[Born Different by Dril Queen plays] [Classical music plays] [Plastic smashing] [Stephanie] Hello everyone, Stephanie
Sterling down in the murder basement where I'm actually filming my remake
of the Battlestar Gallactica remake. Anyway... I don’t use the word “madness” lightly,
especially as I’m clinically quite mad myself - proudly I might add - but in the
most classically exaggerated stereotypical definition of the term… the entire media
industry has fallen into madness, right? I mean lik
e, full bore, disconnected from
reality, utterly fucking DoDo Land madness. [Do do do do do do do] Be it films, television, and of course videogames, I speak as somebody who has covered gaming
and the surrounding businesses for almost fifteen fucking years now… and I can no
longer comprehend what I'm seeing anymore. While we've all found it understandably funny that a game announced both a release date and
its cancellation not just in the same day, but the same *post*, part of me
could only
shake my fucking head. In isolation the whole thing's bizarre,
in the context of the wider games industry it’s a perfectly absurd picture
of the fucking state of things, so either way ain’t nobody wrong for
laughing but... Jesus Christ… when you add in the further context of entertainment
media writ large and what we’re seeing across the friggin’ board… I can’t help but
regard this whole situation with quiet dread. As ridiculous as it is - and it *is* fucking
ridiculous, it only hammers h
ome to me just what kind of freefall the games business,
and a whole buncha other businesses, are in. Righty Doky, let’s look at
the situation specifically. The game in question is Love Live! School Idol
Festival 2 Miracle Live, a game I’ve never heard of and will stop thinking about as soon as I’ve
done writing this script, although the me in the future that is *reading* the script, that's me,
will have just started thinking about it again. Wait, wait this is actually a really
good fuckin
g way to counteract my ADHD. Hello future Stephanie! If you’ve lost
your keys by now, and let’s face it, you have, you put them under the
second computer monitor, okay? [sound of keys being found] Holy shit, she’s right! Clever girl. [Zilla] "Zilla takes too much
time to make a single joke"? Oh, c'mon, how is this MY fault?! [Steph] Anyway, much as I want to brag on how
clever and attractive Past Stephanie is (clue: she’s just like me but younger and less drunk), I must instead talk of Love
Live!
School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live, a game I'm gonna use the full title of
every time, and one that has indeed had news of its cancellation arrive in the exact same
announcement as news of its global launch date. Hell of a fucking move, and honestly hats
off to the social media rifle who had to type and tweet this shit, just holding their
fucking head up and doing it without shame. “We are excited to break the news to
you that the global version of Love Live! School idol festival 2
MIRACLE LIVE!
is launching soon in February 2024,” stated the game’s Twitter post, choosing
to lead with the good news first! “However, we also want to inform you that the
Global Version will close its doors on May 31, 2024, and cease in-app purchases accordingly.
We appreciate the love and support you've shown, and we're committed to making these last
few months an unforgettable moment.” What the fuck? That... somehow that was me
failing to do an English accent. What the fuck? Anyway, pro
tip to the Love Live! School idol
festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE! developers - if you do want to make that moment unforgettable,
put it in the script of a YouTube video. Which reminds me, Future Stephanie, remember to
get the suppository ones at the shop tomorrow, you know the creams don’t work. Also
don’t read that part out loud. Ah fuck. Three months. That’s how long the game is gonna last when it launches globally on
a yet-undecided day in February. Three months. And that’s…
that’s kinda fucki
ng *morbid*. It’s like… like the terminal
illness of videogames. I suppose that’s a bit tasteless to say,
but... but I think so long as I don’t name any *specific* illnesses it won’t
quite classify as *offensive* to say. So anyway, this game has Achey Anus
and Saint Schrivens Disease and it’s only got months to live, which does… actually make me want to play it now that I’ve made
it bloody creepy and weird for myself. Yeah… yeah I’m kinda looking forward to playing with something as it dies
.
Don’t read that part out loud. Ah FUC- Of course, because videogames are videogames
and videogames have the fucking audacity, it seems Love Live! School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live *will* launch globally
with in-app purchases active. Yes, Bushiroad is actually hoping
that people will spend money on it knowing it’s literally friggin’ dead on arrival. Then again, I think a lot of companies
when they do this are more banking on swindling purchases out of those
who haven't heard the news an
d got really into this game they found
on their phone before oops DEAD. It’s hardly a stretch to assume such a
cynical motive - in-app purchases are already designed around exploitative
swindling, so what’s one more scam? But for seriouses, that really ought not be
allowed. You should not be allowed to let people invest in a product that’s literally gone tits up.
