this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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I think you'll find that if you go to the forums for any live service game whose popularity has visibly waned, which is nearly all of them on Steam, since Steam makes those numbers public, you'll see people attributing it to things that the developer did, balancing or otherwise, but that seems naive to me. It seems inevitable that the popularity of these things will wane over time. To end up with anything else strikes me as a stroke of luck, even if the game is a masterpiece in competitive design.
We have templates for this already. Online games that predate the live service era can still be played and enjoyed in perpetuity, including the likes of Quake (this one's even open source), StarCraft, and, once again, Third Strike. You can check the Twitch numbers for each of them, and we can actually get really good numbers for how many people are playing Third Strike at any given time, give or take a few random arcade cabinets out in the wild, via FightCade. They don't sustain a playerbase the size of League of Legends, and I don't think any game ever will without a drip feed of new content. Chess hasn't had a rule change in over 100 years, to my knowledge, and despite being proven to stand up to the test of time competitively, it will never do League of Legends numbers either.
Are you sure about that? I would assume there are many more chess players worldwide.
Most video games that have existed have followed a similar trajectory, but that doesn't make it inevitable by any means. Competitive games are typically the ones with the longest lifespans. Some people are still playing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance online and possibly Battle for Middle Earth 2 as well.
But these models are not profitable, so game developers don't try to follow them. Perhaps the reason why popularity seems to inevitably decline is because the gaming industry is practicing planned obsolescence. They deliberately put older games out to pasture once the profit streams have dried up, but if the developers weren't so focused on profit, maybe that wouldn't always happen.
Probably only by the most liberal definition. Chess matches aren't watched by a crowd that could fill a stadium like soccer is, and even after a surge during the pandemic, it doesn't pull numbers on Twitch like League of Legends does on a bad day. I've played chess, but I don't, present tense, play chess, you know?
I brought up the three video games I did precisely because it's impossible to force obsolescence or put them out to pasture. Quake being open source allows for a game that's proven to be competitively viable and enticing to be maintained and expanded by the community the way you described, but it doesn't stick with its audience the way any "shiny new thing" sticks. Some people are still playing these games the way some people are still playing Supreme Commander and Battle for Middle-earth, but once again, they'll always stabilize at a number way lower than a game like League of Legends with frequent new content, regardless of balance.
But if someone said hey, wanna play a game of chess?, you would be able to. Partially because the rules haven't changed since you last played. So that counts for me.
You might wanna check the numbers on League, although they haven't published anything official in years. Viewership is down massively compared to 5-10 years ago.
You may be right, but I have a hunch that there is fresh ground out there for the adventurous game developer willing to break it. Video games are still a very new type of media and I don't think we've seen all the forms that they can take. It's like being in the silent film era and having a discussion about the potential future of pornographic films. It's hard to know what the future has in store; never say never, as they say.
I checked the numbers on League just before that comment. They're still at about the 100k average they've been since the beginning of Twitch Tracker's history for it in 2017, with a similar bump that chess got during the pandemic. I'm all for those evergreen competitive games; I refuse to play LoL anymore, among other reasons, because it can't ever be one of those. But I'm very confident that LoL has the numbers it does because it continually introduced new things, and that always has an expiration date.