I miss the days when video games were something you would bought for some money upfront and that was it. There were no microtransactions, DLC, DRM, live service nonsense, and gambling; you just played whatever you bought and that was it. Nowadays, the ever invasive subscription model and other tactics have found their way into the video game market. Video games are no longer things that you just pay once for, they’re becoming a service. Combine this with a market where less and less games come in physical copies, and the market is evolving in a way that I don’t want to see. This article goes on a rant about common video game practices found these days, and why I don’t like them.
Live service games
Live service games can be defined as titles that are essentially small alpha-quality games with little content intially, and as the name implies, is a live service. New content and events are rolled out over time, and players have to stick around for a few years (yes, it takes years) to see the game expand. These patches typically are rolled out every few weeks or so and an internet connection is mandatory to play. These types of games have been around for longer than you might first think, just look at what MMORPGs are doing. My problems with live service games are that they have no ending and the perpetual investment demanded by the game.
Mobile gacha (gambling) games are especially guilty of this; the main ‘story’, if one exists, never ends and the in-game universe just keeps expanding. A classic gacha game plotline goes like this: humanity has been invaded by [insert alien species]{.underline} and pushed to the brink of extinction, you’re commanding a legion of elite units designed to reclaim the Earth. I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen plotlines like this, only for the endgame to be an infinite grind where nothing ever happens and the aliens are never vanquished. As new content is not released rapidly, sometimes you’ll forget what happened previously in the story by the time you start a new chapter. Maybe I’m the weird one for wanting definite endings for games and a continuous storyline, but gacha games are easy to get burnt out of.
Another problem with live service games is the drip feeding and use of FOMO (fear of missing out). The games use tactics like daily login bonuses that reset if you don’t login consecutively and most of the content is given by time-limited events. Live service games encourage you to login everyday and play for a few minutes, or for eternity in MMOs, and make that a routine in your life. The game doesn’t want you to play for more than a few minutes, since that’ll satisfy you and lower the chances of you coming back for more tomorrow. If you don’t login tomorrow, you might miss out on some new top tier unit or item! Once you escape the cycle, it’s very easy to see how dumb and tiring all of this is. A game is something you should play at your own pace, doing whatever you want. Yet live service ‘games’ try to turn that rhythm into a daily habit by using FOMO, of course you’ll get burnt out. New gacha games are released everyday, some flop within a few months, others go on to last 10 years or more. Imagine, 10 years of gradual never-ending content rolled out. There’s bound to be someone who has been through all 10 of those years.
Mobile games
Mobile games have done more damage other than spawning the existence of gacha games, I think they’ve lowered the overall standard for games.
There are two big differences between games on a phone and games on proper systems (consoles and PC): nature of the device, and complexity. When you play a game on a phone, you can play it anywhere and instantly get into it. It takes two seconds to pull a phone out of your pocket, you tap the game icon, and boom you’re in. You can play on public transit, in your bed, on a toilet, when eating, or even while waiting 20 seconds for someone to come. It takes the same amount of time to stop playing too; you exit the game with a tap or just turn the phone off. The mobile phone, is portable. You don’t have that portability and instantaneousness with a console or PC, the best you can get to a phone is a Nintendo Switch but even that isn’t as portable.
Because of the ultra portable and instant nature, mobile games are similarly adapted. They’re smaller, less immersive than console/PC games, and you can start/stop playing anytime. Because of the smaller games, the prices are lower and now the dominant strategy is to be F2P (free to play) while making money with ads or microtransactions. Games are generally less mechanically intensive since the most amount of inputs you can make simultaneously is just your two thumbs. There’s no d-pad or abxy or triggers or analogue sticks, it’s just tapping areas of a non-distinguishable sheet of glass. Overall production quality is worse and you get a bunch of trendy junk that gets cloned to oblivion; I remember the 2048 fever from about 10 years ago. Of course, some mobile games have evolved from being cookie clicker tier junk, modern titles are more mechanically sophisticated. However, the disparity between the average mobile game to an average console/PC game still hasn’t changed that much.
Here’s some of the most popular mobile games from when I was younger, I can’t say much about the current market because I don’t play games on a phone anymore: Jetpack Joyride, Temple Run, Subway Surfers. I hate to say it, but all three of these games are the same at heart: endless running. The mechanics may slightly differ, but ultimately the games are all shallow and meant to be played when you have a minute of spare time. And that’s the problem I have with mobile games, they’re made for the one minute breaks and not an hour(s) long immersive entertainment. There’s no depth, there’s little feeling of accomplishment, and they get boring quickly. Don’t worry for the mobile gamers, you can always find a million clones for your games when you get bored.
I don’t mean any gatekeeping with this, don’t misunderstand. I’m not one of those people that pretend to be part of the “pcmasterrace” cringe or instantly look down at people who play mobile games. What I’m saying is that the simplification of games from phones have become very pervasive and have lowered the overall standard for games in general. You’ll always be able to find games that require frame perfect inputs and have massive tournaments around them, and big titles for consoles and PC will always be alive, but a large and yet-growing fraction of games have been reduced to be “mobile tappers”.
