These Two Games Lock You Out Of Them Forever On Death (Perma-PERMADEATH!) What Do You Think?

[BayCon]

I was looking at an article about CS:GO to learn how to make money from investing in skins, when I came across these two articles:

 

http://steamed.kotaku.com/new-first-person-shooter-will-lock-out-your-steam-accou-1737430269?utm_source=taboola

 

http://kotaku.com/if-you-die-in-this-game-you-can-never-play-again-ever-1690928265

 

If you don't feel like reading them or even clicking the links (I know I sometimes don't...), I'll give you a summary of what they're about. 

 

No, you did not read the title wrong. This is the SCARIEST thing I have ever seen in gaming. You pay, you play, you leave. It's ridiculous! Once you die in these games, you are locked out for good. I can only imagine what such a model would look like for a game like Project Zomboid. What are your thoughts on this? 

[stewydeadmike]

There was one game that came out with a similar gimmick like these (I don't remember the name of it) but instead of "you're dead you're dead deal with it" all players had a "Live pool" where when someone died a number would subtract from that pool and when that pool go to zero the game would have some epic finale then shut down forever.

 

And I doudt this will catch on as I assume most people won't want to play a game where your first death is also your last (Just imagine a game like Dwarf Fortress with something like this). While an interesting concept if you ask me a perma perma death mechanic in a game is really just a waste.

[PintLasher]

I'll probably get this, heard about it a couple of months ago and was intrigued.

[Blasted_Taco]

The game must be mechanically functional in such a way that it could rival Tetris.

 

That means that everything must be balanced, there must be no bugs that could potentially led to a players death and the most important aspect of all, it must be so fun to play that you risk it up potentially wasting money just to get a chance to play it. 

 

Both of those game doesn't apply to this, i only see people who have a lot of money to spend for a very dumb gimmick, those games will fail sooner or later. 

[BayCon]

The game must be mechanically functional in such a way that it could rival Tetris.

 

That means that everything must be balanced, there must be no bugs that could potentially led to a players death and the most important aspect of all, it must be so fun to play that you risk it up potentially wasting money just to get a chance to play it. 

 

Both of those game doesn't apply to this, i only see people who have a lot of money to spend for a very dumb gimmick, those games will fail sooner or later. 

 

Yeah I actually wrote a list of reasons why this game would not work on a youtube trailer of it. That was actually one of the reasons I included.

 

Here's what it said: 

 

I wanna meet the genius (or geniuses) who came up with this idea and ask for some of what (s)he was smoking at the time. I'm going to spell out every reason why this will not work.

 

1. I'm not even sure it's legal for someone selling a game for them to take it away from their paid customer. I hope you have good lawyers and a very detailed EULA Agreement.

 

2. The majority of us as human beings are not stupid enough to pay 10 dollars for a product we can never play again after in- game death. Not all of us, sadly, but most of us.

 

3. These developers have clearly never played any online survival game ever. An elitist heigharchy faction will rise on every server. There will be hackers. There will be idiots. There will be bullies. There will be jerks. There will also be every player's greatest enemy of all in online competition: lag and high ping (more on that later). The more toxic players will shoot and "finish off" the majority of the normal players they meet, if not all. What if the game launches and contains horrible, easily-exploitable spawns? I'll tell you what, new players will have the pleasure of watching 10 dollars get flushed down the metaphorical toilet when they are inevitably killed by a spawn-camper, and this is all in the assumption that anyone buys this stupid game. Or this permadeath thing will be used by the powerful groups to "bully" the "little guys" into doing whatever they want with the continuous threat of stealing their right to play the game. If this sounds appealing to you, I don't know what else to tell you

 

4. The game's community and playerbase will die before it's even born. Do you dream of a thriving forum for the game? Dream on. People will die and leave the game forever. What happens then? Your forums (should you choose to create any for a game with such a gimmick) will be spammed constantly with topics in all caps written by people raging that they cannot play anymore because, of course, EVERYONE'S death will be unfair in their own eyes. What else will happen? Once they die, unless they are totally obsessed with this money burner and make a new Steam account to play again, people will move on, perhaps recommend that their friends stay far away from the game, and the server numbers will fall after the initial slaughters.

 

5. It will not gain appropriate popularity. You know those guys who spend all day at their computer screen with headsets and microphones, yelling, swearing and laughing like idiots over a video game. No, not regular people. The guys who record themselves doing it. They're called Youtubers. They can be your greatest ally, or your most dreaded enemy. Nowadays many games get their popularity when covered by the big guys. Pewdiepie, Markiplier, and other major Youtubers are like the Oprah of the gaming world. Whatever they think about a game will be spread to 12 year olds everywhere. If just ONE of these guys has something bad to say, you can say bye bye to about 56% or more of your playerbase because the simpler  online survival games are mostly played by immature children anyway. Regular players are driven out by those kinds of people. This is all assuming that the big guys don't avoid it completely due to the "lore" of the game.

