Rambling: The stink with GaaS - my experiences with live service games as a long-time player
While I don’t think I consider myself a veteran gamer playing World of Warcraft in the 2000’s, I think I have enough substantial experience with online games that I have a few opinions on them. In this rambling, I'm going to explore them.
My Gamer Resume
Roblox was my first, sometime in 2008-2009. I have very fond memories of playing various obbies with my brother or taking part of lame RP servers with other kids my age. I didn’t care for the supposed “rivalry” it had with Minecraft it eventually had - they were funny virtual Lego games, and god damn if little Bee didn’t love their ass some Legos (I consider Roblox more as an Engine as a Service than a GaaS as it’s more dependent on the individual games you play than Roblox as an overarching game itself. However, it does serve as a vehicle for the Games as a Service hosted on its platform. I digress though).
Between then and 2013, There were a few other games I played, but generally most of my online escapades were limited to playing on Minecraft servers (note: while all live service games are online, not all games and games with online functions are live service games) I remember being in a sizeable friend group at the time, and we’d hop from server to server just checking stuff out and having a good time. We’d also just play games together in general, in any games that could let you - DotA and Team Fortress 2 were big ones, though none of us were every really good at them (I literally only played DotA to dress up the characters, lmao). Some stuck to Wildstar - an MMO claiming to be the next WoW and inevitably fizzled out into obscurity due to horrible mismanagement - and ESO, which in 2014 was a total trainwreck that so-called Elder Scrolls Purists memed the fuck out of before cranking hog to Dagoth Ur x Nerevar fanfiction written in Finnish riddles. At some point I ended up settling on playing WARFRAME.
WARFRAME had the (dis)honor of playing a pivotal role as The Game (trademarked) in my teenage years. I played that game like it was my religion, even though I didn’t really care much about shooter games. And I didn’t need to - with tons of different weapons to choose from, you could play the game however you wanted*!
*Within the realm of the meta, of course, because unless you’re playing with your specific friend group in its entirety, you’re considered a liability. This is especially the case in Destiny as well (arguably significantly more than WARFRAME), which I'll touch on later. Cue the Dan Olson video on Why it's Rude to Such at World of Warcraft. Not sure how it is now, but back in my day - people were often less than thrilled to have my melee Saryn over a Sporyn in their squad.)
For nine years, I’d commit myself to practically no-lifeing two live service games - WARFRAME from 2014 until ~2018, and Destiny 2 from 2019 up until March of this year. In those years I either bore witness to or was a part of numerous eras in those games’ histories, for better or for worse. I exchanged friends and names throughout those times, and came out of it with a handful of close friends and my girlfriend of many years. I dabbled with some others - Deep Rock Galactic and Dauntless to name a couple - and there’s other notable ones including FFXIV and ESO that ought to be mentioned in the case of live service games… but this is my opinion piece, and I want to primarily focus on Warframe and Destiny as it's what I’m most familiar with. I will also put in input from my girlfriend where applicable, as while I no longer play live service games, she still plays both.
Live service games - the technical term for us IT folk being “games as a service” or GaaS, a brief addition to the various cloud-based aaS services you may have read about in your studies about AWS or cloud-based computing or something - are always-online games that receive periodic content updates by its developer with the intent of keeping the game fresh. The intent is to ensure that the game always has new content whenever you come on to play (typically supported by a battle pass of some kind). This content loop fosters a sense of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) - after all, much of the content in typical live service implementations are permanently gone once its corresponding season ends. Many GaaS use in-game cosmetics as a way of establishing a class system of has and has-nots within its playerbase to encourage players to spend money on them - the gamer form of keeping up with the Joneses.
WARFRAME
WARFRAME is practically a mobile game on desktop - you can either buy Warframes, weapons, cosmetics, and other things outright, or you can spend ages grinding for a chance for the blueprints for pieces of your Warframe/weapon/what have you to drop, grind for the parts needed, and wait three whole days for your murder puppet to bake in the space oven. However, WARFRAME benefits from an in-game trade economy where you can trade items for the paid currency Platinum, meaning you could get everything and not pay a dime*!
*…if you play the game like its a full-time job, or are extremely lucky with the rabbit hole that is Rivens, which I will not get into here. Just know that on its release, it became a pretty huge moneymaker.
However, because of the existence of the in-game economy, you can get far with the power of "networking" - if you’re part of a clan that’s very invested in the game, or happen to know some folks who make big cash from the trade market, you can just get shit for free by being nice and just running Sorties or whatever with them.
Giving credit where it’s due - WARFRAME over the years has stuck to just the timegating and cosmetics as its main source of moneymaking - while the meta has had its ups and downs, the core content of the game from its beginning to its endgame is entirely free. Even the battle pass system it introduced is entirely free of charge. It’s just that the means to get to that content isn’t, unless you put in the time for the grind.