DRM (Digital Rights Management)
Games used to be pretty simple before everything became digitized. You bought a physical copy of the game, put it in your system and just started playing. Once you were done, maybe a friend could come over to play or you can give/lend them the game. If you were completely done, you could sell the game to someone else. There was no Xbox or PS account, no need to connect to the internet, day-one patches, or any restrictions put on you.
The current state of buying a game is extremely different. Physical copies are rare, you agree to a EULA and create a Microsoft account before playing, and there’s a 20 GB day-one patch awaiting you before you can play. Once you start playing, you have to be connected to the internet to prove that you aren’t doing anything fishy. After clearing the game, you can’t give that game to a friend, that concept no longer exists. You can’t sell it either, so no one is able to buy it from you at a discount. The same applies with any other digital media, most prominently music and video.
Say thanks to DRM, which is what causes these restrictions. DRM is something that causes unnecessary and excessive harm, especially to the people that DRM isn’t supposed to target. It’s supposed to protect copyrighted material from illegal distribution and access but has never successfully done it. There’s a few ways DRM attempts to cut off pirating, I’ll cover some of the more common ways.
Unlike physical media where you can walk into a store and buy anonymously with cash, to buy anything digitally you need an account on a distribution platform and games are no different. Here’s a short story from me that happened a few months ago, for good reference.
- I bought Final Fantasy VII on Steam
- I had to agree to a EULA to download the game
- After agreeing, downloading, and launching, I was prompted to make a Square Enix account. This was not bypassable
- I created a burner account, then went to delete it after clearing the game
Here’s a list of all the hurdles I needed to pass to play FF7. I’ll go into reasons for why they’re bad below it.
- I needed a Steam account
- I sign the EULA with Square Enix
- I need to create a Square Enix account
Digital distributor accounts
Having a Steam account causes dependence on Valve, the company behind Steam. Steam is a completely digital distributor of games so there’s no way to get physical copies. What if Valve went bankrupt tomorrow and shut down all their servers? If you bought a game on Steam and didn’t download it, does this mean it’s gone forever? What if your account gets closed? It’s easy to believe that all your games would be gone too. What if a publisher suddenly takes down their game from the store, can no one buy it anymore?
You might think I’m making conspiracy theories, but these are real. Recently, there was a big fuss over Sony shutting down the PSP, PS3, and Vita e-stores, and Nintendo shutting down the DS and Wii e-stores. Sony kept the PS3 and Vita stores open after severe backlash, but Nintendo shut theirs down anyways. All the small games that were exclusive to those stores are effectively lost now, there’s no way to get them unless someone’s working DS has a copy downloaded. This is the problem with digital distribution, you have no control over your media and have to always worry about it disappearing one day. You can salvage a rusty game cartridge made for the NES over 30 years ago, but can’t save an indie game made for the Wii only 10 years ago.
All of these problems can be eliminated if we bought physical copies; if the game developer or retailer goes bankrupt who cares? You have a copy of the game. You can make copies of it, share it to someone, archive it for preservation purposes, and play it whenever you want. Even if the original system meant for that game breaks, you can always use an emulator or a different system. The point is that you own a copy of that game in your own hands. That copy will stay with you even if its creator or distributor dies off, and that’s the important part. Digital distributors like Steam make it easy to ‘acquire’ games, but those are never yours.
EULAs and online connections
Square Enix’s EULA doesn’t contain anything evil at face value. It contains the standard clauses; you can’t sue the company, you’re given a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, etc. (extremely restricted) license, and you can’t do illegal things like decompiling or distributing the game. What game developers don’t seem to understand is that most people that buy their games are going to do it the legit way. These people will gladly pay for your title instead of finding torrents. The EULA isn’t going to stop pirates anyways, so by enforcing this very restrictive agreement you’re actually hurting the loyal fans that support the business while not doing anything to the people who don’t pay.
Another problem with these EULAs is how nasty they can get. For instance, I once found a game by Bandai Namco that looked rather interesting. There was a EULA and I gave it a quick read, turns out this EULA made me immediately lose all interest: you need constant internet connection to play. Oh, this game was single player by the way.
Even if we live in a world where internet connection is everywhere, having terms like this is upsetting. Why do you need an internet connection to play an offline, single player game? My theory is that Bandai runs some spooky software with the game that keeps pinging their servers. This program likely reports if you do anything like use Cheat Engine or try to break the EULA, so it functions as an anti-cheat. Again, this is for a single player game; I cannot emphasize enough how ridiculous this is. What if you wanted to play somewhere where you have no internet? On a plane, boat, or deep in a camping site? What if your home’s router breaks or there’s a power outage? Or what happens if Bandai’s servers go down and the game can’t ping them, will this prevent you from playing? Why should events like these stop you from playing a single player game?
There are worse EULAs out there, if you thought mandatory internet connection for single player games was bad enough. EA, a game publisher you want to avoid in general, had some EULAs that restricted you to a one-time download to a single machine. This means that if you have a laptop and desktop, you had to buy the game two times even if downloading from the same distributor. Let me say this again; let’s say you wanted to download whatever the latest FIFA game was to your laptop. You pay $80, agree to the EULA, and download it. Let’s say that you uninstalled the game a few months later due to low storage and wanted to reinstall. You can’t, you have to pay $80 again to do it. The same applies if you wanted to download that FIFA game to any of your other machines. Just think about this madness. You’re someone who just wants to pay fairly and play FIFA, yet the company selling you the game puts these extremely restrictive agreement terms on you. Meanwhile, the pirates who get their free copies don’t have to deal with this nonsense.
