The Evolution of Forever Games | Design Club

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Good times on internet. Hello and welcome to design club live the only design show on the internet where we explain weird made up card games right before we begin and make everyone's brain hurt. I am your humble host will join this always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people Jeff. Hi to the people Jeff. Hey everybody I'm the studio I am Jeff and the studio director of extra credits and extra history and more importantly for this as always a long-time game designer who is joined here to talk about games and game culture and everything not everything some things video games and board games.
Everything. Now how do we do everything now? Everything's with my buddy will voice of the people and our twitch overlord. Hello.
Will, what are we talking about today and why are we talking about it?
So we're talking about the evolution of forever game is what we're calling it. But that is which I sometimes call

lifestyle games.
Right or or a lifestyle game and the reason that we're talking about that is we didn't have a show last week because I was out in Anaheim, California at Final Fantasy XIV's Fan Fest and I was thinking a lot about the way that that lifestyle games evolve and change and move in order to accommodate the needs of their player base and to keep up with the the market I guess whatever we want to call it with the with trends in the industry and so I thought we could
to keep culturally relevant.
Yes, right. I thought we could talk about that because there are a lot of changes that have happened in since the olden good good you know the olden days of EverQuest one. I've seen actually I'll I'll tell you for free Jeff every time we talk about things we could do on stream. One of the projects that occasionally comes up is will you and Jeff should play EverQuest together

and people don't understand why I laugh at them every time and it's because EverQuest is an entirely different vintage of game right the MMO the difference between It is more than 25 years old at this point. Yeah, the the difference between EverQuest and wow as it was at launch is bigger than the difference between wow classic and wow retail. I would say it's it's massive. It's truly massive and these games have continued to evolve and one of the really interesting things about them is the example I just mentioned. That wow, World of Warcraft and we'll mention some others League of Legends, fortnite, Final Fantasy XIV, others have evolved without doing a sequel. Sometimes a sequel happens like Destiny 2 or EQ2 or whatever but game
They're not meant to be that. They're meant to be a game that the reason we're calling this forever games is they're meant to be a game that can kind of go on

maybe not forever but equivalently for a really long time. Yeah. And where it isn't this isn't Madden where you buy the new Madden every single year. Though in some ways Madden is kind of a forever game just with like a $60 a year or $70 a year DLC patch Yeah.
or expansion. Yeah. Um in a weird kind of way but like it's not to meant to be that or say going from Slay the Spire one to two or Monster Train one to two or even like Hollow Knight to Silk Song. Yep.
Like those are evolutions in a game where the games are discrete experiences where a forever game almost by definition is not a discrete experience that wraps up. Like it can't be and we'll get to that. Yeah and sometimes forever games release a sequel then revert back to the name of the original like OverWatch. Mhm. There we've got the OverWatch joke out of the way. We're 3 minutes into the episode. Good job chat. You did the joke. We can move on. Good

job.
[laughter]
So the the main reason that I wanted to talk about this is so
Man you're in messing me up trying to fix my hair will.
[laughter]
So every time there's a fan festival it's generally because it's part of the the the press tour the publicity tour for the new expansion for Final Fantasy XIV. That's sort of how it works. Final Fantasy XIV is an MMO. So there are three fan festivals one in the US, one in the EU this year it's in Berlin and one in Japan. Those are the three main regions for Final Fantasy XIV and so we get a bunch of information about the um We get a bunch of information about the expansion which in this case is called Evercold and we sort of get a
EverQuest of what's to come and one of the things that the developers spent a lot of time talking about was the need

to evolve the game. The need that they felt to do away with old systems to change the way that it gear acquisition works to to make fundamental underlying changes to the systems of the game and that's one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this. And by the way can I Will, can I tell you what that translates to? Yes. Just listening to that immediately with my hey I've worked in a game studio for a long time and I've worked on long service games. The need to evolve basically means we see a problem ahead where we think our game will either we either cannot continue to make it interesting or we think it is not currently interesting enough to compete with things upcoming and because this is a game that needs to last a long time we need to get ahead of this rather than not. Yes. And a good example a couple weeks ago we talked about Fortnite's numbers going down.