But there I go again expecting a basic standard of ethics and good faith business practices,
like the dumb cunt [skelleton warri
ors] I am. It needs to be explicitly clarified of
course that the game *is* out in Japan, and has been since last year. We’re
not dealing with such an extreme case that a shutdown was announced before
the game had even come out at all, but at this bloody rate it only seems
like a matter of time before that happens. Nevertheless, the game wasn't out long at all
even in Japan, and it’s still an absolutely incredible thing that does speak volumes
about what a fucking mess videogames are in. I
t also continues the trend of evidencing
everything I warned about the “live service” goldrush being a terrible long-term idea that
will leave many digital victims in its wake. I've never been able to say
digital right. Oh, I just did it! As if publishers of other ignominiously
shuttered “service” games haven’t already offered so much evidence they
could…um… open an evidence shop. Nah, that’s a dumb analogy… they’d close
the store in less than twelve months. Ba dum tsssh. [Zilla] (sigh) Yo
u're killin' me. [Steph] The wheels have well n’ truly
fallen off the “live service” bandwagon, no longer able to sustain the weight of so
many games desperately jumping aboard at once. Love Live! School Idol Festival 2
Miracle Live’s baffling announcellation (still good) comes off the back of an
apocalyptic year for service games, particularly on mobile, where Square Enix
alone was responsible for killing off, like, well over half a dozen of the
bastards over a period of several months. O
ne can’t help but feel that Square Enix
has played a little role in the newsworthy status of Love Live! School idol festival
2 MIRACLE LIVE! - if they hadn’t already had people confused and amused in equal measure
with the endless parade of service terminations, I dare say the deal with Love Live!
School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live, while still ridiculous, would not be getting
this much ridicule. It would have been a weird anomaly instead of what it now is - the *perfect*
encapsulation of
that aforementio ned freefall. Love Live! School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live is proof positive that the videogame industry
is untouchably beyond the realm of parody. In fact, a few commenters have already
pointed out that it sound like a parody you’d see on Hard Drive - a game announcing its
launch and cancellation at once really would have been the perfect gag if satirists
had thought of it before reality did. But no, this is not satire.
It’s just a fucking mess. Love Live! School Idol F
estival 2 Miracle
Live is just one tiny part of a gigantic fucking *mess* almost entirely created by
executive meddling and corporate profiteering. The writing should have been on the wall
over a decade ago when then-EA CEO John Riccitiello complained that historically,
“the game you bought was the game you got.” It’s a quote often forgotten by everyone but me, who likes to trot it out now and again to show
how fucking twisted the executive mindset is, that he thought just buying and
havin
g a videogame was a bad thing. But really, looking back, it
was more than an intellectually offensive dickheaded soundbite.
It was also a horrid portent. Even ten years ago, I complained that
publishers seemed desperate to move away from the fundamental practice of just
making and selling a damn videogame. Y’know, the job you’d expect the makers
and sellers of damn videogames to do. But at least back then, ohhhh back in my
day, you did still expect to get a fully finished game even if it *
was* gonna try and
nickel and dime you when you booted it up. Over time though, what I used to call “patch
culture” made it increasingly okay to finish games *after* they were sold, as more and
more products were shipped in unpolished, unfinished states and fixed up with
patches on or after launch day. “Early Access” only muddied the water further -
initially a rather noble idea that allowed small devs to get funding directly from
players while actively developing, mainstream publishers to
ok the idea
and fucking warped it as they do, producing games like fucking Street
Fighter V that were basically released as a digital socket into which the actual
game could be plugged once they’d made it. Early AAAccess, as I've always liked to call it. Patch Culture and Early Access laid some of the
groundwork, albeit indirectly and unintentionally, for the arrival of the so-called “service” game,
which became the fad of the late 2010s after Ubisoft put that stupid fucking graphic out tha
t
convinced moronic executives that “live services” were magical money circles that spin around
generating forevercash until the end of time. From there, the goldrush happened,
and the aggressive messaging that now, the game you buy is absolutely not the game
you get, its a hollow promise that may or may not be kept depending on whether or
not that promise sold enough copies. It’s just considered okay now to publish
not games but glorified proofs of concept. And now, in the wake of that fr
enzied
rush, games are failing because they can’t stand out from the teeming swarm of games
doing the exact same shit they’re doing. Bandwagoning in the games industry
has always been stupid, as far too many publishers still think simply copying a
successful game will also copy its success, but it was *especially* fucking
shortsighted to try and flood the market with games explicitly designed to
suck up a *lot* of the user’s time and money. You just can’t do that. Time and money is finite,
as
are the people spending it. There was absolutely zero sustainability
in essentially stripmining an audience. I said all this. I said it moments
after Ubisoft’s magic money circle started showing up online. I said it
again when publishers kept talking in interviews about how service games
were the future. I said it when a bunch of games started pivoting towards
services. I said when Anthem happened. Obviously the industry didn’t listen, it
