#and like. yeah moving away from live service models is something i'd be so happy for

[thefirstknife]

I don’t know how public-facing this info is, but: the inside-the-industry discourse right now is that Sony wants to move away from games-as-a-service, (imo correctly) perceiving that it’s a totally unsustainable model both on the front end (as players across the board are burnt out on pandemic-era design that incentivized constant play via FOMO) and the back end (since the expectations for the rate of release of such content is completely insane, especially for how little they charge/how out of control the wage:investor profits ratio is right now in the economy generally, and drives off good talent). So, like, good for the long term health of the game, maybe? But what did Sony cite as a major reason for acquiring Bungie in the first place?

Well… it was that they wanted to pivot TO games as a service.

Nobody at Bungie who can remotely be called “working on the game” likes delivering it as a service (source: trust me). And now the people who were most acutely aware what a terrible model it is are the ones out of a job. This whole situation is so, so fucked up.

Yeah, heard something about that too, specifically the stuff about Sony wanting to move away from games-as-a-service. And yeah, agreed, overall I would love for this trend to be phased out eventually, though I'm not sure how realistic that is given that the genre of MMOs has been going on for so long.

But that aside, yeah. It's a fucked up situation. I remember when Sony got Bungie and emphasised how they want to fund Destiny as a live service game and now what... Over night they changed their mind? And this wouldn't be such an issue, except in this case they decided to move in this direction by having so many employees laid off. Like, this could not have happened in a worse time, just as they're set on a schedule and are preparing an expansion and they need those people to deal with the workload. Horrible situation for everyone that was fired and horrible situation for everyone that's staying.

It feels such a tone-deaf decision made by people who sit in offices and have never interacted with a game dev or a video game. I even thought that the way they didn't announce any expansions post-TFS and with how they teased episodes, that those two things were a beginning process of moving away from a live service or at least moving away from the current model that expects so much stuff to be released in such short dev cycles.

But like, this shit can't happen over night. And it most certainly can't happen when you gut the studio and take away talented people who have been working on the game for years and who even agree that live service models are awful. And worst of all, not the first nor the last wave of lay offs recently.