And that would be you know in the same kind of thing the Fortnite team was probably looking at and saying what do we do to remain a forever game the game that people keep playing. Yes. Their numbers don't suck by any stretch of the imagination. Most dev studios would kill for a quarter of Fortnite's actually a tenth of Fortnite's DAUs daily active users. Yeah. But when you know you're one of the number ones and number go down you start to worry. Right wow was on the decline for many years. That didn't mean that it was dying. It just meant that it wasn't replacing players who left It wasn't at its peak. Yeah it wasn't at its peak and it was still a huge juggernaut of a game and still is to this day even if the current patch has some um issues that they've owned up to to. So I I I think I'm inclined to agree because some of the specifics and we won't dive too deeply into the specifics of 14 because this isn't really just about 14. We're just using it as a

kickstart is that the way that players acquire gear right in most MMOs there's a process to acquire stronger gear that gives you better stats to let you do things right to let you take on bigger monsters or whatever.
We'll get to part of this too but part of an MMO honestly is number go up. Yes. Thing come out. Cool new new expansion come out new gear or things to do. Yes. Part of thing to do is to get cool new gear cool new gear make number go up. Yep. And number go up needed to compete in new area. Yeah correct. So in the past there have there has been a currency based system where you earn a currency called tombstones and you use those to exchange for gear and they have said that while tombstones aren't going away in their entirety they're changing away from that to a more what I will call battle pass esque system or an activity pass I will say it doesn't cost extra it's built in it

just tracks how much of different activities you're doing and you get to choose what you do and that's how you're going to acquire gear right so they're changing and they're changing from a daily cycle to a weekly cycle because that's a pretty big one.
for people's lifestyle. Actually you know what that also means will remember I've said a couple times in the past for lifestyle games you have the game you're playing you have the game you used to play used to play a lot is now the game you go back to sometimes and you have those two as soon as you put the new game in you're trying out the active game you were playing shifts to the one you check back in on and the one you check back in on is now gone. If they're shifting from we need you in every day to we need you in every week they're worried about people who've basically made the shift like they're on another game they're not hitting their dailies because they're not hitting their dailies they're getting discouraged.
Yes. So it is a compensation method meant to hopefully help move it back into

something that competes with the new primary or slowly shifts it back in. So if the new primary isn't as interesting the game you were playing is able to shift back into that spot cuz you don't feel like you've been left behind. Yeah and it's very interesting too that this is mostly a conveyance to the player. It's very possible to log in for one day and get all of your get all of your weekly allotment of things done in 14. There are some things that you only do daily but none of them are like you have to do this daily or you'll fall behind. Um And honestly like World of Warcraft sorry League of Legends also shifted to more of a weekly style thing on some of their passes. Mhm. Um and I think it is it's more health it's healthier for people and more easy to engage for people who might only have time a couple times a week. Yes. To feel to feel like they're not missing out. Right. Well okay so like Jeff if you were playing an MMO Yes. You've got a family and like a

full-time job and responsibilities, right? You don't have time anymore. I would I would hazard a guess. Right? So like to do that. And I think that that's a common thing, too, as the MMO generation, right? How many of you uh by show of emotes remember making your first RuneScape account and thinking it was like the coolest thing back when RuneScape was new, right? Cuz that's a bunch of chat. That's a lot of people in chat, right? But now you're probably an adult with like a job, maybe a family, responsibilities. You can't grind to 99 in every skill all the time anymore, right? Like that's that's like a whole thing, right? And so it's the the needs of a player base have changed and so in order to accommodate that, the game has to change to keep up.
Right. Except for RuneScape. RuneScape never changes. RuneScape just keeps doing its thing and you just grind away forever and that's fine. Um
[laughter]

So Will, before we set the stage, I'd actually like to hear more of the changes. Like I love translating what I hear in from like talking point into what dev team is actually worried about and thinking. Yeah. But um let's start with the let's pull back. Um what are forever games or lifestyle games? Let's let's start let's define our let's define our problem and circle in for the attack. I'm going to say that a lifestyle game or forever game is a game that you build your gaming hobby around. Mhm. Right? It is it is your build around. It's the thing that's like central to you, right? So lots of people play lots of games, but they'll often have one main game. It's not always an MMO. It's not always a live service game, but they'll usually have a game that's what they would call like their favorite or their daily driver, right? Final Fantasy XIV.
Right. 100%.
League of Legends.
Right. Like and you know, it's and it's

a game that takes up that can be gone back to daily or multiple times a day. Um and I call them lifestyle games because it is it's also kind of part of your lifestyle. Hey, I get done in the evenings, I play some League of Legends, I chat with some friends online about it. We might go in for a couple of matches. Right.
Like it often involves at least a partially social experience. Um but and they're games meant to be played they don't almost I cannot think of a lifestyle game that has an end. Actually, excuse me. I can. Baldur's Gate 3. Ooh, Baldur's Gate 3 is a very good one and yes, although it has an end to the story which then evokes real play which evokes players who have played Baldur's Gate 3 as a lifestyle game to immediately play the game again. So
All right, like it's one of the few games I can think of that has a definitive end. That a lot of people will play either through the whole game or a lot of it.

