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> developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model

This is not a defence of the current state of the industry, but let's not get too rosy with our nostalgia glasses.

As the content increased and fidelity improved, production costs skyrocketed. The majority of games failed commercially. A commercial failure with a big production budget could (and regularly did) easily destroy a studio. Even a pretty big multi-title studio. The churn and carnage was dramatic.

Then with an alternative distribution and the availability of tools, the race-to-the-bottom pricing was on. Further increasing the pressure on production.

There were always games being released on the single pay model, but it was never a good risk profile for investors. That profile is almost suicidal when the investment is $200m vs $10m.

There is still a healthy single pay tranche to the industry: indie games. And not coincidentally, production costs of a 'triple-I' game are not that dissimilar to the production costs of an average publisher-funded game 20 years ago.

Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content).

Their logic is quite flawless:

Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible with console exclusives, ie. single player games.

I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.

In an alternate reality, 3D TV really took off and split screen was replaced by polarized-screen. Wouldn't that have been neat?

https://www.tweaking4all.com/video/gaming/split-screen-game-...

Wow super neat, you reminded me of a family member who has a 3D TV!

And with modification this technique also works with laptops and colorized glasses!

gaming intensifies

A couple things I want to respond to:

> I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.

I think this is fundamentally a problem, because the psychological pressures a game applies to get people to pay for microtranactions are intrinsically opposed to fun and satisfying experiences. Games that successfully monetize on microtransactions do so by putting the "fun" just out of reach, and annoy and bore their users into putting money into the slot to get the result they want.

> There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, except priorities change in the industry.

I think the single-pay model might very well have been an accident of history. Before we had home consoles and PC gaming, the business model for video games was based on recurring revenue: in that case in the form of coin-operated games. Before digital distribution, the only way to monetize a game for PC or home console was to sell a game in a box with enough value inside that customers would be willing to pay outright for it. That was the age of the gaming experience as a development priority: the game itself had to be good enough that players would be willing to pay $50 for the next title.

But now that digital distribution is the norm, it's again possible for game developers to extract revenue from users on a recurring basis, and since that is wildly more profitable and less risky than relying on one-time-purchases, that's what developers are going to focus on. That's only accelerated by the cost of content creation: in order to build a AAA game these days, it takes an army of artists many years to deliver a product. That's a far cry from something like the original Diablo which was made by a handful of people. With that level of financial investment, studios are much less likely to take risks on new ideas, and are more likely to seek alternative means to monetize that investment.

I would also point the finger at Free to Play games simply undercutting the single purchase games and diluting the market for AAA studios big budget games.

One more thought is the idea of the "Forever Game". It seems the longtail development cost of already released games keeps growing. So how do you fund it? Is that a cause or a symptom of the drive toward profit?

The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.

It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate it's users behind those walls on purpose to get big buck for small bang.

For me, personally, I will never buy a game if it has some connection to EA ever. These guys are toxic and just hurt the industry. But people buy and EA delivers. And obviously people don't learn, EA got so much shit from the internet community and people still don't stop buying there games, which, for me, is incomprehensible.

> The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.

It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.

> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible

Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.

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[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...

[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.