copies. So they updated it to be free-to-play; everything gameplay-related in the game was free (with an asterisk…more on that later) and they monetized it with a bunch of the live service trappings and nonsense that bothered you enough to make this post. Limited time purchases for cosmetics, subscriptions, etc. The thing that made me stop playing it was that they added a replay viewer where, much like in Street Fighter 5 and 6, you can just watch anyone else’s replays, including your own, but that replay viewer was locked behind a subscription fee. You know, the feature that people use to get better at the game and see what they did wrong. Monthly subscription. It’s a horrendous deal and made me put the game down. You don’t get to charge me a recurring fee for something that lives on my own hard drive and gets calculated by my own computer. Likewise, these live service games are all things that could be run without their servers, with private servers or LAN, but they want you to keep seeing these opportunities to buy these ephemeral cosmetics where both they and the game itself are designed to self-destruct once the game stops making money.