Decide they want to take a new character, a new tact, new group of companions through the way through it. And loop back in it's but there's very few. Um the BattleTech game actually did it a bit ago. Um And then the RogueTech mod where basically once you solve the campaign, you can kind of just be a mercenary company like going through the stars and taking contracts with fighting with your BattleMechs and
Yeah. But usually it's more of a game that um just doesn't have an ending and is meant to be played for long stretches of time and Yeah. And sometimes um another way that I've occasionally conceptualized games like this when we're talking about them with Twitch chat to like help people get a sense of what I'm talking about is games that are north of a thousand hours. Like if you can think of a game that has more than a thousand hours of real content in it, not like cookie clicker content, right? But like meaningful engaging content, then you're probably in the neighborhood, right? And actually, this is a really good like

many people's favorite games aren't lifestyle games. Like I loved playing say the Mass Effect or the Dragon Age series. Like there are a whole bunch of games that I think are amazing or even Slay the Spire or Monster Train, but they're not games I log into like I play the game well, some of them like I continue to play like I like playing Spire. But it it's a different feel and games with an end are amazing. You can play through and be like, that was a great game. Or even games like Civilization where you're like, hey, every every month I'm going to play a couple of long Civ games, but it's not kind of the daily go Actually, I guess Civ could be a lifestyle game, too. But like the daily go-to kind of one versus the I'm playing and have a very satisfying wrapped-up experience and I eagerly await the sequel. Right. It's it's a game that isn't I I would say that um lifestyle games or forever games are often unbound. Yeah. And that gets me to my question like what kinds of games therefore make

good lifestyle games? So I'll throw out immediately and this can be either genre or type. Yep. So for example, MMOs which are a type of game, not a genre of game um make good forever Yep. games. Games like Counter-Strike or heavy PvP team-based PvP, Counter-Strike, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch. Like all of those kinds of games because and we can get into why later, but basically ongoing head-to-head PvP tends to make for good lifestyle games. PvE is harder. Um But often MMOs rely on that and they rely on the the treadmill principle to make it work, but they often make it work. Um I I saw I saw uh a mention in chat of Minecraft. Mhm. Yeah. Minecraft is kind of an interesting one because it has infinite generation, right?

But I think it's also the infinite build. Yeah.
It's it's your digital Lego set online. It's you do all the you know, it's your ability to just go sit around and build build build build build and oh my goodness, I now have a kingdom. Right. Kind of thing.
Yeah. Yeah, lifestyle games are also often the ones where you go just one more X and then hey, wait, what's that light coming through the curtain? That's not morning, is it? Oh my god, it's morning, right? That's a that's a pretty uh common one. Um uh Jacob brings up would fighting games uh fall into this? And the answer is they can, right? Some people
that has the PvP aspect.
Right? Some people put thousands and thousands of hours into um Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat or uh Injustice or Smash or whatever, right? To achieve excellence. Pokémon
those are less common Yes. as lifestyle games, but they can like one of the things about lifestyle game is it's a personal choice. Yes. There are ones that tend to be more

common. So again, we're looking for if we're saying what make good ones, you know, if fighting games make better ones like I would put them like there's the top tier that makes these are more commonly make good lifestyle games. I'd put it in the mid tier. It's not like a it's not the S tier version of it, but it's still in the A tier version. Yeah. For fighting games. Yeah. Um Someone mentioned Stardew as well. Stardew's kind of an interesting one in that it is another like semi-linear in that like you progress steadily through time towards an end goal game that has enough potential to be a forever game. But like here you go, here's another like in the same way that Counter-Strike and Overwatch, you know, the the competitive PvP Mhm. Super Smash Brothers is absolutely a competitive PvP you can play with your friends. Yeah. And so can absolutely do and make that. But like and maybe it's easier to also

say that okay, what kinds of games make good lifestyle games. And one of the ones I would say is ones with a complete and satisfying ending. Yeah. Um so like very few people, I won't say nobody, like because I know Dr. Aaron, play through Mass Effect more than twice. Yeah. One one Renegade, one Paragon and then you're done. And like cool, that was a great experience. So for that for example is strong story-based. Yep. I would say for a lot of people, Baldur's Gate is kind of like that. I think more people replay that as a lifestyle game than almost any other game like that I can think, but
Right. like hey, good sprawling game. There's all and you know, and we're kind of edging towards the middle. Like Skyrim is probably more like Baldur's Gate, but um all I don't know. System Shock, Assassin's Creed, like you start naming Tomb Raider. Platformers? Like Super

