this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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The origin of the term. Note, "good to users" is things like undercutting local taxis a la Uber, or ad-free accounts a la Netflix, with the plan to abuse the established customer base later. A bad game =/= a company systemically abusing users for shareholders. It's just a shitty game.
...it's a live service game?
For me, enshitification should also include things like franchises, because we can see an obvious downward spiral of certain franchises, for instance Pokémon. Consumers in the videogame space also qualifies as users, to some extent.
So I think enshitification shouldn't just be about platforms and services.
Then again, people will stick to definitions like words are warfare. This is what politicians have been doing for quite some time.
But yes, yes. Textbook correct. Have a cookie.
If you broaden a word too much, it loses meaning. Eventually it'll just mean "things I don't like," and we'd need another word for the original meaning and the cycle repeats.
That's why the OP pushed back against it, and why I'm defending them.
Eh, I don't think the word loses meaning at all if applied to a franchise, especially since game developers insist games are services nowadays.
Besides, if it just encompasses online services, then it's a pretty useless word and just a marketing ploy for the blogger who wrote the article about it.
But hey, Lemmy/Reddit/Mastodon/Matrix is full of pedants and contrarians, so life goes on.
The next game in a franchise isn't opt-out, it's opt-in. Netflix adding ads to your tier is opt-out (you need to pick a higher tier to avoid them). They're not the same thing at all.
I could see if SS started as a non-live service game and then added live service nonsense later, but that's not what happened. It was released as live service from the start.
The word just means the product you purchased gets worse because of changes the manufacturer makes. I can perhaps see it being used for physical products like cars, where the next model year adds a monthly subscription to something that used to be included for a fixed price (e.g. heated seats, remote start, etc), so buying the same model but newer would result in a degradation.
SS is a new IP, so it's not really a new release of something that already exists, and it was advertised as having live service stuff from the outset. There's no bait and switch there, just bad bait, and the bait and switch is a pretty hard requirement for me.
So they get a pass because it's a reboot? For me, films and series become services at that point, because it is constantly servicing a fan base.
People could argue that SS is apart of the RockSteady series, because that's how I interpreted it, that Arkham City didn't lead to a natural conclusion of that iteration of Batman, which is standard in the comics industry.
Every story has a beginning, middle and end. When failing to come full circle, as just another IP to continuously milk, with no regard for overarching plot or any conclusion to any arc, at that point it's a service.
I was hopeful for this game, because RockSteady's Batman games have been some of my favourite story based brawlers. After reading that I won't be getting any resolution to the plot threads or character arcs, I feel like I've sort of wasted my time paying attention.
At that point it's become like Marvel films, which is technically just a babysitter - and that is a service.