I think in a truly free market where anyone can create any video game using any franchise without being restricted by IP laws, live service games would be harder to sell because they would have to compete with non-live service games of the same franchise.
Why play the online only Diablo 3 by Blizzard when someone else can create their own Diablo that is playable offline?
Granted, it wouldn't be a perfect solution. There would probably still be some games as a service and some of them will pull the plug without providing any means to play offline/with dedicated servers, but a true free market without IP laws would probably make the situation better than it is now.
ひげ
@xianc78 it would be better, but in the meantime it is much easier to get the government to force companies to do right by the consumer (which is NOT EVEN THAT HARD BTW) than it is to just let them take away games that people have paid for and provide no alternate solution, even going as far as putting legal on their asses when they try to do stuff like reverse engineering servers and getting money for their efforts. because why can some random make money doing work that a big company should do, when the big company is making no money anyway?
>I don't know if politicians care about "preserving art".
Of course they don't. But there are laws about this sort of thing and it's the job of people to make politicians nervous and embarrassed by asking them to do the bare fucking minimum to stop making our lives worse.
@beardalaxy
>it is much easier to get the government to force companies to do right by the consumer (which is NOT EVEN THAT HARD BTW) than it is to just let them take away games that people have paid for and provide no alternate solution
Sure, but this assumes that the government cares about you, and that they care about video games. Most video game industry regulations these days only occur because a lot of aspects of the modern game industry like lootboxes can be considered "gambling". I don't know if politicians care about "preserving art".
>even going as far as putting legal on their asses when they try to do stuff like reverse engineering servers and getting money for their efforts
That's not a free market.