Mario Bros? Almost, yeah. Right? Unless you're speedrunning. And then the game isn't the lifestyle game, speedrunning is the lifestyle game.
Yeah. Right? And that's like a slightly different adjacent thing. Most playthrough style games are don't make good lifestyle games because you play through, you enjoy the experience greatly. You know, you go get your platinum like Matt just did on Returnal. And you're like, awesome. Maybe you'll play it again five years later, but that's not the thing you're going back to every single day. Right.
And it's not like when I was playing Fallout 4 where like, hey, cool, I'm going to do a couple hours a night till I get to the end of Fallout 4. Like those are just those games don't have the we can keep you going for five or ten years because they've planned out all their content. The team has made and crafts a good experience, but it's not an experience that's meant to be open-ended. It's an experience that's meant to be contained. Visual novels, another great example, can be very powerful, meaningful experiences, but

they generally don't lend themselves to repeated daily replays, right?
Yeah. In the same way. Now, and we should also say cuz I saw some chat about this, we're we're talking about a spectrum, right? And there are very, very few, if any, games that exist on the will absolutely always be played as a lifestyle game or the can never be played as a lifestyle game and ends of the spectrum, right? I just want to reinforce that. We're talking about how easy it is for them to find themselves in a position on the spectrum because for instance, Final Fantasy XIV is first and foremost a JRPG. And you can play through the core story of that JRPG and take all, 500 hours doing it, and be done, and be satisfied. And like not play it daily, right? Plenty of people do, plenty of people don't. You can do the same thing with World of Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls Online.
Legends could be your weekend game every other weekend where you play once or twice and you're back out. And you're

getting a you're getting a solid experience. Yes. It's just some games that's why I was saying, what kinds of games make good forever games and what kinds of games don't make good forever games.
Right. Yep. Um Because in a lot of cases there's kind of a whole feature set you need in a game to make it a good lifestyle game or forever game.
Yeah. To make it easy to access as a forever game, for sure.
Yeah. Because it really like you have to have things to do. You literally, to make it a forever game, you have to have unlimited things to do. And I think that's why a game like Baldur's Gate Uh-huh. actually kind of qualifies is Larian Studios put so much in with all the different companions and the hidden companions and whether you're playing as good or evil and choices from before like you might do a play-through where you're like, here's my three main companions and you pick a whole different three for the next one and that substantially changes your experience or the order you do things or the class you're playing. Like

there's so much in there that it can actually make it feel like there's an unlimited amount of things to do. Yep. Yeah. You're getting excited, sorry. What were you about to
I was I was thinking about just a distinction, right? When we say unlimited Yeah. we're not talking about truly infinite content. That doesn't really exist. What we are talking about is uh more content than a player can reasonably consume, right? Because I will hear people saying, well, I've gotten every achievement in this MMO. I guess I'm done. Yeah, but I think if you've gotten every achievement in an MMO, you have to admit that you are so far past the average player that like
Like I can't complain about Final Fantasy XIV not having a plethora of things to do. My one of my resolutions for the year was to hit top 1% in the world for Final Fantasy XIV achievements and I'm in striking distance. Like right? Unlimited is overwhelming amount

of content, not necessarily truly infinite, if that makes sense. Just to so that everyone's on the same page. And that's one of the reasons that PvP games of a certain type, player versus player, skew towards the unlimited content because if you're playing Counter-Strike, sure, they've set up it's not like there's unlimited guns or maps or other things. Actually, nobody would want that. Right. You want to get familiar with what's there. It's that each match against different, you know, a random grouping of people feels a little different and you can keep playing it. You could do a 4-hour stretch and each game will be different. The same. You could go for a marathon session of League of Legends and each match, you know, say you're going to go you're like, I'm going to go play a ranked for, you know, 4 hours or I'm going to go play, you know, ARAM for that. Because of just how the timing works and the characters that get selected and the players behind them, like they're all going to feel a little different. Yep. And that that is why a lot of groups for this lean into the PvP

aspect because the other option is the Pv, sorry, the PvP, the PvE. Players versus environment. Hey, we've designed usually huge amounts of stuff for you to do and that's more expensive. That takes a bigger team. And like the reason you don't get a Final Fantasy expansion every week, but instead every what is it, 6 months? Uh we get a patch about every 4 months and an expansion about every two or three years. Okay. I I don't know the cadence. Is it takes the team that long to go make all of the stuff. And like so from like a studio standpoint, unlimited things to do, it's like, well, I can fight other players, I can explore through the things that people have crafted for me, possibly both. And then actually, there's the third one which is games designed to be replayed but in a PvP experience, the roguelikes. And that's one of the reasons I think they've really taken off is I've played a lot of Slay the Spire.