According to my girlfriend - it’s gotten better on the P2W side. Warframe/weapon slots and entire Warframes/weapons are given out to players for free frequently via events, the battle pass and Twitch drops, and Digital Extremes has gone so far as to set up a system where you are “refunded” Forma when a specific meta Warframe or weapon is nerfed. Overall, it seems like the game is in a significantly better state than it was. I still wouldn’t recommend it for the sheer time sink needed to play the game.
This doesn’t mean it’s fully free from the chains of Live Service Hell - a notable part of live service games including WARFRAME is reliant on its living world, where in-game events are only there for a limited time, and who knows when they’ll come back if at all - some aspects, such as Trials, explicitly will never come back to WARFRAME. And while the removal of that content could arguably be for the betterment of the game1, this still supports the concept of FOMO - you had to be there at that time to play it. If you didn't... tough titty.
Destiny 2
In Destiny, Bungie gets to have its cake as an online MMO (paid expansions) and eating it too as a live service game (removing said expansions people paid for - but don’t worry, it’ll be free! maybe!).
Many people cite particular eras as the beginning of the "downfall of Destiny". And while there are many points where Destiny made pushes for player unfriendliness for the sake of profit, you can practically throw a dart at it's developmental timeline and wherever it hits is more than likely going to be a part of its "downfall".
I think Shadowkeep was definitely a turning point for the game as it pushed Destiny into “proper modern live service game” territory. This expansion did the following:
- Introduced their iteration of the battle pass, the season pass. They either come with the deluxe versions of the DLC’s they came with, or cost $10 a pop (now $15 as of the release of Lightfall, with no noticeable change in the content offered). Much of the content provided in the passes are exclusive and will not return.
- Created the Content Vault, a concept where parts of the game are removed and reintroduced at a later time. Bungie has said that unvaulted content would be free for all, however some returning weapons have been season pass locked.
- Said Content Vault also rendered literally all weapons and armor pre-Shadowkeep unusable outside of non-Power level dependent Crucible matches, meaning players were forced to forgo their beloved weapons for new ones. This is not dissimilar to the similar move made with the release of Destiny 2 as a “reset” for the game.
- Put more of an emphasis on Eververse, with its own tab in the menu next to core functions including the world map and friend/fireteam/area population list.
- Many argue this was the turning point for the lore of the game taking a sharp drop in quality - I will not argue in support or against this in my rambling, but I do agree with this sentiment, though it especially dropped in Witch Queen and hasn’t recovered since.
My girlfriend, being a very obviously sarcastic yet fully deserving of the title D1 Alpha Veteran, says that Destiny’s downhill turn was in The Taken King. This was the expansion that introduced the seasonal Halloween event Festival of the Lost - and Eververse, which functioned as a cosmetic storefront for the game. I wasn’t there to judge the DLC, but I won’t argue the predatory nature of Eververse. Cosmetics aren’t required to enjoy the game, sure - but when you combine the inevitability of fashion as endgame in live service games with the comparatively mid as fuck offerings completing endgame challenges provided, players may feel pressured to spend money to buy cosmetics. After all, don’t you want to look cool with that paid ornament for an Exotic armor that looks terrible with everything? I consider myself a bit of an outlier what with VanguardVogue, whose entire schtick was the game's fashion system. The fashion system was and still kind of is my special interest… but regardless of if you’re just a regular player or you’re befitted with autism supreme, the pressure to pay is still there. You're not less of a person for falling victim to it.
However, looking even further back, I think Destiny’s tightly wound marriage with the common woes of live service games dates back to it as a concept before its release. Destiny operates on a four-phase loop since the beginning: the DLC release hype, the waning enjoyment, the bitter “this game sucks/is dying!”, and the rising hype for the next DLC. The seasonal model puts this loop on speed dial making each loop from a year to a mere three months, with each season also acting as its own iteration - Season A coinciding with a DLC release having a lot of hype, Season B settling down and maintaining that hype, Season C being when buyer remorse kicks in and the new car smell wears off and much of the community has shifted to criticizing the game, and Season D being a mix between people feverishly roasting the game or Bungie itself and people hyped for the next DLC. Rinse and repeat.
What doesn’t help is the downright vitriolic state of the game’s community. Stricken by this reoccurring loop, many players find themselves in the gaming equivalent of an abusive relationship with Destiny. They know the game’s gone to shit, all the spark it once had for them is gone and they don’t derive enjoyment anymore, but they keep playing anyway. They keep spending money on the game anyway, and they keep complaining on Reddit et. al. in the guise of “caring about the game”.
