 This is Game Chat with Buona episode 130 live service games reaches its apex. Oh man chat with Buona welcome to the show now here's your host Buona McCall with all the gaming news of this week uh by the way that's me. Greetings folks and welcome to episode 130 of Game Chat with Buona we got a great show lined up for you my goodness it's been a minute I think the last episode 129 was August 2018 here we are in the year 2036 I'm just joking this is 2019 it's like every time I got ready to record this show man it's like the forces of evil just showed up and just destroyed everything like even tonight I wanted to I wanted to record it I really wanted to record the show all right I just really wanted to record the show adobe's like nah man you're not gonna record the show we're just gonna spend all day updating adobe audition so we're just gonna spend all day updating and then if finally updated then adobe audition is like hey buona you don't have a microphone I'm like yeah I do it's like no you don't anyway got a great show lined up for Game Chat with Buona we're back I think let's do it ride the bike man it's like riding the bike gotta remember how to podcast anyway for our first story we're gonna talk about eve online eve online is probably one of the oldest space games that are still going strong in terms of MMO RPG it's been around since around the time when World of Warcraft came out I mean they've they've been neck and neck with World of Warcraft in terms of anniversaries I think it was 2003 2002 it's been a very long time but eve online has been very very popular with numbers you know like the biggest battles and you know 10 billion dollars worth of ships destroyed in the latest fight but I gotta say for the past few months it's been a little bit dry the story I'm talking about is fear rock paper shotgun and eve online is actually promoting a 10 000 player death match so I'm a little bit concerned about this they're I think they're going for a Guinness world record the article starts out talking about their previous numbers like 6142 that's the current Guinness world record for the most players involved in a single fight so they're actually pushing for 10 000 this this is the problem I have with this okay the problem I have with this is that most of these previous fights that at least as far as I'm concerned were organically created by the players I mean there's maybe some conspiracy theories about how may ccp may have kind of helped it happen I don't know but these were all created by the players because eve online prides itself with player generated content you know emergent emergent content so these things just happen with the players this seems very forced and you know just to just to quadruple that you know eve or ccp the company that owns eve online they were recently purchased by pearl abyss these are the guys famously known in the west for black desert online and also known for doing some shady stuff sometimes when it comes to microtransactions and you know pay the wind type of stuff that creeps into to black desert online like every two months and they have to the player base has to like beat it down with a bat so they got that looming over their shoulders they got that looming over their head this big giant cloud of of pearl abyss and now they're kind of forcing this fight is this like a I don't even want to be a part of it it just feels like it's synthetic you know I don't even play eve anymore I've been away from it for probably a good you know a long time it's been a really long time I want to say two years I started playing into 2012 I'm not a bitter vet I'm nowhere near that those guys are 10 plus years I'm nowhere near that but I don't even play anymore a 10 000 player fight that they're just gonna or just gonna put together it just goes against everything they've done so far I don't know what's going on uh at ccp I haven't been following the news very very closely other than the the whole pearl abyss story but this to me doesn't look good at all this looks very very desperate it's very it looks very forced and uh I don't know how to feel other than you know a little bit I'm making a frowny face you can't see my face right now but I'm like it's a frowny face check it out guys over rock paper shotgun they got the details aether wars which is coming on march 20th by the way march 20th uh and if you want to join the festivities to have a link to sign up at the bottom of this article I'm not there I don't I don't have any plans to do it I'm not going to say I'm not going to do it because maybe I'll learn something new between now and then that may that may entice me to do it but as it stands right now I really don't want to do it it just seems very forced check it out guys the story is over there and for our next story we're going to talk about apex legends I haven't had the pleasure of talking about this on game chat with boona but I have done some videos over on my youtube channel youtube.com slash boona I played it on my twitch stream at twitch.tv slash boona as well apex legends came like a mighty force man this this this game just like just destroyed the norm when it came to battle royale games the article I'm talking about now it's over on venture beat that apex legends has passed 50 million players in a month yeah that's that's kind of crazy and the pretty perspective they they did a smart thing they compared it to the other juggernaut in the room that is their number one competition that's fortnite fortnite took the world by storm and you know in a similar fashion to what apex did because nobody saw it coming they're just like was like a big whirlwind but this one was actually more swift a tweet by daniel amad kind of puts it in perspective they have a player count based on the time that the game was out and apex legends was out for eight hours and they got one million viewers or one million players one day 2.5 million three days 10 million players one week 25 million players four weeks 50 million players now to compare that to compare that with the five folks over at fortnite in two weeks they got 10 million players in six weeks 20 million players in 11 weeks they got 30 million and in 16 weeks they only got the 45 only he says so to put it in perspective apex legends got to 50 million in four weeks and it took fortnite 16 weeks to get to 45 million i i mean there's no other way to even look at that just to go wow it's just like what else do you say and it's a big difference in philosophies man you got like the old guard of respawn entertainment these guys came from call of duty and you got epic which is like the new and shiny i don't know how much of