I've played a lot of Monster Train. I've played a lot of Balatro. I mean, there you know, I could keep naming games with roguelike elements. These are games that they've designed the player PvE experience, but they've designed them in such a way that you like, hey, here's your restart point. Go do it again and there's enough variance in there that it's challenging. Yeah, I think that there's and and we've even seen that in like MMOs, right? Like where one of the upcoming updates to XIV is that we're getting a single-player roguelike mode in the middle of an MMO. I'm By the way, if you need me after Beastmaster comes out, you can find me in Final Fantasy XIV. That's where I'll be. They made a roguelike single-player mode in my lifestyle game. I am dead to the world. Farewell forever. Like that's it. I'm done. But like from a large MMO perspective, that's brilliant. Like, hey, we've got the players, we've got environments, we've got assets, we have tools. What if we took all of this stuff we have and

remix it with a new set of rules? Yeah. Actually, I want to I want to address a question that that Dragon Gamer had, which is, I don't understand why some games choose to make disposable content instead of evergreen content. I'm going to alter this ever so slightly. Instead of disposable, which has like a specific connotation, which I think you may mean, I want to address it as ephemeral content. Hm. Right? And I think
And actually, say in chat if that's also what if you think that that is a fair translation cuz if not we want to know what you're thinking and we'll Yeah, we'll we'll we'll adapt, but like I do want to address the idea that like evergreen content Mhm. is made up of a lot of ephemeral content, right? So, I'll give you an example. We're talking about fighting games as a lifestyle as a lifestyle, right? And there's an ephemeral there's an ephemeral moment that has become a thing in fighting games, right? And that's the Daigo Parry, right? That

happened in the course of 10 seconds. It was an ephemeral moment that happened in one match-up between two players in one place, right? But because like the exact circumstances of that are impossible to replicate, and yet it has become part of the cultural underpinnings of fighting games, right? Every Counter-Strike match, like Jeff was saying, is a different match, right? So, when we talk about this, there's this weird balance between like the experience that you're having and the content that's designed to give you the experience. And so it's I think though that's
Yeah. Let me um because you're going to get that in any game, the instance of it of how that particular match or that session or that, you know, your version of Journey or what Slay the Spire goes.
Yeah. Like disposable, content that becomes irrelevant after a certain period of time. And I think that a lot of that comes from traditional game thought,

which was which is not lifestyle games. You know, that you're like, hey, cool. I'm making a game for Fallout 4 and we're going to spend extra time, you know, for this one side quest and you know, we'll put it up so it only happens on Halloween. Right.
Like for single play for some games, I think it's just honestly they could be spending their time better. Like but for other but even for then like in Batman Batman: Arkham Asylum, if you go to one of the cells, you meet Calendar Man. Calendar Man will have special messages for you that he will say to Batman on certain actual physical or days of the real calendar. So, if you show up on Christmas or Halloween, like but for them, that probably took an extra hour to put in. They recorded a couple of extra lines of dialogue. They hook it up. They query the game clock. Cool. It's a little Easter egg and it makes the game it's a it's a nugget about the game that makes it interesting that you might learn about it and go back to the game

where you're like, oh, that's cool. Yeah. For a lot of live service games though, getting people excited about an ephemeral event. Hey, here's the Halloween event. Here's the, you know, holiday event. Here's the New Year's event. Helps actually make it feel like part of your lifestyle. Yeah. Hey, cool. It's the New Year. We're celebrating New Year's in the game. Yeah. Okay, so we've got we've got a clarification and and I think this is also a very good one. Dragon's is my question referred directly to old WoW expansion dungeons and bosses versus XIV's expansion dungeons and bosses. And I'm going to unpack that and translate a little and then we can go into it. So, in World of Warcraft, you create a character, you go through a very short tutorial beginning section, and then you choose, unless it's your first character, in which case the choice is made for you, but you choose an expansion to level the character through. You don't go through the entire story of World of Warcraft.
Really? That's interesting. I I haven't played WoW in a long time.
Right. Uh and I did this recently on stream as

