What is a live service game?
Live service game (also known as, games as a service, GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model. It is similar to software as a service(SaaS). Live service games is a service to monetize are game even after their initial sale or to support a free to play model. It is like YouTube/ Facebook where it tries to involve and keep people engaged with the game.
Why GaaS is rising?
The rise of live service game has transformed gaming industry by focusing on content rather than static releases. Mainly, Fortune & Destiny 2 offered dynamic universes that change over time through updates, events and seasons. This service is providing fresh content and engaging narrative to the player daily. So that the player does not feel boredom. Instead of one time purchase, GaaS involves continuous revenue generation through in game purchases, subscription, downloadable content and microtransaction. Gaming companies makes billions of dollar in profit through GaaS business model as players will always try to be encouraged and win.
Thanks to new technological achievements. That are the main factor behind this new business model coming to the industry of Gaming.
However it has a lot of problems too. Here some pros and cons about this service:
Pros:
- Massive communities and social connection: As the game will receive continuously new updates the connection between players will be increased
- Daily new updates and seasons
- Newer players will be encouraged to play
- Often free or cheap to entry
- Getting experience of new maps and items
Cons:
- Very addictive, which might ended up gamer's most of the time
- Burn out from pressure to “keep up”
- Pay to win system which is very unfair
- Oldest Game series like counter strike throughout its lifetime this game has got a lot of updates which is an example of life service game. And that's why the skin floor is too high for most of the inexperienced players
- As new mechanic is new to everyone gaining proper rank can still take time, so they might get out before reaching there
- Most games don't earn that much by selling them. The actually earn by selling passes, items, cosmetics and some premium model in the game
- Those games whose are out there for a long time in the market might lose its original concept
- As some games offer cars and extra features using real money this cause one team dominating over other team
Recently, Microsoft has released 'Intelligent delivery'. As the game will continuously getting new updates and features it might be a problematic to the users as they have a limited amount of storage in their PC. That's why intelligent delivery will help users to uninstall particular features that they don't use anymore.
Some says
"I would rather have creators siphon money into new projects over endless updates and cosmetic sells."
Fortnite