 

6. "It's bad for business". It has already made you look like scamming money-grabbers. Damage has already been done to your team's name, and it will turn people away from your future productions.

 

7. Circumstances out of the player's hands can lead to unfair deaths. Have you ever played a first-person shooter and your shots just didn't seem to be registering, and you look at the scoreboard to discover that your connection is screwed? Your performance probably sucked that round didn't it? Need I say more? How would you handle complicated situations of he-said-she-said? You would have to micromanage and moniter your server logs to make sure people have a fair death and deal with the ones who don't. What then?

 

8. You better release this game only when it's COMPLETELY complete. There better not be any balancing issues, overpowered weapons, bad spawns, engine lag, poor optimization, game-breaking bugs or future content updates. Here's an equation for you... "One Life Only Game (problems + future content that cannot be accessed by old players) = Anger^max"

[BayCon]

I'll probably get this, heard about it a couple of months ago and was intrigued.

I'm not one to waste money. I'm only 16 but I refuse to waste a dime of what I have. xD

 

A paid game that you can only play once without paying again? It may as well be an overpriced arcade game. That doesn't really appeal to me. 

[LeoIvanov]

It's only getting attention because it's something new. The only thing I'm slightly concerned about (Not as much as I am concerned about what to eat this evening) is that the games like these may become the next trend. I like concepts where you are genuinely afraid of dying in survival games, but this one is taking it too far.

[Svarog]

Two absolutely basic problems with the concept.

1: I can see a ton of trolls grouping up and murdering people for lulz.

 

2: Pirates will crack it and enjoy it forever no matter how much they die on their pirate servers. For free too. And let's not even pretend that won't happen because there isn't a single DRM in existence that hasn't been cracked.

If a game like that comes out It might break steam's refund system. Then again, I can already see it having a mandatory 2 hour tutorial so it would probably be more likely that it would break that one lonely dude who works at steam support.

Now in SP I like the concept of permadeath, hell, many times I went on self imposed No Death challenge through most games I own for fun, I die on final boss? Well fuck I restart the campaign, getting far only to get booted back to start really makes you play the game in a different way, horror games especially benefit from that in my eyes.

In MP? Permaban from the server I can understand, losing your character after days of grind would really hurt but losing the game? Fuck that, double so if the game isn't free.

If it had a pool of lives that replenish it would be better, like, you only get 1 life a day/week or a month in extreme cases, go on and combine that with character loss too at least then you can still play at some point. But even with that the diminishing returns would kill the playerbase within 2 weeks if not less.

If they want to make a game that really locks you out and charge for it, it better be the best fking 10 minutes of video games I ever experience in my lifetime before I get shot by a random, lost the game and the cash.

[EllEzDee]

The very definition of "gimmick".

 

Damn have they put a lot of effort into ripping out chunks of what's popular right now. Wonder how many actions they have that rely entirely on pressing the F key. Context-sensitive to the max.

[MrZombifiedGamer]

Idiots. Seriously, just idiots. Anyone who buys this game is either foolish or stupidly rich. 10 bucks or not it's not worth it. I wouldn't dish out 5 bucks for it. 

[BayCon]

Two absolutely basic problems with the concept.

1: I can see a ton of trolls grouping up and murdering people for lulz.

 

2: Pirates will crack it and enjoy it forever no matter how much they die on their pirate servers. For free too. And let's not even pretend that won't happen because there isn't a single DRM in existence that hasn't been cracked.

If a game like that comes out It might break steam's refund system. Then again, I can already see it having a mandatory 2 hour tutorial so it would probably be more likely that it would break that one lonely dude who works at steam support.

Now in SP I like the concept of permadeath, hell, many times I went on self imposed No Death challenge through most games I own for fun, I die on final boss? Well fuck I restart the campaign, getting far only to get booted back to start really makes you play the game in a different way, horror games especially benefit from that in my eyes.

In MP? Permaban from the server I can understand, losing your character after days of grind would really hurt but losing the game? Fuck that, double so if the game isn't free.

If it had a pool of lives that replenish it would be better, like, you only get 1 life a day/week or a month in extreme cases, go on and combine that with character loss too at least then you can still play at some point. But even with that the diminishing returns would kill the playerbase within 2 weeks if not less.

If they want to make a game that really locks you out and charge for it, it better be the best fking 10 minutes of video games I ever experience in my lifetime before I get shot by a random, lost the game and the cash.

 

I'm not even a fan of server perma-banning on death, however I can KIND OF see how it would be cool for some. Also I saw the troll faction coming from a mile away, but I was kind of unsure if it would be likely that some would hack the game to be able to play it to their heart's content like they are legally allowed to..