part of my quest to understand World of Warcraft and I understand it better. I still don't like it, but I understand it better. Um and so you choose an expansion to level through and you probably won't get all the way through the story and then when you reach the minimum level for the new expansion, you're whisked away to tackle the new expansion. And so older content is used kind of as a um scaffolding for you to level through, where the story is sort of not really the point and you probably won't play all the dungeons and you're just there to get level. Versus another choice which was made, which is Final Fantasy XIV, where everyone starts as a level one character in one of three starting zones based on which class you choose to start the game as. And you play through the entire story from beginning to current content like along the way, right? And it is I am truly, [snorts] and I cannot stress this enough, not exaggerating, it is about 500 hours of

JRPG. I love this game to death. It is too much JRPG for many people, right? And so those are sort of like the polar those are sort of like the polar opposites of this of this thought train.
Let me actually throw an extra thing in there though. Part of it I think for this is based on the style of other choices they made. Yeah. In Final Fantasy, you can switch your job anytime you want. In World of Warcraft, you can't. If you want to now play a wizard, you and you weren't a wizard, you have to go make a new character. Part of the fun in WoW and in Final Fantasy is playing with your friends. And so like if what every time Will wanted to switch classes, he's like, "Cool, I have to play 500 hours of stuff to get it up to where I can play with my friends again." Right. That's a no-go. Right. Um World of Warcraft realized this and said, "We need a way to accelerate people to get up to where everybody else is." And then they also realized

they have, you know, a thousand hours worth of playable content divided up into these, but it only takes you 100 hours to get up to that I play with my friends level. So they basically said, "Rather than just eliminate things, we're going to find ways to direct your experience and level through that off of old stuff we've The important part, we've already made." Yeah. So and I think that this is an important thing too is that the difference between that like use once content and the evergreen content, and I I'm I'm actually going to say that it's still ephemeral, um is and I can expand on that in a second, is the things that surround it. Right? What is going on around that that defines those needs, right? And the other important note for this is, I mentioned earlier, Final Fantasy XIV is a JRPG MMO and WoW is an MMO RPG. And that seems

like I'm being really technical with the difference, but when you begin to peel back a lot of the layers, you see that Final Fantasy XIV is JRPG first and foremost, where you can play with your friends and uh um WoW is a game where you can play with your friends in a thing that happens to be an RPG. Mhm. Um and that WoW's systems are built around bringing everyone into the same ephemeral moment. There is a real There is a real desire to put everyone in the same ephemeral moment, to get everyone together so that they have a shared experience, so that everyone is here when the entire community does the thing. Kind of like waking the sleeper. They're I It feels like in a lot of ways they're trying to recreate waking the sleeper on a regular basis, although that doesn't quite work. Oh, Will, I found a thing. Wait, am I mirrored I'm mirrored, so no way you can read the I have to go get Here, I have to bring something for you. Give me 10 seconds.
All right, great. Um

Yes. Yeah, it's Yeah, the Yeah. Although the mechanics are getting more complicated and that's and that's very true. Right. Yeah. And also uh I will also agree that in 14, 14 is also designed to allow you to have your friends help you. Um 14's level syncing is very rigorous. If uh Jeff were to play Final Fantasy XIV and be in the first dungeon, Sastasha, he would be level 17 or 18 and I could take my level 100 character and say, "I would like to participate in this duty with my friend Jeff." And the game would get, "Cool, you are now temporarily level 18 with all the abilities of an eight of a level 18 character." And I would be like, Kick mentor. Right. All of my buttons don't work. What do you mean? Um also, there is literally a mentor newbie bonus. Where like if I party If I as a mentor party up with a new player, they get bonus XP. And I'm using the old

phrases from City of Heroes, which was the first game I saw MMO I saw that specifically were like, "Oh, you know, you got a group of 40s and you got a 20 wants to join you. Somebody can sidekick them and they'll temporarily be 40, so they can party with you." And mentor means you go down because it made sense in the superhero genre. Like you can be Robin to the Batman kind of thing. But um one of the other ones actually, before I show Will my cool picture, um that a lot of MMOs bumped into and games like it is and like we did as far back as EverQuest. Like there aren't good solutions to this problem is cool, you make your initial game. And actually we're going to get back to this later. And like, "Now we need our first expansion. Okay, we've got a new race, so we want a new, you know, newbie zone and new progression zones cuz we're on the new continent." Like cool, we got our next expansion. We've done a new thing and suddenly, you know, eight expansions in,