But when you really dig into it, it’s less of a love for the game and more an inability to let go. Is it sunk cost fallacy? Probably. FOMO as a concept has been practically memefied by the community, but its pervasive grip upon its players is undeniable. I was already harboring mixed feelings for the game when Witch Queen came out, but it wasn’t until I forced myself to quit by proxy through deleting the VanguardVogue Tumblr around Lightfall that I finally made the move to uninstall. Even then, I still think about the game from time to time.
I also think the parasocial dev-player relationship may have some play. To most long-time Destiny players, there's no unfamiliarity with the community having practically cannibalized itself in recent years - the textbook definition of “holy shit, please play a different game”. There’s a lot of animosity between the various “sections” of the community (predominantly between casual and tryhard players, or PvE vs PvP players), as well as between the community as a whole and Bungie itself. The Destiny community is also the community that famously has cyberbullied developers off their platforms for being a little bit of a callous ass concerning a beloved Destiny 1 Exotic on social media and had a particular player stalk and harass a developer and their family, going so far as to send them pizzas as a form of intimidation.
While a lot of these headline-making occurrences are frequent with Destiny, the means of which these types of communities can be sown is rather common with live service games - Bungie, like many developers, would frequently maintain contact with the Destiny community both in the oft-hyped Thursday ritual This Week at Bungie (TWAB) blog posts on Bungie.Net as well as in the various social medias, mainly with Twitter, Instagram, Reddit or Discord. The TWABs detailed the numerous goings-on of the game, as well as upcoming content and featured player-made creations and videos (of which artists and content creators obsess over getting that chance to get featured, as featured creators are awarded Artist/Movie of the Week emblems to flex on other people in-game). Many developers also have very public social medias, and would interact with players on Twitter, Reddit, et. al..
It makes sense, conceptually - developer transparency is an incredibly important part of gauging how an update will be received by players, and it keeps players in the know of what's coming up. But this situation, in combination with the increasing elitism and the "doctorization"2 of players, creates a tumultuous situation where, should the developers say the wrong things, can cause a crisis for the game's playerbase - this gets especially messy when shareholders and profit margins are involved, and you get messes such as bar none the worst transmog system known to man that Destiny players begrudgingly accept because for many of them, it's the only game they play and it's totally different from the other live service games out there so you should pay $10 to use armor you already have. Don't tell them about FFXIV's transmog system.
In Essence
That is what makes the live service games of the current era so insidious - this relationship nurtured between the developers and players is something innate to live service games as a whole, the gamer stripper that says "I love you" while pocketing your cash. Calling it an addiction feels reductive, like some kind of knee-jerk reaction by pearl-clutching Moms Against DnD type of thing, but it’s not an unfitting term to call the phenomenon. My love for Destiny turned into an addiction, one I had to force myself to quit cold turkey. In my process of quitting the game, I realized just how predatory live service games can become, especially for neurodivergent players like me where addictions are more difficult to control. Live service games on a fundamental level utilize tactics to keep players playing, like a digital casino where you end up paying tons of money to win serotonin and digital drip, even when you say you won't pay a dime.
There have been live service games that have subverted expectations, namely Deep Rock Galactic - you pay $30 to play the game (sometimes less, if they're running a sale), and... you play the game. The season passes are 100% free and there are zero pay-to-win aspects - the only microtransactions the game has are entirely cosmetic (and outside of the game to boot! you buy them on Steam like a DLC, no platinum currency chicanery), and while the offerings are substantial compared to that of other live service games3, the cosmetics provided are pretty on-par with everything else in the game rather than being a step up like other games. It does utilize FOMO to some degree as a live service game, however all of the rewards that could've been obtained from previous seasons can be obtained for free through events in the game.
To call this rambling quits because it's gotten so, so immensely long: I didn't binge-write this rambling at 1AM on a Saturday to demonize live service games - they are simply a different kind of game to the traditional games as a product we're so used to. However, I do think some degree of awareness is essential for playing these games because of the manipulation at play. It seems so silly to people that don't understand, but to those that do - live service games sink their grasp into you.
Anyway, if you're a Destiny (or any live service game, for that matter) player looking for an out... close this tab and uninstall the game.
You'll thank yourself for it.
The two raids of the game, Law of Retribution and Jordis Verdict, were extremely buggy raids whose only use was to speedrun through for loot like literally every other part of WARFRAME. I have some degree of fondness for them, namely it was the only way to get Arcanes for the longest time, but in the game's current state? Glad they're gone. They were terrible to play.↩
Players are emboldened to believe they know what's right for the game because they play it, despite typically not having an ounce of software or game development knowledge. It's a parallel to doctors believing that they can manage an EMR rollout because they work with it despite barely knowing how to turn on a computer. Hey Google, what's a Beechcraft Bonanza?↩
For $8, you get skins for all four classes, a paintjob for all other skins as well as for Bosco (a companion drone), one to two helmets all classes can use, and skins for half a dozen weapons. Not too bad compared to $20 for a single skin.↩