EA and other companies are killing creativity with all this online-only business model. Back in the day when games like Half-Life came out, people could host games on their own machine. They had a healthy modding community so they could produce new maps and add all sorts of content. Half-Life became massively popular for years being the number one online game with tens of thousands of users. It lasted for years and it still goes on today. But these days, everyone wants to be the next World of Warcraft. So now they're making old franchises into online-only games where THEY are the only ones allowed to run the servers. Then when they stop making money because the number of players drops, then they end the game and don't allow the buyers to mod the game or run their own severs. This online-only business model is killing creativity. The only real solution is for smaller companies and people to put out games where people can run their own private servers. A better solution is to actually put out single player games where the authors actually have to produce content and gameplay that will keep the buyer interested.
@oflow @Hercol What they should do is allow anyone to run a game server by putting out a server package for Linux and Windows. I remember when they dropped some flight sims years ago from a popular hosting company. Well people made their own private server and it worked well. But now it seems that the companies don't want people hosting games, they want to control it in case it gets popular like older games did. Like Half-Life 1 and Counterstrike.
Elite was great. I remember it for my Commodore 64 and then I remember the Frontier games that were based upon it. I also remember a series called Starglider that were loosely based on Elite. Starglider 1 & 2 were great games. I played them on my Amiga. Starglider 2 was epic, it had polygon graphics, a big advancement for the time. I remember a great experience of capturing a Space Whale, they sounded so real. The game was open ended for the time too. Elite Plus, Frontier and Frontier First Encounters were nice. I loved the way you could examine a crafts hyperspace jump cloud and tell what system they just jumped to. The Elite games eventually evolved into the X series of space games beginning with X: Beyond The Frontier.
These consoles that block used games will be hacked within two weeks of release and they will be able to use used games, pirated games and home-brew games. Who are they kidding? They are trying to move everything online to fight against software piracy that really isn't hurting the industry. Few people can afford all the good games coming out so there is gonna be piracy and they will always find a way around protection. But when most games move to online, the pirates will start creating hacked servers. What they need to do is price games for about $30 and lower and make actual good games. This is why I'm glad independent game producers like the ones with Kickstarter are raising money to avoid the big game studios. Wasteland 2 has raised $3 million and they were shooting for $900,000. With the new tech people do not need a big game company like EA to put out a new game. They can go right to the gamers for funding and distribute through the Internet. Make the actual boxed copies something of a collector's item. I'm going to donate myself!
I hope this isn't the death of the Elder Scrolls single player games. Everyone wants to go to MMO because of one reason, money. It has nothing to do with anything else but money. What happens if it flops? I think game makers are getting lazy about making good single player games. Many of us don't want to pay a monthly fee to play a game and don't need to play with other people. Bear in mind the most popular games are FPS single player games like Black Ops, Skyrim, Call of Duty and Mass Effect 3. I'll be glad when 3D and MMO fads are gone for a while.
Shadow-Phax's comments