News - Live Service Games Are Out Of Control (warzone 2)
But when you're not gaming every day when you're not really living in that environment, it feels impossible to access things that you want because you log in and there's a giant grind wall you log in and everybody else already has the stuff, or you wanted to see the event but you missed it, or you know last week was, we'll just pick a random example, like Walking Dead in Call of Duty or something, and you're like, yeah.
I'd really like to sign in and check out the Rick and Michonne event, and maybe life happens and you're just four days later you log in and another. A live update has rolled out that's pumping homelanders, or some other celebrity, or something like that, and it's very hard to keep up with because it's all coming out very, very fast, and it makes me feel like I'm missing out on a lot of content even though I'm still active enough in the game to retain gameplay competency.
I'm not active enough to really experience that much of it, even if it's content that doesn't change the base gameplay that much. I still feel like I'm missing out, and I think this is another Boomer complaint. Years ago, when battle passes first came out. I heard a ton of older gamers talk about how frustrating it was to have to pay to get unlocks or pay to get the p, and then you had to grind and you had to play all the time, and they didn't have time to play all the time, and I didn't agree.
Obviously, I had a different experience, and experiencing that sort of feeling of falling behind has changed my perspective. But I do believe, and if we're mostly talking about Fortnite here, live service games have evolved. Since the early days of Fortnite, those early Fortnite battle passes, those early Call of Duty battle passes—those really rudimentary, once-a-month upgrade kind of things are now comically slow and behind.
Big games put out new stuff almost every single week, sometimes twice a week, huge updates every month, if not every, and then maybe even bigger ones every quarter. New maps are coming out, and new stuff just happens every time I log on. There's dozens and dozens of new things going on, and it feels like it's accelerated, at least 10 times over what it was five or six years ago.
On top of that, console and PC games are feeling increasingly like mobile games. One of the number one reasons I don't play many mobile games is that when I log in, every mobile game has tons and tons of popups for me to click X to scroll through because it wants me to buy things and sign up for this pass and that pass and this special deal and those points and these energies.
But it's kind of the same when I log into my console games or my PC games. Call of Duty is definitely like that; there's tons of new content we have to unlock, and we have to do this daily challenge. Hey, check out this new operator skin. The battle pass has some stuff going on; it's a nonlinear battle pass now and keeps getting more and more.
And I will say that for games that are PVE, like we'll talk about Hell Diverse or Deep Rock Galactic and stuff like that, having rapid updates to change the enemies that you fight is very good. It's very important because it helps prevent things from getting stale, so I'm here for that, but it doesn't have to be that way for every single game.
And what happens to me is that after a while of playing. I just don't quite have the emotional energy to feel as excited about new things, and again, when things are going well and I'm playing every day. I think the proper medical word is that I'm getting desensitized. To it just doesn't feel quite like burning out on gaming because I still love the game I still two game and the game and the desire to play that game any game cod game whatever game I love gaming I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff but I feel like I'm burning out on the content itself because it's kind of like when you're a kid and you get into something I'm going to say maybe a pre-teen here you're really into a comic book you found, an art series a fandom a Harry Potter a Twilight a something and you're 12 years old and you just dive head first into this is your identity this is who you are you read every update you study the lore you experience the thing da you interact with the community you're very busy.
What I warn people about in terms of social media algorithms like Tik Tok and Instagram Reals and things like that is that those companies understand very well that if the information isn't novel enough or if it doesn't hit you in a certain emotional way, you will lose interest. Video games don't have quite the infinite pool of content to pull from to get those dopamine pumps because they have to be developed so in a lot of cases it doesn't work quite right it kind of has the opposite effect and makes you not excited about things so, that's just that's just me that's how I've been feeling about games lately you can tell I'm being a salty Boomer I just want to log on and have a lot of my stuff ready to play I don't want to have to grind 40 hours to get a gun or something like that and that's kind of it for today's article Boomer complaints about live service games, and again they're not all bad there are definite upsides to having live service games that we did not cover in this article because this one was more of a complaint article we did talk a little bit about PVE and Hell divers and Destiny and why those need updates I just wish.
Every single game didn't have to be live. I wish that every new game didn't see itself as a live-service game, and I wish there were more straightforward ones. Simple games that you either own or log on, and most, if not all, of the stuff is available for you to play that you can just get on and play without grinding because, right now, to me, gaming is starting to feel like I have to pay an annual subscription to access a service, and then I have to pay an annual subscription in that service to access another service, and then I have to play like it's a job and work to unlock and grind.
Things are inside that double layer of service that I'm paying for. And then it can all be taken away by a server error, so it's a little bit demotivating, and that's just kind of how I feel about it. I hope that you learned something useful.
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