[Svarog]

I'm not even a fan of server perma-banning on death, however I can KIND OF see how it would be cool for some. Also I saw the troll faction coming from a mile away, but I was kind of unsure if it would be likely that some would hack the game to be able to play it to their heart's content like they are legally allowed to..

Many games have server perma bans, the thing is, in most cases, that only applies to specific "Hardcore" servers, and likely does have an expiration date, it's there to increase tension tenfold, people can play on other servers in the meantime.

As far as hacking goes, I really haven't seen a single case of a DRM that wasn't cracked, sometimes it took a while.

Remember Spore? A game that would allow you to only install it 3 times before you lost it? And changing your GPU counted your PC as a entirely different PC so you could lose an install that way.

Pirates didn't get that limitation. Most pirated game of it's time.

Remember Assassin's Creed 2 and it's Always On-Line DRM? That was a tough one, It took a year if I remember correctly but eventually it got cracked and worked offline.  

On a side note, That particular fking DRM (AS2's) is the reason I only buy games on GOG or if I'm 100% certain there is exactly 0 DRM involved in it if it's from other service, it pissed me off to no end back in the day.

I really don't see how a game could truly lock you out of playing it too. I suppose they can have a global "Whitelist" for all legit servers that disallows entry to those who died based on steamID, in that case pirates would only need to get their own servers up & running and figure out how to make the client connect to those instead, which I've seen a shitton of in my life so it probably isn't all that hard to pull off, after a while even legit game owners would resort to playing on pirate servers making the thing futile and a very, very nice pro-piracy argument.

Also, I'm really interested in how legal it actually is to have a game work that way for a paying customer.

[BayCon]

 

I'm not even a fan of server perma-banning on death, however I can KIND OF see how it would be cool for some. Also I saw the troll faction coming from a mile away, but I was kind of unsure if it would be likely that some would hack the game to be able to play it to their heart's content like they are legally allowed to..

Many games have server perma bans, the thing is, in most cases, that only applies to specific "Hardcore" servers, and likely does have an expiration date, it's there to increase tension tenfold, people can play on other servers in the meantime.

As far as hacking goes, I really haven't seen a single case of a DRM that wasn't cracked, sometimes it took a while.

Remember Spore? A game that would allow you to only install it 3 times before you lost it? And changing your GPU counted your PC as a entirely different PC so you could lose an install that way.

Pirates didn't get that limitation. Most pirated game of it's time.

Remember Assassin's Creed 2 and it's Always On-Line DRM? That was a tough one, It took a year if I remember correctly but eventually it got cracked and worked offline.  

On a side note, That particular fking DRM (AS2's) is the reason I only buy games on GOG or if I'm 100% certain there is exactly 0 DRM involved in it if it's from other service, it pissed me off to no end back in the day.

I really don't see how a game could truly lock you out of playing it too. I suppose they can have a global "Whitelist" for all legit servers that disallows entry to those who died based on steamID, in that case pirates would only need to get their own servers up & running and figure out how to make the client connect to those instead, which I've seen a shitton of in my life so it probably isn't all that hard to pull off, after a while even legit game owners would resort to playing on pirate servers making the thing futile and a very, very nice pro-piracy argument.

Also, I'm really interested in how legal it actually is to have a game work that way for a paying customer.

 

 

I keep hearing more and more of GOG these days, but I avoid it because of fear of a small selection of games. Is it acceptable in size? Do you recommend it? Also, yeah I don't see how it's legal to take a product away from a paid customer. I hope they have good lawyers.

[EllEzDee]

Shouldn't really be any fears of a "small selection" on GoG. Besides being a pretty big distribution platform, it's not like Steam and tied to a client as DRM. You basically just use the site for download links.

 

Anyway, can't imagine there being legal issues for removing the ability to play if they had it as part of the EULA. Plenty of games on Steam (especially from scummier companies) have a EULA you've gotta sign with the blood of your first born with. I suppose just putting "we reserve the right to take away your ability to play" qualifies.

[Svarog]

You know what's scary? If it somehow takes on, imagine AAA industry jumping onto "Let's exploit that right now!" train.

And about GoG, the "old Games" part of the name doesn't mean they only have games made a decade ago on there, they actually sell some newer games. You're probably not going to find all AAA releases on it Day 1 but hey, I never buy Day 1 anyway, what for if I can wait for a year or two and get the actually full version (Patched and DLCed) at half or less the price. I've never complained about lack of things to buy on GoG, they pretty much have everything I like.

And well, steam may have thousands of games but... how many of them are actually worth a single fuck much less some actual money? If steam is good for anything it's MP games thanks to various stuff it has. And I'm extremely SP oriented.