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The Ticking Time Bomb of Modern Free-To-Play Games (theverge.com) 83

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
When games like Dragalia Lost shut down for good, what happens next? From a report: Dragalia Lost launched in 2018 as a statement of intent from Nintendo in partnership with Japanese developer Cygames. Nintendo may have first jumped into the field of mobile games in 2016 with the launch of games like Super Mario Run and Miitomo, but this was the first original property the company had produced exclusively for mobile devices. This free-to-play gacha game (a game whose content is generally free to access while charging microtransactions for loot boxes and randomized lotteries for rare and limited-time characters) had a flashy multi-region launch campaign collaborating with major Japanese musician DAOKO, banking on the game's success at home and abroad. And it was a hit. Less than a year after launch, the game had already earned over $100 million, with a steady stream of merchandise following soon after. Yet, as of last month, Nintendo and Cygames published the game's final update, and this week, it was revealed that the game would shut down on November 29th after just three years of operation.

Without any announcement from Nintendo of an official offline version or archive to memorialize the game after servers shut down and the game is no longer accessible to the public, fans are working across the community to preserve everything they can of a game they dedicated themselves to over the last few years. "Especially with games like Dragalia Lost and games that are on a live server and stuff, once the server closes down, you can't play that anymore," explains Sei, an active member of the game's community. "It's not like you can download a ROM of a Game Boy game and play it: once it's gone, it's gone." Free-to-play games have risen from an anomaly to the most profitable sector of the games industry. In 2012, the mobile games market hit $9 billion in revenue at a time when free-to-play revenue systems were only starting to grow more popular, challenging the norm of games charging a one-time price of entry.

At the same time, free-to-play revenue on PC was at an impressive $11 billion, thanks to titles like League of Legends, already eclipsing the revenue earned by premium titles. By 2020, free-to-play revenue across mobile, PC, and console accounted for over $96 billion. Unsurprisingly, the industry has adapted to increasingly cater to players in this bustling sector. Yet, for every headline boasting of the phenomenal revenue-generating success of titles like Fortnite or Pokemon Go comes a host of titles that burn out within a year or sometimes even less. Japan is one of the biggest regions for free-to-play games, particularly on mobile, where titles like Uma Musume: Pretty Derby have broken into the top 10 highest-grossing mobile games worldwide despite only being available in a single country. Yet, even games based on major properties like Bandai Namco's Tales of Luminaria have struggled, shutting down in under six months.
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The Ticking Time Bomb of Modern Free-To-Play Games

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  • They're only games. This is not any kind of travesty.

    Move on with you lives - find new games to play.

    • Would you say that if LotR was all collected and burned?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by registrations_suck ( 1075251 )

        LOTR sucks. I mean...christ...all they had to do is give the ring to one of Gandalf's big birds, fly over the volcano and drop it in. All that march, march, march and war bullshit was totally unnecessary.

        • If you were tr00 you would know that Gandalf's big birds were able to fly away Frodo and Sam from crumbling Mount Doom only because The Ring has already been dissolved, thus Sauron's power diminished.
        • Then how about:
          Starship Troopers?
          Huck Finn?
          The entire collection of Marvel and DC?
          Casa Blanca
          Plan 9 From Outer Space
          The MCU movies?

          Just because something is bad, doesn't mean it should be lost. It should be at the very least have a copy made and stored somewhere safe. This is a problem the video game industry has that most other creative works do not.
          • Well, every time a stage play is produced, people buy tickets, watch it, and leave. There may or may not be printed scripts available, but largely the record of the performance exists solely in the memories of the audience and performers. It's convenient that we have book,disk, and tape recordings of the works you referenced, but that has only been available in recent human history.

        • I don't think anybody could have chosen to throw the ring into the volcano. It had to happen by accident. Not to pry into JRR's mind too deeply...

        • I never understood why these movies are so big. The overall story arc was about a dude who travels to drop a ring into lava. I get that side-stories were good, but side-stories don't carry the movie.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Mitreya ( 579078 )

          all they had to do is give the ring to one of Gandalf's big birds, fly over the volcano and drop it in.

          I, for one, welcome our new big-bird overlords.
          They only covered the possibilities of Galadriel and Gandalf refusing to take the ring (and Boromir trying to take it) but eagles are not exempt.

          Also, eagles would be seen and intercepted, so the story would be short indeed.

        • One does not simply fly into Mordor.

      • I would. I hate to be that guy, but don't conflate a lifestyle with entertainment. Entertainment is fleeting and plentiful. I know countless people who have read the books. Once. These are the people who understand what entertainment is. Now if it all got burnt tomorrow I wouldn't cry for me, I had no intention of reading it again. Would I cry for my kids? Undoubtedly, they'll have their own entertainment and may not even be interested in the "old" stuff nor have time to read it given the new content they a

        • Not everything is worth preserving.

