Live service games are both good and bad. On one hand live service games are awesome. If supported for a long time, they become classics and come to shape whole childhoods and generations. Yet live service games have a bad reputation and it’s not unwarranted either. There are plenty of reasons to dislike live service games, even more so if you actively play one. The big ones people talk about a lot are shady monetization schemes and business practices. Try to think of any big live service game nowadays that doesn’t have loot boxes, battle passes, gacha mechanics, absurd prices for in-game items and cosmetics—shady “discounts” that aren’t discounts, and it goes on and on! Those are all present in not just free-to-play games, which is the main model games go with these days. They’re present in games which you’ve already paid for, 60, 70 dollars and then when you boot up the game you’re blasted with popups for the latest battle pass! Buy it now! Oh and look at this discounted bundle! It comes with both a car skin and a character skin!

I do think it is reasonable for live service games to have in-game monetization, free-to-play games and pay-to-play games alike. But not as exorbitantly so. Not how games are right now. Servers are expensive and all that but when executives and investors demand bigger and bigger profit margins every single year, it stops being fair.

Oh and don’t get me started on MMOs with subscription based monetization systems. It would be one thing if you only had to pay for the subscription, but most of them make you pay for both the game and the subscription. Yes servers are expensive, and yes it’s true that these games get support and updates for multiple decades, but having to pay a subscription and also for the game itself is not cool, not in the slightest.

And all that doesn’t even cover the issue people currently have with live service games: what happens when the servers go down? If you’ve paid for the game—you would think you get to play it indefinitely, no matter the status of the servers, no matter where you are—if you’ve got internet or not. But unfortunately in reality none of that happens, and people are realizing this and trying to fight against it which is super cool. Because developers and publishers don’t need to support games forever—they just need to offer the option to keep playing the game after it looses support. Whether that be with an update that makes the game playable offline, or simply providing the players with the ability to host their own servers. Games like CS1.6 and CS:Source were never about official servers and any random somebody with a computer can host their own server and play with their friends to this day.

That is all to say: I hope that the Stop Killing Games Initiative succeeds.