you have all these places people can start. You're running all these different newbie zones. Because most of your population's higher level, the newbie zones are all ghost towns except for maybe the brand new one with people restarting and you end up with a world that's supposed to feel full that as you do more and more and more starts feeling emptier and emptier and emptier on the old stuff. Yes. And if you want to keep introducing new zones and new classes and new other things that you want to move people into, there isn't really a way to keep the density in the old areas that makes it feel fun. And so you start bumping into problems of how do we solve for that? And like the WoW way of like, "Cool, we're going to take one of these many many ones we've done. You're going to pick how are you going to level up?" That's stuff they've already done that was basically radically underused as if they're new stuff and they're getting a chance to use it again for rapid acceleration. Yeah. But it's just it's a problem that's hard to fix if you want to keep introducing new

things.
Yes. And you don't have a single world. Yeah. Which almost none of these do. They're all server-based. Yeah. So Will, I found this when I was cleaning out something from a bit ago that um Woody, the artist who did this Mhm. years ago, sent me. Let's see, is it Is this going to be readable? Yeah. Mhm. Let's see. Oh. Yeah. There we go. Can you read it for me? Yeah, so we were hammering on this hardcore 25-man heroic last night. Everyone was totally burned out by the time we got to the boss. Six freaking hours, man. Then scroll up. Ooh. Aw, isn't that cute, hon? They think they're hardcore. And it says, "I woke the sleeper." on his shirt.
Like yeah. Like Yeah, it's I I love that. Just the older gamer sitting there like looking at the kids, "Oh, honey, isn't it cute? They think they're hardcore." Yeah. Like I mean, there there have been these there have been these uh like ephemeral moments in evergreen

games for as long as evergreen games have existed, right? What What was the one where Lord British got all of his stuff? Oh, that was in right before Ultima Online launched.
Right. They forgot to set a flag that made him invulnerable based on like a new set of stuff and he went in to give a speech to a whole bunch of players and somebody thought it would be funny to cast a wall of fire on him because every other time they interacted with mods, Right. they were invulnerable. So why wouldn't you throw a wall of fire on him? But oh, somebody forgot to and Lord British died Yep. in front of like in like the final pre-launch or about to go live, his corpse got looted. Like you know, somebody slew Lord British. And yeah, like it was pandemonium. And it says some guy forgot to flip the flag on him like, "Oh, yeah." Okay. So we're we're a little in the weeds, but Yeah, so features that a forever game needs. You need unlimited things to do. Yep. Like if you're going to play forever, you have to have stuff to do. You also need some sort of ongoing progression model.

Like I can progression can mean different things, but everybody likes to feel like they're making progress on a thing. And if you're going to play a thing for a long time, and you know, be it League of Legends where, you know, you initially get your character up, and then it's like, "What's your rank at, you know, if you're doing um ranked PvP
PvP If you're doing ranked play or other like they have ways to opt into. Right? You know, if you're playing an MMO, it's what's your level or what's your level of each job or what's your level of gear or what's your like of other things. You're We're Slay the Spire, you know, you're looking at have you unlocked all of your stuff? Do you have a win streak? Like there there are ways of measuring yourself Yep. against that. And uh for a lot of roguelikes, it's discovery. Have I discovered you know, I just replayed Balatro. Have I discovered every single card, every single customization, every single, you

know, lots of different variants of that? Yep. But it it's an extra track. Unlimited things to do and a way to measure that you're making progress on it.
Achievements are also sometimes one of these, right? What's my achievement score? How many mounts do I have? How many minions do I have? Do I have all of the glamour? Do I have all of the fancy shiny weapons?
every fish? They added more fish, Jeff. I don't have all the fish now. I have the title for having most of the fish, but I don't have all the fish and it makes me sad. Yeah.
Um But again, we don't have to dig super deep in, but I can I'm trying to think of a forever game that doesn't have multiple ways of measuring progress of things you've done. Yep. Oh, actually, hold on. There we go. Yeah. Yeah, got to catch them all is absolutely
Mhm. Yeah.
Um Ongoing customization is almost always something involved with forever games. And this can mean your avatar. Like, hey Will, what's the new set of cool gear that came with the last ex