          Its either collect nothing, or collect everything.
          Too many opinions on what is good enough to preserved or not.

          • Its either collect nothing, or collect everything.

            That's a very great way to find yourself in a self-destructive hording spiral. There are truly countless of games released both for PC and mobile, literally hundreds come out on the platforms every month. Collecting them all and treating them as equals is just stupid.

            Come up with system and a justification, and then apply it. Lots of things in the world aren't any good left forgotten as a fleeting mention in the annals of history, if at all, and that is all many things deserve.

      • I don't think a company making a financial decision to shut down servers on a piece of software...with a user base that has shrunk to the point that it doesn't make financial sense continue supporting...quite equates to book burning.

        Is the company just supposed to become a charity, for the sake of a few people that happen to have an unhealthy obsession with one particular game?

        Make no mistake, these games are made to tickle those certain parts of ones brain, so that they do become an obsession. It's probab

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          The ideal solution is to provide the community with the necessary software and documentation to continue to support those games on their own. A lot of people think this should be required by law. Not just for games, but for other products as well, in right-to-repair legislation.

          What isn't needed is your moralizing.

    • Re:Only a Game (Score:5, Funny)

      by fqsfgs ( 9404143 ) on Friday September 02, 2022 @09:54AM (#62846443)
      BREAKING NEWS: Man who doesn't care about games doesn't care that games suck, but does care enough to tell everyone how little he cares. Expect to hear more about this as the situation develops.

      • Funny as your post may be, I don't get the sense that the GP doesn't care about games. Quite the opposite. People who get stuck playing only *one* game could be said to "not care about games". Just because you have so many games available that you don't care about the loss of a particular one doesn't mean you don't like games.

        I'm with the GP. I couldn't give a shit if any 5+ year old game shuts down. There's so many other games in the world to play with literally multiple new ones every single day (especial

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gTsiros ( 205624 )

      Entertainment? Bah! Such an unimportant matter.
      How many billions you say? Doesn't matter, it's unimportant. It's only a game.
      It has no value, obviously.
      Or, to be more precise, it has no value except that which we assign to it ourselves, in stark contrast to other things which have intrinsic value.
      Like money. Or a gamepad. Made of chocolate. From Belgium.

    • I'm not familiar with this game, but all free to play mobile games I've come across were just very thinly disguised Skinner boxes and a really shitty way to waste time. Chances are, this game is no different. So really Nintendo is doing these people a favor.
      • Still modern mobile is way ahead of most platforms that are emulated/revived as part of "retro" scene now. So preservation of them as part of humanity's cultural heritage is a valid concern.

  • I play Rise of Cultures (Score:3)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Friday September 02, 2022 @09:26AM (#62846383) Homepage

    I love it.

    If it shut down tomorrow, I would kill.... my account, rant a couple of times on the internet till I found a new game and totally forget about it.

    Ticking Time Bomb? More like a ticking pie in the face.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      I love it.

      If it shut down tomorrow, I would kill.... my account, rant a couple of times on the internet till I found a new game and totally forget about it.

      Ticking Time Bomb? More like a ticking pie in the face.

      I think this is more the ticking time whinge about centralised control over multiplayer games.

      You can still play the original BF 1942 over LAN, you cant do that with any of the modern BF games, or COD.

      But it's something most players have long since accepted. I've stopped paying for these games so I'm just going to make sure I don't get hit in the face when the people who didn't realise EA/Activision/et al. don't give a shit and definitely don't owe them anything.

      Doesn't matter how popular it is now

  • I must've missed the ticking time bomb (Score:3, Funny)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Friday September 02, 2022 @09:28AM (#62846387) Homepage

    Free game server shuts down. No fuck was given by anyone over 12. Weather coming next.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Note that "free-to-play' often means 'player habitually spends money, often to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year'.

      I personally avoid this class of games like the plague, as I want some semblance of being able to revisit a game I purchased. However, this makes far more money than a traditional single player game or multiplayer game where players can host. As a result, the money flows away from developing the class of games I would enjoy and towards these ephemeral microtransaction laden 'games' that are

    • Wait until all software works like this.

      Don't say you weren't warned.

  • Timbomb? Only Free to play?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Taskmage ( 191493 ) on Friday September 02, 2022 @09:36AM (#62846401)

    And where is the difference to a pay to play or subscription based game that shuts down after a year or two?
    Sure, if no microtransactions are included, you may have invested less money - but i see no difference for emotional investment.

    If the servers go down the game is dead. This is true for each and every game that requires online access for whatever reason.
    So shouldn't it be "The Ticking Time Bomb of Modern Online Games"?

