#alder613

It's funny, thinking about how sick I was of Mega Man games in the 90's. I hated seeing the announcement of yet another Mega Man game. There were years where Capcom would give us two, I think sometimes even three Mega Man games. And so many of them felt rushed and interchangeable to me.

Now I see Mega Man and it's like "Yay, Mega Man! I missed that guy!" Something something Brian Eno.

It's taken me a minute to warm up to the way Dual Override looks. It's not too different from Mega Man 11, but Dual Override changes Mega Man's proportions to look more in line with something like Mega Man 8.

Bigger arms, bigger boots, and a smaller head. Whereas I have quickly discovered I was one of the rare people who actually thought he looked good in Mega Man 11.

I like the bigger head, smaller boots look. I like that he has slightly more normal proportions. I feel sort of like how people joked that Sonic kept getting taller in every game, there was a time that Mega Man's boots and arms got bigger in every game.

Absolutely not! Lots of people seem to hate Game-Key Cards. It's the worst of all worlds; it's as bad as buying a download code in a game box combined with a waste of plastic.

Things can be bad an not be AI generated. For example, Green Light Ride probably wasn't AI generated.

I don't even really think the lyrics are that bad, honestly. It's got the vibe of like... an anime that got converted into a b-tier Saturday Morning Cartoon, you know? Like a Nelvana dub, or Ocean Productions or something.

I mean this is the most naked example of capitalism.

Financially speaking, let's break down what a game means. If a company like Sega gets you to buy one game a year, that means you are giving them $50-$70 annually. If it's a game you really like, something that becomes your favorite game of all time, then it is the bar you compare all other games in the franchise to. Yakuza 5 is the best one? Well Yakuza 3, 4, 6, and 7 aren't as good as Yakuza 5, then. And maybe that means you eventually stop buying new Yakuza games, because you'd rather replay your favorite one.

In comes the live service game. You never buy it, it never ends. You can't say "Yakuza 5 was my favorite" because there is no Yakuza 5. There's just The Yakuza Game, and maybe season 5 was your favorite, but parts of season 5 are still in the game even though its season 28. Right? Season 5 never really goes away, not entirely.

An item in The Yakuza Game is $5. Maybe it's a shirt, maybe its shoes, whatever. And that's a lot cheaper than $60 for an entire game, right? So people are more willing to buy it. If you buy one $5 item a month, then Sega has made the same amount of money from you that they would have if you bought a full price game.

But the idea isn't just to make you spend $5 a month. Maybe you spend $10 some months. $15. Even $20. For $20, you get four virtual shirts, and that's cheaper than the price of one real-life shirt. Right? You feel like that has appropriate value.

But in Sega's eyes, all these small increments add up to you giving them more money over the long term. And on a game that lasts forever. $60-$240 a year, every year, in perpetuity.

They don't have to worry about a remaster in ten years, because if it catches on, then this forever-game will still be getting played in ten years. At worst, you can do what Fortnite, Overwatch and Apex Legends did, and have throwback seasons (and in those cases, you can charge people a second time for updated versions of items users might already have).

This is how Epic Games makes $20 billion a year. A live service game has the potential to vastly exceed the profits of a traditional one-and-done game by truly staggering degrees.

The catch being the same thing that happened in the mid 2000's. World of Warcraft exploded big time and everybody scrambled to make their own MMO to steal WoW's thunder. Turns out: people only have so much time in their day. Dozens of MMOs failed. Wild Star, Everquest Next, Tabula Rasa, Warhammer Online...

Remember when I said "Maybe Yakuza 5 is your favorite" and mentioned how many Yakuza games came both before and after it? Yeah. Now you aren't competing with other games in the series, you're competing with the pillars of the genre. For a live service game to succeed, you need to nail "the favorite" on your first shot. And there aren't very many games that do that, in any format.

And in a live service arena like this, where a lot of the profit is generated from entrenched, habitual spenders who burrow into one game and never leave? The odds of pulling them out of their comfort zone shrink, and shrink, and shrink. If you only play video games for an hour per day, why would you go somewhere new when all of your friends and items already exist in the current game?

But such is the siren call of profit. Why make $100 million on Jet Set Radio when it has the potential to be $1 billion, $5 billion, or even $10 billion? Even just a sprinkling of live service can sweeten long term earnings, after all. Users may not like it, but they'll tolerate being annoyed a little bit. And it's fine annoying them a little bit. And a little bit more. And a little bit more. And a little bit more.

That's a little weird.

If it makes you feel any better, we've seen one Sega game track already:

In some of the footage this is called "Magma Planet" or "Lava Cave," but it's clearly a match for Planet Velteor from Galaxy Force II:

There are definitely people who did not vibe with Halo back in the day. Most of them came from the PC space, I believe, where a game like Halo seemed a lot less special.

Because, like, Halo didn't invent big levels, or shooters with vehicles, or even dual stick analog aiming. You could, if you wanted, pick Halo apart really easily. It had a very long hype cycle, being announced three or four years before it came out, which back in 2001 was nothing short of an eternity.

Bungie made a lot of promises about what they wanted Halo to be, and then delivered on less than half of them once Microsoft came knocking. I believe it's been said they rebuilt most of the game from scratch in only a few months in order to launch with the Xbox. But I also believe they credit Microsoft with lighting a fire under them that helped Halo come out at all, otherwise it may have spent years more in development hell.

But make no mistake, Halo was a big deal. Huge. It may not have invented its ideas, but it used them to bring a type of game to a type of people that had never seen anything like that before. Halo did a lot of things right, even if later parts of the game feel held together by bits of duct tape and a photocopier.