We are all so tired of live service and we keep buying it anyway
The battle pass won. Let’s at least be honest about why we keep renewing it every season like clockwork.
Be honest with yourself for one paragraph. You don’t enjoy the battle pass. You enjoy finishing the battle pass, which is a different and much sadder feeling. You log in on a Tuesday you’d rather spend doing anything else, you clear the dailies, you watch a bar fill by 1.4%, and you tell yourself you’re having fun. The grind won. Let’s at least stop pretending we resent it.
The treadmill is the product
Live service didn’t sneak up on us. We asked for games that never end, and the industry gave us games that are structured to never end, which turns out to be a very different wish. The genius of the model isn’t the content; it’s the calendar. The fear of missing a limited cosmetic does more design work than any actual mechanic in the game.
Nobody likes the treadmill and everybody’s still on it. That’s not a bug in the system. That is the system.
And the trap is that some of these games are genuinely good. The shooting feels great. The seasons have real ideas. So we can’t even take the easy out of calling it all cynical garbage — we have to admit we’re choosing it, season after season, eyes open, wallet out.
A modest proposal
- Buy the pass for a game you’re actually playing this month. One. Not four.
- Skip a season. Notice the world doesn’t end. Notice how that feels.
- Stop calling “I completed a chore” the same thing as “I had fun.”
I’m not above any of this, by the way. I have three passes half-finished right now and a fourth I’m “thinking about.” A 6 for the genre, and the 6 is me being generous to myself.
A column, not a game — but if it were scored: the model is a 6 we keep paying 10 for.
Plus
When the underlying game is good, the seasons can genuinely sing.
Minus
Engineered FOMO; the chore-disguised-as-joy problem; it never, ever ends.
Comments (6)
skipped a season for the first time in three years after reading the early version of this and genuinely felt a weight lift. the world did not end.
“you enjoy finishing the battle pass, not playing it” is going to haunt me every tuesday for the rest of my life. how dare you be right.
the calendar doing more design work than the mechanics is the realest sentence here. it’s all just engineered urgency in a trenchcoat.
speak for yourself, some of us genuinely like the loop. not everything you personally dislike is a psyop.
counterpoint as someone who quit all of them: my gaming got better the moment i stopped treating hobbies like a second job.
three half-finished passes and a fourth i’m thinking about is so specifically my exact situation that i felt personally attacked, thanks
the part nobody admits: half of us aren’t even playing for fun anymore, we’re playing to not waste the money we already spent. sunk cost the genre.