    What exactly is the point here that applies only to free to play games?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jeremyp ( 130771 )

      Well if you paid lots of money for a single player game that requires you to log in to a server to play and then they shut down the server so you can't play it, you have a legitimate grievance. If you didn't pay anything for the game it's more a "so what were you expecting to happen" scenario.

      You might legitimately expect game publishers to keep paid for games playable after they lose interest by e.g. releasing a patch that removed the necessity to log in to a server (accepted that they might not do that).

      • Well, what you actually say is that because it is free to play, it is less of a timebomb because "what were you expecting to happen"...

        To me this looks like an artificial differentiation.
        If i play a free to play game that needs an online connection, it *will* shut down at some point in the future.
        If i play a pay to play game that needs an online connection, it *will* shut down at some point in the future.
        But i can't make _any_ assumption about the "when", because it has nothing to do with my expectations or

      • The problem is for people that spend money to play the F2P game. If you're a whale, and sank thousands in cosmetics, or to build your collection (e.g., card games like Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering Arena), do you have a grievance? I think you do.

        The only difference between many modern F2P games and traditional games you had to pay for, is the monetization model. I paid $50 or whatever for Diablo 1 back in the day. I have no clue if BattleNet servers are still on for it, but if I want to, I can install

        • So the difference is that you *can* invest more money, while you got the "all included" package before.
          What about DLCs, formerly known as addons?

          Yes, with free to play games there is the risk that you can't play it the way it was tomorrow. But that is true for _every_ game, no matter what monetization method it uses. Just add enough time and it won't run/won't be playable anymore.

          Or, the other way around, you *had* to pay to even play the basic game in the past, now you can play the (basic) game for free. B

        • If you're a whale, and sank thousands in cosmetics, or to build your collection

          Perhaps the smart move for the software company would be to offer these whale's a conversion opportunity to transfer some fraction of their in-game wealth to the publisher's new-game-of-the-day. Don't want an identified whale swimming off to another publisher's ecosystem, after all. Oh, well.. I hate these things.

    • One of a number of things will happen when the servers go down:

      1: The game maker offers to cede control of the servers and codebase to another party, so the game can keep being run, if not developed. This seems to be very rare.
      2: The game maker makes the game open source, both client and server. So far, only happened with MUDs, no commercial ventures, because the IP winds up getting sold off to some place, and tossed in a vault forever.
      3: The game's client is still out there with graphical assets, but

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      If the servers go down the game is dead. This is true for each and every game that requires online access for whatever reason.
      So shouldn't it be "The Ticking Time Bomb of Modern Online Games"?

      Yep. Pretty much every modern game has this issue. If you look online, you'll find plenty of instances of pay-to-play games - ones that sell for "full retail" - becoming unplayable due to their servers going down. Even games that are almost entirely single player have become unplayable due to server checks, there mostly for DRM but also for the most minor of online things. You can't even play a modern Tetris game without an Internet connection due to an online leaderboard feature, which means they added ant

    • And the problem is not limited to f2p or online only games shutting down.

      If also affects constantly evolving games. Dota 2 is an example of that Dota 2 today is drastically different than it was 8 years ago. Old versions literally don't exist anymore.

      Same for the time limited game modes. Dominion from league of legends, the various Diablo like event game modes fun Dota 2... You either were there and enjoyed then for the month they were available, or you will never play them.

      And if affects unimaintained game

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      where is the difference to a pay to play or subscription based game

      One difference is that free-to-play games have a very skewed distribution of payments. A small minority of players spend 95% of the money made by the game.
      People can spend tens of thousands of dollars -- and they lose the accounts just like everyone else when the game shuts down.

  • Fixed Title: "Online Games Shut Down" (Score:3)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Friday September 02, 2022 @09:47AM (#62846427)

    The title is bad, the article is bad, the suggestion that somehow "Free to play" games are different from any other online game is bad.

    Whoever wrote this either has some sort of hidden agenda, or is an utter moron.

    You spend money on online games, and they get shut down. Yep. Happens. All the time.

  • When games like Dragalia Lost shut down for good, what happens next?

    You... play a different game.

    If you treated it like it was an investment and spent more money on it than you would have gladly spent per month to access it, that was stupid and it's on you.

    They don't even have to shut down the game to shit it up. I played STO back in 2014 and thought I'd dust it off and try it again since it's still running. All of my characters were still there, good work STO. The game is now less of a grind to get to max level, but more of one to get the good ships. But more importantly it seems to be more a bugfest than ever, it's so bad they literally took the bug report button out of the game. There was always a problem with dropping connection while changing maps, now it's worse. Pathing problems and enemies stuck in walls (or passing through them completely) have multiplied. Maybe they're just trying to get people to stop playing this antique game, but if people are still spending cash on it I can see why they're keeping it going.

