Games

I don't have a problem with a model where I pay more money and get more content. And I do think that there are certain things that can only really be done with live service that some people will really enjoy -- I don't think that live service shouldn't exist. But I generally prefer the DLC model to the live service model.

• Live service games probably won't be playable after some point. That sucks if you get invested in them...and live service games do aim at people who are really invested in playing them.

• I have increasingly shifted away from multiplayer games over the years. Yeah, there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans make for a sophisticated alternative to AI. But they bring a lot of baggage. Humans mean griefing. Humans mean needing to have their own incentives taken care of -- like, they want to win a certain percentage of the time, aren't just there to amuse other humans. Most real-time multiplayer games aren't pausable, which especially is a pain for people with kids, who may need to deal with random-kid-induced-emergencies at unexpected times. Humans optimize to win in competitive games, and what they do to win might not be fun for other players. Humans may not want to stay in character ("xXxPussySlayer69xXx"), which isn't fantastic for immersion -- and even in roleplay-enforced environments, that places load on other players. Multiplayer games generally require always-online Internet connectivity, and service disruption -- even an increase in latency, for real-time games -- can be really irritating. Humans cheat, and in a multiplayer game, cheating can impact the experience of other players, so that either means dealing with cheating or with anti-cheat stuff that creates its own host of irritations (especially on Linux, as it's often low-level and one of the major remaining sources of compatibility issues).

• If there are server problems, you can't play.

• My one foray where I was willing to play a live service game was Fallout 76; Fallout 5 wasn't coming out any time soon, and it was the closest thing that was going to be an option. One major drawback for me was the requirements of making grindable (i.e. inexpensive to develop relative to amount of playtime) multiplayer gameplay was also immersion-breaking -- instead of running around in a world where I can lose myself, I'm being notified that random player has initiated an event, which kind of breaks the suspension of disbelief. It also places constraints on the plot. In prior entrants in the Fallout series, you could significantly change the world, and doing so was a signature of the series. In Fallout 76, you've got a shared world, so that's pretty hard to do, other than in some limited, instanced ways. Not an issue for every type of game out there, but was annoying for that game. Elite: Dangerous has an offline mode that pretends to be faux-online -- again, the game design constraints from being multiplayer kind of limit my immersion.

They do provide a way to do DRM -- if part of the game that you need to play lives on the publisher's servers, then absent reimplementing it, pirates can't play it. And I get that that's appealing for a publisher. But it just comes with a mess of disadvantages.