Anticheat and anti-tamper
There’s another Square Enix game that I was interested in, the Nier Replicant remake. This game used to have Denuvo anti-tamper, a rather self-explanatory name. Why it was removed, I have no idea. Denuvo exists to prevent people from illegally copying or modifying game files and is known to cause some performance loss. So if you were to get a free, cracked version of Nier Replicant with Denuvo disabled, not only did you get the game for free but your copy runs better than someone who fairly paid $80 for the game. It’s ridiculous that software like Denuvo is still used, it causes way more damage than good. Denuvo also isn’t perfect, sometimes it’ll get false positives and so some players get weird issues that ruin gameplay. Again, the pirate wins.
Anticheats are a bigger problem than anti-tamper these days though. The name is again, self-explanatory. Anticheats make “some” sense in competitive multiplayer titles, and are very common indeed. Anticheat has a rather big problem inherant to its design: security. See, anticheat is software that runs with lots of privileges on a system. It has access to virtually everything on your computer; personal and system files, all memory, network traffic, and any devices connected. Anticheat needs this privilege to detect any potential cheats, but it’s like trusting someone to work on super confidential projects in the NSA; you can trust them to act in good faith or you can have someone like Edward Snowden who revealed everything to the public and broke public trust. If an anticheat software was known to have a critical security vulnerability, you can get some pretty nasty consequences. For example, someone could use the vulnerability to access everything on your machine or even perform remote code execution (the hacker can do literally anything they want to on your machine, such as deleting everything or installing malware). These kinds of vulnerabilities aren’t a schizophrenic fear too; like the digital distribution store events, these actually existed and more will appear.
But honestly, a random hacker crippling your system should be a relatively small concern compared to the anticheat itself; how can you tell if it’s not doing anything funny like scanning and sending data about your system to someone? In fact, as I was writing this article I found an anticheat that does phone home with private data about your system, look up for posts about Xigncode3. In a sense, the hacker is now the anticheat company or game developer themselves. You can’t tell if the anticheat is doing anything malicious or not, it’s like a blackbox, so you have to trust that the program is behaving as it should. Let’s say you play a game like Valorant, which uses anticheat and is played by millions. This game’s anticheat is known to persist after uninstalling the game, which is quite spooky. Let’s trace a few steps back: the developer of Valorant is Riot, who is owned by Tencent, who has ties with the CCP… maybe you got a little concerned just now if you consume Western media. Not saying “China bad”, but with these connections you can easily become wary of lots of programs on your system. Trusting anticheat software to do only what it claims to do is a bad idea, you should always be skeptical of what might be happening in the background.
More account creation
Let’s wrap up the long DRM rant with account creation again, but this time with Square Enix instead of Steam. I don’t understand why playing FF7 needs an account, the game is over 20 years old and came out in an era where IPv4 addresses were still abundant. Why does Square Enix want me to make an account just to play this completely offline, single player game? Square Enix says I get cloud saves and some other features with the account, but Steam already supports these. In the end, I made the account and tried to delete it after beating the game. It took an hour of digging through old forums to find a very convoluted solution.
You see, the account that I create can’t directly be deleted. It needs to be linked to a different type of Square Enix account (so I have to make another one), then delete that other account which will delete all connected accounts. I want to just say, why is this process unbelievably difficult? To delete one account I had to make another one, link the two, then delete that second account. All I could think of was how hard Square Enix was trying to get me to register with them, it’s stupid.
Account creation should be sparingly done; having more only congests your email inbox with spam, causes password recycling and therefore increased security risks (unless you’re cool and use a password manager), and just overall adds more unnecessary corporate data mining and bloat. This doesn’t apply just to gaming related accounts, but email registration in general. The more you sign up for, the more vulnerable you become if you don’t have good practices (which most people don’t). The first 3 hours of trying to start FF7 was bad and because of this I highly discourage anyone from getting the Steam port. FF7 is a wonderful game, just don’t get the Steam port (sail the high seas instead).
The future of gaming
There’s a lot more that can be said of the future of gaming. On one hand, the constant improvements of hardware and software is exciting to see, and I’m thinking of a hardware upgrade myself. The advent of raytracing is fantastic, I now have a killer display upgrade for better visuals, and I’m still not burnt out of games. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of issues plaguing the overall gaming market that do make me want to leave it sometimes. Shallow mobile games, live service and cloud-based games as a service, the ubiquity of microtransactions and overall incompleteness, and increasing restrictions from DRM and unfair practices. The list can go on, and this article can go on for waaay longer but let’s cut it here for now. The future looks very unstable in the midst of digitalization taking away freedoms, let’s see if how much more the public is willing to accept this before something happens. I might revisit and expand on some untouched topics, such as my thoughts on cloud gaming (and cloud services in general) or VR.