As a community, gamers have made a lot of stink about this in the past. Nothing has changed. I’m confused about how they ever thought we didn’t care about always-on connections.
Testing what they can get away with is my guess.
You have to translate from CEO double-speak first. What he meant was “Gamers are masochistic morons, so we thought we’d make more sales by making piracy harder than by making the game better. Our launch flopped, so we’re going to try it the other way around.”
They probably judged how many people care accurately, but misjudged how deeply those that do care. And how much more likely those people are to leave a review.
Helldivers 2 is still selling tons of copies even though everyone is saying that the servers can’t handle the capacity. No one seems to care over there, so I can see why the Nightingale devs thought no one would care with their game either. I thought we were recovering from live service, but Helldivers shows we haven’t.
I agree that live games are a problem, and helldivers 1 had an offline option, but Helldiver’s 2 being always online is better executed than any other live games I’ve seen. And, their servers have been needed up significantly since Friday.
This is the kind of exceptionalism that bums me out. It’s still a server that no one in the community can control, which means it will still have downtime while the game’s making money and will disappear entirely when it isn’t making money. It still means you arbitrarily can’t play if you’re in a situation where you have no internet, like on a train or in a cabin in the woods, and it means that your session will get interrupted with no workaround if something happens like Steam’s matchmaking servers go down for maintenance for 15 minutes on a Tuesday; or when PSN gets hacked again. It means this game won’t even be playable in 10 or 15 years for as excited as people are about it right now, and that’s why I’m disappointed to see people making an exception for it that they didn’t for all sorts of other live service games, because if Helldivers 2 shows that this stupid business model still works, companies will continue throwing money at it and making more of them.
