I assume you're referring to stuff like Tarkov or Star Citizen? These games basically work the same as live service games, except they pretend to be "in development". But I'd hardly call it a boom. There's only a couple truly big money makers, the rest are grifts that don't really go anywhere, but might have small vocal cult-like fanbases. Then there are games that really do use the "Early Access" model to fund getting the game made. It's not really like kickstarter, or preordering, because you do get to something in exchange for your money, immediately. And it hss brought us games like Satisfactory, DRG, Hades, Subnautica, Everspace... Even Baldurs Gate 3 was an Early Access title. You could buy and play it for YEARS before "1.0" dropped and became the explosive success it is today. Those games got made because they were able to sell copies to fund their development throughout the process. And instead of trying to please clueless investors, they had to please _the players_. I don't really see why you'd be salty about this psrt of the trend. Obviously some stuff is not worth buying, but that's true whether a game is finished or not.

We used to have 1-2 "wow killers" every year. The last one that tried was new world in 2021, afaik. So I'm pretty sure they were referring to MMORPGs, not MMOs in general. Altho even those are fewer nowadays than before, I feel.

The thing is there are a ton of MMOs that are coming out. Their claim makes no sense if you look at the slated releases.

Concord was the biggest flop of all time and people already forgot about it.

The Atari crash was just Atari. In North America - and *only* North America, things were quite different elsewhere in the world - Atari was virtually the entire game industry at the time, but that isn't the case today. We already do see individual developers and publishers crash the way Atari did. All the time. But for every flop, there are a dozen hits. The industry is big, and it is not a monolith. And the audience is far far far larger. People will always be buying games. It's not possible for the entire industry to crash the way Atari did. It'd be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash.

> It’d be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash. Which can happen. Theaters sure aren't doing well. Movies soldier on without them, but with vanishing distinction from any other form of streaming video. When the superhero genre wanes, it might not be because some other bajillion-dollar trend overtook it. People can just stop caring enough to justify budgets with nine digits. What comes after that is a fallow period. Many large investments fail, capital dries up, a few pricks make headlines for declaring 'movies are over.' There's been several times that making money on music was not a reliable business model. The industry flipped out about piracy... on cassettes, and then also when MP3s came along. Fortunately they solved that through commercial streaming services which also don't pay artists anything. And now you can install a program that invents and records pop songs, just for you, in about as long as it takes to play them. Even in '83, it's not like Atari *died.* They had two more consoles that decade, plus a handheld. They marched on into the 1990s and *then* died. The crash simply meant a whole form of entertainment was no longer an expected feature in people's lives. Subscription MMOs have dwindled. The RTS genre crashed.

This user struggles with absolutes.

But none of those are entire industries crashing. Audiences change, media changes how it targets audiences, business models change, but the medium still lives.

Again, not even Atari itself went away entirely. A crash means line go down. It's not a sudden and definite end.

I just remembered about it after watching secret level.

Well, I'm kinda curious how much longer home consoles are going to hang on. Nintendo is releasing their second generation handheld. The Steam Deck is quite popular, and the rest of the PC gaming industry has been scrabbling to match it. Meanwhile, the PS5...exists and what's an Xbox even for anymore? People like to say consoles will continue to exist because they're so much simpler than PCs to "just play" on, but that's not really true anymore. My parents' Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing. We're in a different world than when I was a kid, when I could really get a game, plug it in the SNES, flip the switch and it runs. I could see Microsoft and Sony having an Atari or Sega moment. Exiting the hardware market, shutting down their platform, becoming a relatively minor game studio occasionally remembering to make a game in a property they haven't published in awhile, like Atari putting out an Alone In The Dark game every 1.5 decades or so.

> At least with those you get an option of physical release at the same price. At least in Europe the physical version is more expensive. Mario Kart World for example: - Digital: 80 € - Physical: 90 €

I do miss the era when you just put the thing in the thing-shaped socket and the thing just worked. Now you cannot do anything without setting accounts, downloading things, updating things and accepting tons of unread documents. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

> My parents' Switch has a multi-page settings menu, an online account and subscription, even games that come on cartridge often require downloads and updates before you start playing. Two-fold problem: a) give the consumer freedom of choice b) make it difficult enough to successfully set it up once, and then stay locked in That's both by accident (provide freedom choice) and by design (lock them as long as possibile).

That episode was so cool, I was disappointed to learn it was about a dead game.

I think we are still in the middle of the crash, but concord is a pretty good marker for the death of live service game spam. The number of canceled games since then has been impressive.

Increasingly, the software published on disc or cartridge is incomplete or unfinished, because there is pressure from management to ship retail products on time, but game development is hard, so the dev team will use the time during manufacturing and distribution of discs or cartridges to write patches, which will be automatically downloaded when the game runs. And it's getting to the point that the cartridge or disc just functions as a license key. Maybe some of the game's assets will be stored there but not the complete game, as they'll still require large downloads to function. I've been a Nintendo + PC gamer my entire life; basically anything I've ever wanted to play was available with that combo...and I'm ditching Nintendo.

> what’s an Xbox even for anymore? PC-ifying the console market, same as always. A task it has almost completed. Sony exiting the console market would be failure. They've been using the PS1 playbook five times in a row - seven or eight if you count handhelds - and it's worked, at most, thrice. Sony's ideal market has games developed for a specific platform, and occasionally ported outside it, so each vibrant fiefdom has its own identity and culture. That made them a mountain of cash on PS1 and PS2 and then nearly killed the PS3. Developers' ideal market is making the game once and selling it to all customers. Platforms are an obstacle. Sony's ideal was fucked as soon as RenderWare looked the same on any console or PC. Microsoft got the message and made the 360 a generic compiler target. Sony almost shipped the PS3 without a real GPU. It took them years to stop fucking around and offer libraries to make their tiny special supercomputer act like any other computer - and that got them better ports, and made them more money. What followed was two and a half generations of lockstep releases for near-identical AMD laptops. You can buy the blue one or the green one. Yet I don't think Sony really internalized what's happened until the Helldivers situation. They suddenly demanded every PC player get in their console ecosystem, because they recognized how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. Microsoft exiting the console market would be... what they've been planning for a decade, probably. Somewhere after the Xbox One, I mused that they could upset the console race by *not* releasing an Xbox Two, and just treat the upcoming PS5 as a slightly broken PC. They seem to be getting around to it. Albeit with a side of releasing a Steam Deck competitor, because they love showing up late to a trend.

I propose we call Microsoft's portable Xbox a "Xune."

When we start making games with our hands again.