the unreal turning guys and some of the old epic old old guard is still over there uh with fortnite i don't know i'm not positive but i can tell you how they're doing development they do very very rapid development they deploy a lot of patches and a lot of changes really really fast really really fast and i was very very surprised today very surprised to see that i wasn't surprised i was i kind of should have seen a comment um the apex legends they have a different patch philosophy than the guys over at epic with fortnite they have a different patch philosophy this is what they wrote on their patch notes that came out today which was their i think it's their first real big balance patch this is it they say this is how we think about live balance at respawn tldr we make less frequent better tested high impact changes balance changes in order to minimize the impacts on your time spent mastering the game what a novel concept what a novel concept players actually have to take time to master a game so you're actually giving them time to master what's there before you go and do swift changes and change everything wow and you're actually testing what you're doing before you put out there wow double wow this is nuts so normally i wouldn't i would take that with a grain of salt from a company because companies say they test their stuff but you know giggle giggle it's not always the case but when it comes to respawn entertainment those guys their ping system their notification system their communication system they claim they tested that for a month without any voice comms just to make sure that you can utilize that without using your mic and you know what they were right so when they say they test something thoroughly i believe them i actually believe them because the proof is in the pudding it's delicious chocolate pudding too man but 50 million players in four months who saw this coming i don't know i didn't see it coming check it out guys over on vitrobeat.com they got the details apex legends passes 50 million players in the month and it took fortnite 16 weeks to get to that same point and for next story we're going to talk about live service games this is a big topic in the world of video gaming today because these are games that are are released in a in a much different way than games were released in the past and what i mean by that is that these games are constantly updated over time i played nothing but these games these days i play warframe i play elite dangerous and there's a ton of other games out there that i've i've dabbled in and out most notably i've been playing anthem i played the division a ton of games destiny destiny two these are games that are released and then over time they have been updated with uh with content and patches and and events and stuff like that you know back in the day live service games were came to like mmorpgs we call them subscription games so those games were monetized via monthly subscriptions and they were kept up to date so the live service games of old were fifteen dollar a month or you know in some cases less to to play these games mmorpgs war to warcraft final fantasy 14 the last two of a dying breed of of these live service mmorpgs but now shooters are doing this shooters counter strike and overwatch and you know fortnight all these big big shooters that are out there you know rainbow six siege by ubisoft so the reason why i'm talking about this is that the article came out about a chart there was a visual chart on the player the top ten games on steam the player count and it was like a lot it's a very nice video i'll link it in the show notes which shows an animated view of the players the player count and a majority of this list a vast majority of this list are live service games these are games that are constantly being updated and they have an article over on venture beat which has a great great headline says blockbusters exit but they come and then go that is so true so if you get like a triple a title let's say um you get a title like horizon zero dawn on the ps4 excellent game right just high marks across the board everybody loves the game dlc games out everybody bought dlc then they put the game down they don't play it anymore the game's not on twitch it's not on youtube it's not on mixer it's not being it's not being blasted everywhere so essentially they took the money from that game and they're probably going to come up with a sequel or the developer studios doing something else so these blockbusters they come and go look at god of war look at just most recently red dead redemption who's still talking about red dead redemption i mean it was like game of the year it's all it's barely been a month and a half well probably more than that's been two months since the game of the year awards you know have gone by nobody's talking about red dead redemption these are blockbuster games but they're not being talked about they're not buzzwords they're not raking in the cash and that's what the next headline says live service games stick around for years and can even grow over time so you know some of these blockbusters they have these big spikes at launch or a dlc releases and then they just drop off live service games stick around and in some cases i just talked about one in the previous story apex legends it just keeps growing they just keep growing look at fortnite look at look at pubg and this that was one of the things that was in this graphic pubg player on those battlegrounds was like the top of steam for like forever and that you know just even a couple years ago that was unheard of only valves games had the coveted top spot it was dota 2 it was counter strike it was teamforcers too those were the ones that were the top games but times have changed my goodness live service games are the future so that's why we're seeing games like antham coming out that's a live service game and we're seeing games like the vision so what's different about these new games that come out these guys that are releasing their titles the big thing is that they're not charging okay the live services of old mmorpgs even even you know a couple years ago some of these live service games like destiny 2 you know we're charging for dlc and for the for the big major stuff these guys aren't charging they're monetizing their game through cosmetics or some sort of a season pass to get early access if you're talking about the division too i did a video on my youtube channel if you want to check it out with the details of the division two's monetization plans for 2019 and their game the division two and antham has a year plan of all this free content that you