The new worst gaming trend: killing our favorite games to replace them with sequels
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-new-worst-gaming-trend-killing-our-favorite-games-to-replace-them-with-sequels/
The biggest games of the last decade are being wiped off the internet for no good reason.
You cannot be allowed to be content with what you already have and like. You need to buy more, buy now, buy new!!!
Consume! Buy our game as a service so we can rake you over more hot coals as we bastardized your nostalgia for profits.
ow2 is a free alpha release, and sc2 is over 10 years old and hasn't received any major content in at least 4 years...
plus sc2 co-op commanders had a bundle deal right before development got dropped for the game, but now, years later, blizzard expects you to pay a full 15$ per commander to unlock!
and obviously there's no way to unlock them through gameplay...
so one of the two is straight up worse than the one it replaced, and the other is stupidly expensive given how ancient it is.
great examples, really.
i mean, it's not a sequel in the cs2 case, it the sane game, the mechanics, just newer engine, it's not perfect but it's just valve being slow lol
For games with high skill ceilings and delicate mechanics, a new engine is a new game. A new engine can rarely capture the overall feel of the old engine.
It’s missing many many features that csgo already had and the physics engine seems deeply flawed. It’s a massive regression in most regards
Fucking surf man. I have so much nostalgia for CSS it's unreal. Surf, rat, sncoutknives, deathrun, jail, 24/7 single map 32 player frag fest servers. One of the most underrated GOAT games imo. I know the competitive community shunned it but as a 13 yo kid that game shaped me into a PC gamer for life.
You can connect to some servers direct through ip but the server browser is nonfunctional and valve has not released the tools needed for people to port servers over
You can launch csgo still by checking it in the beta options for cs2. Still has community servers
Honestly, I have trouble seeing these "sequels" as new games. I mean Overwatch 2 was mostly a heavy balance patch, graphical patch, and pivot to F2P.
These are just large updates where they incremented a number in the name. With that in mind, this isn't a "trend", it's been going on for as long as these service-style games have existed. Fortnite's pivot from Save the World into Battle Royale, for example. Or going further back: Remember Star Wars Galaxies?
Yes, these mega-updates are often regressions... again, that's not news. The only thing "new" is realizing "oh, we should increment the number to get some hype going".
Well, for CS there are other versions still on Steam still with active communities. The issue with CS2/CSGO is skins. That's the reason they had to kill CSGO. They couldn't have skins carry over, be tradable, have the new features skins can make use of, and be able to be earned in the old version and new.
They didn't really "kill" CSGO, though. You can still play it. Just no matchmaking.
Asking people to give up their skins in CSGO and go to a new game was never going to happen. Instead they made a patch and generated hype for the game as a new name, while supporting Source 1 servers. To think that if they didn't do a name change, people wouldn't be whining so much.
Or going further back: Remember Star Wars Galaxies?
The game that was shut down less than a week before Star Wars The Old Republic released? You're not wrong about the other stuff, but this one definitely wasn't just a big patch.
No, I'm referring to the New Game Enhancements update that completely reworked SWG to play more like WoW. That was a much larger gameplay change than Overwatch 2 or CS 2.
Man... I miss SWG sometimes.
My Steam avatar is still to the day my SWG character.
It's the only MMORPG I ever paid a monthly subscription to play.
I mean, EA started doing this as soon as they thought they could get away with it in the franchises that are the most obvious fit: sports games. Madden, NBA 2kX, PGA whatever...
At first, gamers would just feel left behind because there was a new title out to match the new season's roster of teams and players. No one batted an eye because that echoes how live sports keep up annual appeal. But over time, the publisher started taking the servers offline for the older sports games, so if you wanted to compete then the only option was to play a newer title.
I'm not saying that's inherently evil, and not to make a slippery slope argument, but it's not really hard to see how the lure of steady recurring revenue would drive the industry to do the same for as many franchises as possible. And here we are today where IIRC you can't play titles like Diablo IV offline even as a single player.
IMO as gamers, we need to collectively draw a line in the sand. But we're such a diverse group with different tastes and expectations, so I don't really see that happening.
Speaking from experience with open source, there's literally no way in hell the average consumer is going to make even minimal effort in order to improve anything at all, even if you manage to make them understand the problem. Ask any idiot still on Twitter.
But over time, the publisher started taking the servers offline for the older sports games, so if you wanted to compete then the only option was to play a newer title.
I’m not saying that’s inherently evil
As someone who remembers when games used to ship with the server code so you could host your own multiplayer, I am saying it's inherently evil!
Well damn, I remember that too and it's a good point. You changed my mind, shutting down the only servers is shitty and evil and game companies should go back to allowing community servers.
You wouldn't subscribe to a service like Netflix if they required you to pay an additional fee to unlock each piece of content, nor would you pay money for a Netflix app that's useless without a subscription, but that's essentially what you're doing when you "buy" a live service game. Don't do that! Either pay once for a game that's fully playable offline, or pay monthly for a subscription to a live service game where the software to access it is free.
The publishers are being greedy assholes, but they couldn't do it if people didn't pay for the privilege of being scammed.
Not a bad tipp for individuals. Won’t solve the problem though. The few individuals who actually go through with this dont make a dent while children and their parents will gobble up this stuff because marketing. We need policy for shit like this.
You're not wrong, but if you want to use policy to regulate business models that exploit dumb consumer choices, there are way bigger fish to fry than videogames.
I know. It is a pattern. It’s roughly summarized under anti trust. You know, the stuff that has been dismantled in the US over the past couple of years.