never does, and that’s why we’re now in a worl
d where Love Live! School Idol
Festival 2 Miracle Live announces its shutdown in the very same tweet
it announces its global launch. There’s something deeper at play though than
just me being right about shit yet again. We should never look at things
in isolation. As I like to say, things don’t happen in a bubble. Which
brings me back to my opening sentiment that the entire world of media
has descended into, what was it? [Madness. Madness and stupidity] What we’re seeing in the games indus
try
is just one part of an overall descent into mayhem that’s occurring across
entertainment, as our media becomes more contrived and convoluted to access
across countless subscription services, just wait until they start offering packages,
movies are being yanked out of circulation just weeks after release, and finished productions
aren’t being released *at all* because the world’s gone so fucking bananas it can be
more lucrative *not* to sell your product. [This is crazy] This is why I’v
e not been so quick
to laugh at Love Live! School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live as others
have, although I have done a bit. Because if we pull the camera back to focus
on the entire landscape of entertainment, the most horrifically bizarre thing about Love
Live! School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live is how its situation is NOT all that bizarre
anymore in the context of a landscape that includes HBO relaunching itself about a dozen
times, or Animaniacs being on Hulu instead of something owned
by the literal Warner Bros., and
of course everything involving the DC Universe. Hell, patch culture's even threatening
to come to movies. Remember Cats? Sorry I made you remember Cats. The world of entertainment has gotten more
confusing than that time I watched Naomi Watts wanking and crying in Mulholland Drive and
tried to wank over it but ended up crying instead. [Zilla] Relatable! [Steph] Focusing just on games
does an injustice to the scattered, anarchic horror show going on across al
l of
media, and how it all informs each other. The concept of personal ownership of the
things you buy is becoming more and more muddied by subscriptions and streaming,
and that’s being further compounded by mere access itself being a fleeting privilege
rather than a reliable fair expectation. There’s not much fundamental difference between
a movie being pulled from Disney Plus and an online-reliant game shutting the servers down.
Different instruments, same tune. As much as I despise the
whole “live service” fad and have
reveled in games like Babylon’s Fall failing as hard as they deserved, I'm tempted to give
celebration pause when I consider how disturbed I am when a TV show or a movie is yanked,
even if it’s something I don’t entirely like. Of course, a major difference is the “live
service” fad was vile in general, motivated as it was by false promises and financial predation,
and that’s why I chose my words carefully and said “online-reliant” games earlier. because thi
s
could happen to other games, ones that aren’t unfinished pieces of shit but nonetheless would
become all but useless if they went offline. One of my favorite games last year was Karmazoo, but if the online shut down tomorrow,
the remaining game would be a husk. We needn't hypothesise though. Looking
back over the past several decades, looking at, like, the proper old Star Wars
MMO or, like, the first Aliens vs Predator, we've seen what happens to online
games once their servers go offlin
e. Now a lot of shutdowns in the past have
come down to age. They just get really old and then the support goes away, which
brings up its own discussion about what the statute of limitations is on that sort of
shit, but we'll get into that another day. The normalization of access revocation
couldn’t have come at a better time for the companies that seemingly profit
off it, running as it is alongside the redefinition of what buying something means. And of course, the coinciding but
not coin
cidental things couldn’t have come at a worst time for
the rest of us poor fuck imps. One thing I will give the bastards is
that I’m kind of impressed by the gall. With all the subscriptions, all the in-app
purchases, all the self-serving services, the entertainment industry wants us to invest
in their products more than ever, yet the incentive to invest anything, either emotionally,
intellectual, or financially, couldn’t be lower. Why invest your heart into a TV show when Netflix
will jus
t cancel it after a season or two? Why invest thought into a
movie you might not be quick enough to see before it's yanked from
distribution for whatever inane reason? Why invest financially into a videogame’s
economy when said game, and everything you bought, could become thoroughly
meaningless at the flip of a switch? The fucking nerve of them. Sort of... I guess video game executives are being
their best selves, just not giving a fuck. Though of course an executive's best
self is still
among humanity's worst. We should talk about games dying of old
age, so to speak. Games I mentioned where the online access was just taken away because
it was so long since the game had been out and, you know, we should talk about the statute
of limitations and what that means for games. Karma Zoo, one of my favourite
games of last year, as I've said, will be sort of unplayable one day. At least,
you know, getting the actual point of the game, because it is a small game and it's a wonderful
game, but not one that exploded mainstream, the playerbase for that will just
dissapear one day, and then that's that. Owning games in perpetuity is something that's
always been on shakey ground, when we consider that games often can't be played in perpetuity,
and will become increasingly less likely to be so. So that is something we definately
need to think about, but until then, thank god for me and... we'll see you next week.
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