Here’s all you need to know.
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Live Service games has a big track-record of being shut down a year or two after their releases because they’re either so broken messes (like Darktide), lacking in content (also Darktide) or new content being rolled out in an extremely slow pace (oh hey, Darktide again).
Developers see the big potential for constant revenue from continued monetization from macrotransactions, season passes and the like but they almost always fail to deliver a fun experience to players because of it.
That’s why no one should spend money on Live Services, because when they eventually get shut down… then all that money you spent means nothing.
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Live service always tend to die more easily than normal games, always has been, but when you have control of it’s cost, you can support it for a long time.
Atm FS’s job is to stabilize stuff, then they can start the “Live” part of Live Service
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The big cost to the developer comes from having to maintain servers, I’d think, so it seems to me like if they’d just have designed Darktide to be peer-to-peer hosted (like Vermintide 2) instead of dedicated-server hosted, this probably wouldn’t be an issue…
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FS: “Finally, our live service game as a service will soon be going live!”
Me: “Oh, how soon is soon?”
FS: “Ten months after launch!”
Does not compute.
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To be fair here, Darktide isn’t a traditional Live-Service game really. In fact it doesn’t operate like one at all.
They clearly just put that term out there as bait for their investment partner Tencent to swallow. So far this has been exactly like Vermintide 2 and that game is NOT Live-Service.
Edit: I’d also like to add, taking the Jimquisition serious in the year 2023 is an unforgivable sin for many reasons. Sir, please face the wall.
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Vt2 became a live service as they added stuff semi frequently.
And they have said that content/live Service and such will be delayed till the game is fixed/good enough
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the purpose of service games is to disguise always online DRM and complete control over your data making you unable to use the product without engagement with the company that makes the live service game. MMO’s were the first to do this back in the early days of the internet, but eventually someone figured out that they can make waaaay more money than 15$ a month by monetizing the inconveniences people complained about in those games.
After this, game companies realized that deloping problems to sell solutions to is more profitable than making a polished and enjoyable game. Some of them going as far to target gambling addicts, or those with poor impulse control such as people with adhd, which creates another problem because making problems creates demand which can create competition if your “mmo” or “service game” is not completely locked down (making the game completely antisocial as a result.) The competition being RMT funded bot armies that destroy the enjoyment of the game for everybody else. I digress.
Fatshark isn’t that bad, but shame on them for using always online DRM and calling it “live service”
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No. No you do not need to play games. Technically speaking you don’t have to do a lot of things, such as pretty much everything else.
Astute observation.
As for the terminology, I didn’t coin that, but it’s standardized language now so we might as well use it. Words are power. If you don’t know the right words, you can’t find the knowledge.
So whether you find the terminology contemptle or not, you still have to know it if you want to have influence over the domain they control.
You’re only as good as the idols that inspire you.
If the man you look up to is a clown, expect to be laughed at occasionally.
The Jimquisition wasn’t always bad, though. It used to be half-decent, but that’s long gone. Jim has gone down an unsavory route, locking himself in an ideologic prison that deprives him of his senses. He has thus unironically turned himself into a tool of the very corporations he claims to keep accountable, while at the same time still churning out these hitpieces that strike a chord somewhere between “reasonable discussion point” and “totally nuts”.
It’s the very act of eating one’s cake and then trying to still have it. But maybe he should be seen as yet another example of the temptations that come with influence and fame. It’s in a way sad, because you could make the argument that he is the victim of something greater, that he couldn’t overcome.
So which is it?
Let’s be real though. He is also mostly a grifter. An influencer. It’s right in the name.
To influence. To manipulate. To change someone’s opinion or alignment.
Ironically I wasn’t even defending Fatshark much here. Just pointing out two observations:
→ Darktide is not a classic Live-Service game in it’s current state (It’s Pay2Play + cosmetics)
→ The Jimquisition is ridiculous and I find OP ridiculous for bringing it up
100% true. Although you have to admit that online games necessarily require a hosting structure, so you can only have the two options:
Direct connection (Player to Player, Hamachi, etc.): Game can be hosted at any point, but stability is only as good as the connection each player has to the host. A methodology for data saving must be additionally found (either on the host computer or clientside for everyone - The latter opens the game up massively to cheating and modding).
Hosted Dedicated server: More stability for all players, but data necessarily has to be saved there. No or little modding capability because of limited client-side data.
I still prefer what we have now. You can reconnect to games after an error or crash, you lose progress less often and the gameplay is smoother.
I can’t remember how often a spiteful host, a ragequitter or just plain bad luck with internet hosting has costed me hours upon hours of gameplay progress and nerves. Not to forget that there was always that one rubberbanding wizard who had the ability teleport on top of Siennas ordinary abilities. 
That was especially bad when the game first started with shoddy netcode. I remember Vermintide 1 even had a bug in certain maps that would crash or desync you and then it was over. I legitimately had friends check out over that.
These are all issues we don’t have in Darktide. So there is legitimate reasons to pick a dedicated server, even if the potential to do all this data gathering and data hoarding you mentioned is there and can be abused by companies.
The supreme option is of course Dedicated Server Hosting by the community like back in the Half-Life 2 days.
I’ll admit to a bit of naivety here. What exactly does a “live service” game constitute, other than being a pleasant, innocuous, friendly sounding catch-all term for “our game has dark patterns in it designed to keep you phytologically hooked!”
At a basic level, “live service” can simply mean that the devs intend to push out regular updates for the game that includes some combination of free and paid content. But isn’t that like what so many games already do, and have been doing, for ages? Vermintide 2 is no different from Darktide in this regard, yet it didn’t bill itself as “Live Service.” Same with Deep Rock Galactic. Plenty of other games get regular additions and content injections (either free or through DLC), but don’t feel compelled to call themselves “live service.”
It seems like the act of calling your game “live service” will just doom it to a life time of unmet expectations. Why bother?
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I’m pretty sure it’s about the intention in this case. DT was created as a live service instead of organically growing into something like it (read: a game with continued support & updates). So instead of deciding to continue working on a fun game, we have
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Made me lol
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Im mean you play games to have fun so as long as you had fun I would say the money was well spent