Same goes for europe but not as brutal. When these laws were made, there were no insanely fast growing international conglomerates with a product that changes shape like a chameleon. No wonder they didn’t keep up but now we‘ve got homework. We gotta push politicians to revise laws and change the status quo.
We need to balance the scales so consumers get the info they need (instead of constantly changing terms and conditions, 10+ pages long), the power to actually change stuff (be able to sue if apple does not let you mass extract your fkin passwords if you dont own a mac) and keep new transgressions from happening by putting long jail terms on anti competitive behavior.
I have mixed opinions on whether regulation is needed. Maybe just more transparency in marketing would be enough, and I'd be happy to see that, but an outright ban on the business model seems heavy handed to me, given that it's a problem individuals can simply choose not to participate in if they're informed of the risks.
I wonder how many people would buy a game where the piece tag says something like this:
$60 + $10/month. Not playable without a subscription.*
And then in the fine print:
*The publisher may discontinue all subscriptions at any time after 1/1/2025. If that happens, it will no longer be possible to play the game.
It’s a very good idea. But I‘m sorry to inform you that this is regulation. It is a very nuanced piece though. Much better than banning it outright, at least to try first.
GaaS really helped me slim down my game purchases to just one or two a year with no online play.
How is this a trend? It happened with two games and you can still play one of them (CSGO).
EDIT: it happened with 4-ish games, actually, and the Blizzard games are the only ones we cannot play anymore.
Arguably I think it's happened to a few more than that, Warcraft 3 comes to mind in the Battle.net launcher.
How do you mean you can still play CSGO? There are no official servers and even installing and launching it is not straight forward at all? I'd akin that to saying you can still play Vanilla WoW and point to private servers, which is not what anyone means.
You can absolutely play CSGO and it only takes a few clicks from the CS2 entry in steam. You still have community servers, which were always a big thing in CS.
You cannot play Overwatch 1 or old Warcraft 3 at all, doesn't matter how many clicks you try.
Eh? I'm pretty sure Warcraft 3 works just fine if I put the disc in my PC. Pretty sure I can LAN all night with my friends.
Eh. If you count CSGO when there are no official servers I think you need to count WC3 unofficial servers as well. There are workarounds to playing old WC3 online, just not through battle.net.
Steam still connects you to custom servers, and Valve still allows you to download the server hosting software. The part that went offline- rather, moved to CS2, was the matchmaking client.
The workarounds to WC3 require you to leave Blizzard designed software to third party support. I don't recall WC3 ever having matchmaking, but the server browser and hosted game list were taken completely.
So, not for lack of trying on Blizzard's part.
The old Warcraft 3 is a stretch.
I don't expect a game from 2002 to still have a official fully working multiplayer component.
CS:GO is over a decade old and certainly isn't "killed", does the author just not want new games to be released ever? I feel like everything posted nowadays is ragebait.
I mean CSGO turned into CS2 in my steam library.
So CSGO effectively doesn't exist anymore. I say 'killed' is accurate
You can still open csgo by selecting it from the beta tab on CS2. Can still join community servers on there through to the end of the year iirc
Doubt valve will have ironed out this forced open beta by then though
They won't shut down the game at the end of the year. They just said they won't be maintaining it / ensuring compatibility
It was a free update/upgrade for CS:GO. That's like saying v2.0 killed v1.9.
Also, major upgrades for free ten years after release is frankly unheard of. This isn't a "trend"
I mean ... Pikachu face? :)
So people switch to service based solutions for movies, games, music, ... where they own literally nothing because the actual owner is the corporation which sort of 'rent it' to them. And then they're surprised that provided stuff gets demolished by 'landlord' because it doesn't bring enough money to the landlord
Yeah it's totally our choice, it's just that simple. /s
I remember when I bought half life 2. A hard copy in a store. Then, suddenly, to play it I was required to use some thing called steam. According to you, by playing that game, which I bought normally, I brought this on myself. According to reality I was just trying to play a game. For years I hated and resisted steam and all that did was make playing games harder. I finally gave in and life is honestly much easier because of it. I'm still bitter about being strong armed and the potential for steam to fuck us all over, but I never really had a choice if I wanted to play certain PC games, namely half life 2.
Oh so cutting this new variant upon the preschool's "I'm rubber you're glue."
Alas, I am slain.
You're just doing the 'name fallacies at random and act superior' thing though you hardly have any high ground to be standing on
Hey, I have an idea let’s cancel the old game and market in the new game which is exactly the same as the old game and they have no choice because we deleted old fame.
I mean all they have to do is add a 2/2/2 mode using the weaker open-queue tanks into the Arcade to say "look we've got OW1 as an arcade mode!"
In what way? 6v6? Generous loot? Immobile Orisa and Bastion? Uglier graphics?
That's basically the trick of this - these aren't really sequels, they're just large updates being marketed as sequels. In the case of OW2, the biggest loss is how prohibitively expensive the new monetization scheme is.
- 6v6? Yes please.
- Generous loot? Yes please.
- Immobile Orisa and Bastion? I was an Orisa main and a Bastion main before that. I (mostly) miss the old meta. Yes please.
- Uglier graphics? If the graphics must suffer for the game to be fun again, then so be it.
If the game was reverted, it would feel like a breath of fresh air, they fucked it on all fronts.
I strongly recommend against downloading a pirated version of spacewar as the original was shareware and the source code for multiple versions is available on github. For those purists https://archive.org/details/SPACEWAR_1020
I don't think we're talking about the same Spacewar. The Spacewar I'm talking about is "used" by pirated games only to the extent that they make steam think the pirated game is spacewar, unlocking access to the steamworks API, including multiplayer support.