don't have to pay any money for but they're going to continue to update the game it's a very risky thing business wise but it has been proven to work for a lot of game companies more often than not i play warframe and i play elite dangerous both of those games have been going on for five well yeah both of them have been going on for five plus years right and they're not charging for a whole lot of stuff warframe is a free to play game and they charge for you know currency platinum and prime access packs with with different warframes and cosmetics elite dangerous only charge for their horizons dlc which came in year two and they haven't charged for anything since except for cosmetics and skins yet development continues and they put out a plan you check my youtube channel talking about the elite dangerous future plans they put out a plan saying that the next major update isn't coming till 2020 so they're they're funded through that i mean they're not counting on i mean if you're going to put out an announcement that your game is not going to have a major update until 2020 you better have some money to back it up because your player base is going to skedaddle you tell your player base we're not going to have a major update for you know for two years they're out of there they're not going to take a break or they're not going to come back at all you know gradient elite dangerous is going to have some minor updates in between blah blah blah you can check out my video where i talk about all that but still live updates are king the future of video games in the next couple years i don't know how long this is going to last is going to be primarily live updates so single player games they have got to find creative ways to keep players playing or keep players interested in their game they don't necessarily have to play the game all the time but there needs to be some buzz you know some positive words of mouth some some talking about the game and you know social media and steam and and and twitch and mixer and youtube these are avenues for that when there's new content and there's new things to do people talk about it if there's not then it sort of dies down the game doesn't completely die but they rely on sales so it's like traditionally they have a steam sale or some sort of a sale to kind of bring the game back to light it's a oh that game god of war i've never played that it's on sale for 20 bucks now on the playstation 4 maybe i should try it now and then there's some buzz going on with the game again how the game do did it win game of the year what would happen and it's a little bit tougher to to maintain or not even maintain but to get money and sales from that type of like business model so live service has definitely changed the landscape in terms of what the what the dominant platform is just look at EA i know you're probably like oh boy then you said the words no seriously look at EA and their shift to their service called EA origin access right origin premiere these are services which provide you games over time and they constantly updates and it was very apparent with anthem because they gave all the people who subscribed to their premiere access program the best deal on anthem you got to play it early you only to pay $15 you got the best package they they were really promoting that and if you pre-ordered the best package that they had if you didn't use their app their their their service you didn't get to play you just had to watch you couldn't you do not get to play and i was shocked by that but thinking about it over time it's like the the shift has been made they're prioritizing services and you're going to see more of it i'm predicting you're going to see more of it check it out guys i mean this i'm not talking about the article too much but it kind of prompted the discussion between live service games versus traditional uh traditional environments and traditional models out there check it out guys venture beat has the article but what do you guys think let me know what you think about this whole live service thing sometimes it rubs people the wrong way because uh you can easily abuse that as a game developer you can do a lot of nickel and diming to to kind of make that cash or it could be a very good thing because you get an incredible amount of value just by buying the game once and maybe buying a couple skins throughout the year and you're constantly getting great new content so check it out guys let me know what you think about that article and that concludes episode 130 of game chat with buana we actually did another one wow it feels like forever it's like once you you go away for a while you come back and you do it it's like cracking an egg and then frying it and you eat it that makes no sense at all guys follow my stream twitch.tv slash buana i stream there almost every day i take very few days off and even when i'm supposed to take a day off i'm over there on twitch.tv slash buana follow my youtube channel youtube.com slash buana i'm posting more and more content we're gonna have a surge of content over there to cross promote and to maintain and to grow awareness with our patreon patreon.com slash buana you can go and contribute whatever you want that's going to be my main way of monetizing this show until i can find some sponsors or advertisers patreon.com slash buana so if you enjoy what you hear just just drop a dollar drop five dollars every little bit of help this is how i make my living and you guys make it happen thank you so much i also want to thank my sponsor over at corsair.com go to go.corsair.com slash buana i'm probably putting this in the wrong spot in the show because i'm terrible at this right now because i haven't done it and they're mine go that corsair slash buana for more deals and uh you can find some some great stuff from corsair and if you click it if you go through that link that i get credit for it so i'll be putting those in the show notes as well look for these episodes every wednesday we're going to be recording these every wednesday as much as we can if my software uh doesn't act up also we're getting a new pc in here soon the community did raise funds to get me a new pc i haven't had to operate since 2012 so that has been ordered and is coming in within the week or two so hopefully the shows will be better quality i don't know how i'm going to increase the quality with a better pc with a podcast but you know maybe i'll be able to pump them out faster because we'll be able to you know create the shows a lot quicker so thank you so much guys game chat reward episode 130 you guys have a great day night morning and i'll see you next time