    GTA Online is much the same animal. It's worse in a way though because they created all of this content you can only get to through the online version, so now you have to play with other people whether you want to or not. Or at least you have to play the online version to get to the new content; even if you don't want to play with other people you're forced to use the online mode. You can start a private session joinable only by crew or by invite, but if you can't get online, you can't get access to any of that stuff. And when the servers go away, all of the non-SP content goes away too.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Always-online [ie mandatory, even for 1P games] is a different beast, though it needs fighting too.

      FWIW you can block certain ports to get GTAO to let you run your own mesh node alone. After successfully phoning home a dozen times to a dozen places on boot, anyway. Again, a different beast, and one that's starting to affect the meatspace. I look forward to my toilet not flushing because AUTHENTICATION ERROR CONTACT YOUR NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR.

  • In "free" to play games the main design goal is to extract money out of you, where every hostile tactic, from nagging to actively blocking players from progressing, is used. The goal of gaming should be to provide entertainment, not to bilk you out of money. So lets call it proper names - F2P is a form of online gambling.

    • In "free" to play games the main design goal is to extract money out of you

      You just literally described every for profit game ever released regardless if it were free to play or not. You may be not like the mechanics in a specific case, but to say free to play games are incompatible with gaming in general is just absurd as making money is core to the development of any game.

      Now are you suggesting the millions of people playing League of Legends are not "gaming", and are not "entertained"? If so I ask you to carefully define what your idea of "gaming" is.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Scoth ( 879800 )

        I think it's important to differentiate one-time retail pricing vs. free to play with cosmetics vs. pay to win games. They're very distinct and different.

        Yes, all gaming is designed to "extract money", but a one-time-cost retail game has motivation to be as polished and good as possible because they get one chunk of money out of you, and word of mouth and reviews are important.

        Free to Play with cosmetics, like games like TF2, LoL, and similar also try to extract money, they don't block progress and don't te

  • When did we stop considering gaming a form of highly available entertainment and get this idea that entertainment is an addiction which can only be provided from a specific title? Why are any fucks given at all? There are countless games out there. People weren't hollow or empty before Super Mario Run was released and they certainly won't be for more than 20 seconds after it disappears. Not every piece of content deserves to be archived and immortalised.

    Move on to the next piece of entertainment.

    Imagine if

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jeti ( 105266 )

      When did we stop considering gaming a form of highly available entertainment and get this idea that entertainment is an addiction which can only be provided from a specific title?

      Since games became tailored to exploit addictive behavior and many people ruined their lives by spending thousands of dollars per month on those games.

      • Since games became tailored to exploit addictive behavior

        Specifically, to exploit it with recurring monetary benefits. Games always tried to get you hooked, but it just meant word of mouth advertising and cross sales.

  • is easy. Don't get hooked on this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      True, and the best way for people to know that they should avoid getting hooked on things? Stories like these to remind them of the likelihood of the content evaporating.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jeti ( 105266 )
      Cool. You just solved the opioid crisis.

  • Well, if you're *that* hooked, time to whip up those dev skills and develop a free clone maybe? Programming games is fun, you'll learn things on the way that you can increase your employability, and then you an actually make the game exactly like you want it. And since you have a whole community of players organized besides you, it shouldn't be that hard to find artists and testers...

  • Let's be clear about one thing. Nintendo are in the business of making money. Games are only a side effect of that, and only when it serves their financial interests. That's how capitalism and the free market work. If you don't like that, the only option is to change how the free market works. Good luck with that.

  • My kids had loads and loads of fun on their DS. There was this one animating game, Flipnote Studio, that they enjoyed using and watching the huge community generated content. Then one day Nintendo announced they were shutting down the server. No options. Maybe upgrade your device, and then you can wait until they do it to you again.

  • "The Ticking Time Bomb of Modern Free-To-Play Games
    When games like Dragalia Lost shut down for good, what happens next?"

    You get your money back, all the 0 cents.

  • How is this any different than paid-to-play games, that have *their* servers shut down?

    Answer: It's not!

    It's not new and it's not news that a company can stop supporting games.

  • Imagine if you really enjoyed a game that was not popular, was shut down, and there were no fan remakes of.

    And imagining getting the urge to play it in 5 years and being tormented with the realization that you can't.

  • I think for games, if turning off a game's servers will prevent a customer from accessing the product they purchased, the company must provide an alternative for that customer to continue using their product.

    For example if you bought a BMW ten years ago, and BMW decides to turn off their subscription server for Turbo 3.0 and that bricks your car there would be a class action lawsuit. (BMW is offering subscriptions for things like heated seats, Tesla ties software subscriptions to owners and prevents these f

  • I'm glad I didn't buy an xbox. I really wanted to buy this game console, but in the end I regretted the money that I could have spent on it. Now I notice that I don't play regular video games at all and always prefer online gambling, you can visit this page [parimatch.in] and look at the game options if you are also interested. It's a cool alternative to video games.

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