There have been some rumors that Single-Player Games are slowly dying and big names such as EA Games and Microsoft are slowly embracing this new bomb truth. This has been around for many years but it is creating buzz at the moment – games as a service or abbreviated as GaaS. But how do you define this buzzword?
Games as a service means in a video game world, this is where they further develop a game to monetize it. It has many forms which are already familiar to a great deal of players: Game subscriptions like MMOs, Game subscription services like EA Access, XBOX Game pass and game clouds like PSN that offers remote accessibility and lastly, which I think made a lot of recent controversies during the release of Battlefront II, Microtransactions.
One of the cliches is there is ‘Money makes the world go round’ although surprisingly true.This is how an indie developer gets the funds to develop more amazing games or where they get the funding so the can turn an already awesome game into something that is overwhelming. Recent Single Player games like Prey, Nier Automata, Persona 5 and Nioh series really are one of the best out there. They need to be supported more and well, it is kinda obvious that they are dying out.
They are now overshadowed by the likes of GTA Online, Final Fantasy XV due to its never-ending patches, DLCs, and individual character storyline. We have now shifted to favor this over linear gaming and possibly considered as the mainstream gaming. Ubisoft Boss Yves Guillemot expressed in a financial call ‘We are transforming our games from standalone offline products into service-based platforms where we can continually interact with and entertain our players.’ Slowly but surely, these juggernauts are following suit and fast. This might not be bad news for most players who want to get as much possible content as they can on the games their purchase but this will have repercussion in the long run. We might be seeing games that are tweaked so much that they no longer look like how they were on the prerelease which looked better.
Gaming is all about fun and where’s the fun in milking games just for the sake of longevity, well – err – money. Yes, it easy to maintain a fan base especially when that game has massive followers but how long can they get the hype over a similar gameplay over and over again. We have seen that in the likes of Assassin’s Creed. In truth, I am an AC fan but it pains every time Ubisoft tries to release a new, fresh version but falls heavily short or releases a bugged gameplay. You will always have that feeling that it is either a hit or miss for them.
Smart gaming will always be based on what the game offers to players? Is the story immersive enough? Will it take me hours and hours of gameplay because I’m that interest? Or will it be one of those games that will always leave an imprint emotionally – making it memorable for the years to come? See DLCs, MMOs and microtransactions don’t really offer great answers to those questions. At the end of the day, we always go back to our staples; the ones that we immerse ourselves for long hours of gaming experience without paying extra for content.
