4 ms·
The long term trend in PC gaming was to slowly move parts of game programs onto servers in corporate offices so they could control them and extract monopoly pro
by monster99 7y ago
The long term trend in PC gaming was to slowly move parts of game programs onto servers in corporate offices so they could control them and extract monopoly profits. The goal for any capitalist organization is monopoly profits. You can do that in many ways.
League of legends and DOTA 2 were just real time strategy games that have been coded to use the mainframe model, instead of the locally run application model like quake 3 and Unreal tournament.
That was the whole plan for all new PC games. Think about this - league of legends makes pure profit selling flags to display skins that are already on kids machines because we know how computers work. That was the end game for the game indsutry to resell the same game assets like skins and characters over and over at insane margins.
That's exactly what we got with lootboxes and mobile - aka a platform that is completley locked down and there is no software ownership. Go to google and select images, and put in "mobile game revenue 2019" or any other year just prior to this one. Then compare it to PC or console game revenue. The software industry is obsessed with locking down the PC because they see the mad profits from mobile. That's why we got drm in windows 10...
It's all been slowly building from early succeses of walled gardens like mmo's and steam in 2004, to fully server locked multiplayer games that companies control like league and dota 2. To mobile gacha games that sell gambling for pokemon like characters to kids for sick profits without the kids getting any ownership of the software they are paying for.