The further trend towards games that thrive on marketshare worries me.
I mean, great single player games GROW the market.
If you played FF VII as a kid, you damn sure are more likely to get more games bought.
If you play TLOU now, you damn sure are more likely to buy more games, from both the same developer and others.
Game of that type, though, much like MMOs, thrive on being the ONLY AND ONE game played by their users, and for as long as possible. They suck up the market, and then crash and burn leaving nothing behind.
No one looks fondly back to timewasters, less of all the whales.
I'm worried for the market as a whole.
This is functionally an experiment in psychology, and is exploitative towards users, not cooperative.
When the deal ends, oftenmost one part is unhappy about it. That is not, in general, a good business model for the market as a whole.
There certainly is a good-sized market for timewasters, but i'm wondering if really, the only thing that can fill it properly is things of that type.
Not that EVE online is that much different, in truth. But atleast, it fosters people actually talking and organizing.
The closest thing remotely like it would be Eve Online, the PC-based virtual-reality environment that has its hundreds of thousands of subscribers cordoned off into separate servers called shards, which are able to keep tabs on what every player is doing at once. Because Eve maxes out at about 65,000 players per shard
This a complete and utter lie.
Eve is single-sharded, and there is no discernible limit known for total players - and the servers aren't singular, of course. (Even if the main cluster is called Singular!)
EVE's sync is actually low-latency, since all servers report to the central DB, which is, of course, single (but can be vertically sharded)
All EVE players can communicate with another player, or send funds, in less than one second.
EVE has five thousand players on screen, and has been pushing the envelope on that for years.
This isn't coming anywhere near what a medium-sized social network does day-in, day-out, nowhere near the same realm of the technical achievement of EVE.
I have to give them, though, that the automated translation is definitely cool, the continuation of what FFXI wanted to do, so long time ago.