They added hoodies, Jeff. They added hoodies. They added hoodies and you can get them and blue jeans. So now all of your Warriors of Light can be in hoodies and blue jeans and everyone is very excited. Those items are exceedingly rare and going for a lot of money on the in-game market. Nice.
Yeah. And it could be that, you know, it might be skins. It's like, hey cool, League of Legends just, you know, they they just launched their new season and patch yesterday. And there's some demon hunting going on. Vayne is very happy. And there's new skins like with demonized versions of characters. Yep. These are fun. Or like when the Worlds came out last year and you know, there was the Faker Ahri skin or, you know, there's there's other fun stuff or the Fortnite tie-ins. Like customization can mean a lot of different things. Yeah. But it's fun to be able to show personality and individualization through a game you play for a long amount of time. Yep. Uh I want to answer two quick questions from YouTube, Chad, cuz Chad you've had a bunch of really good points and questions uh and I

really thank you for that. Warframe is absolutely a forever game. Warframe has all of the requirements to be a forever game. Warframe is in fact an MMO. It's a weird one, but it's an MMO. Uh and the progression past level 30 is uh multifold. One of them is spoilers. Which so we won't get terribly into it, but there are several things involving uh a chair or one of five different schools that count as ongoing unlimited progression as well as your mastery rank to get towards legendary five or six, whatever they're on right now. Um so it absolutely counts. Uh and the other one is are forever uh games gacha games? I would reverse that. I think most gacha games are designed to be forever games, but forever games can like we we mentioned Minecraft as a forever game. You don't have to pay anything or there's no ongoing monetization. Ongoing monetization is often, but not always part of forever games. [clears throat] Actually, that is a thing to get to that most forever games

need active support from a developer team. And therefore need some sort of ongoing revenue model to pay for the people to keep working for the game. Yep. And in some cases, it's a tiny team. Like Monster Train and Slay the Spire both made large amounts of money and their devs and dev team therefore had enough to keep releasing things or Balatro, releasing extra things in without charging money for them because, hey, all right, and in some cases both with and without charging money for, but you know, Slay the Spire added a whole fourth character. Yep. And didn't charge anything for it because they were doing well enough. Yeah. Monster Train's both done pre-releases and DLC, but you take something like League of Legends, League of Legends has a very large developer team that keeps working for it. All the games are online. They have server cost to pay for. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that costs them money to run the game and to keep adding to it and balancing everything else. And therefore they need

to sell skins and other things Yep. to cover the cost of those. Final Fantasy XIV has they have a subscription, right?
Yep. Mhm. Like there's different ways to pay for I keep getting stuff added to my game or they keep making it. Right. Um which is like that's just it's hard to have a game that doesn't have ongoing monetization be a forever game Yes.
because then [clears throat] it becomes who pays for the people to keep making the content for their forever game. Yeah, correct. Uh and we should clarify cuz I think some people are coming in late. Lifestyle game and forever game we're using interchangeably here. Yes. Usually I've been calling them lifestyle, but because we're talking about games meant to last you for a long time today, we're also calling them forever games. So uh does does having a sequel rule something out as a forever game? Because someone's pointing out that Slay the Spire 2 came out. I would say no. And the reason is um incumbent on like, how do I want to put

this? It's because that's their monetization model in a lot of ways, right? And like if they hadn't engine swapped, I think they probably would have thought about releasing it as a giant content patch for Slay the Spire 1, but they're in different engines, so that might be why. Um there there's like some special
a lot of people, Slay the Spire isn't a lifestyle game. Like I think that's also probably true. Yeah. I I'm definitely in the too close to tell um branch, right? I've got several hundred hours in two. Uh I spent like 150 in the first month that it was out. I don't have a problem with that.
B tier. Or actually, probably the A tier because it's a roguelite. It's not in the S tier of things like the MMOs, you know, the popular MMOs or the, you know, League of Legends or Apex Legends or kind of the big PvP and sprawling MMO style ones that just kind of keep doing that. Yeah. But I

feel like those Slay the Spire is in the same way that Civilization Yeah. four or five or six or seven you know, is like um like, hey cool, you know, this can be the game I spend a couple hours every evening playing. Yeah. Okay, so so all of that having been said and that talking about like what a lifestyle game is. By the way, I think there's one more thing I'm going to throw out there.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think most of them have strong social components. Not all, but um like Civilization and Slay the Spire don't. But Slay Slay the Spire, Monster Train, etc., they do have the daily challenge and leaderboards. And Slay the Spire 2 has multiplayer now. It does. And that is actually proving to be one of the killer features is that many people who would not play Slay the Spire alone are playing Slay the Spire multiplayer. Yeah, and getting their exposure to it. But that's also kind of the secret sauce on things like League of Legends and

Final Fantasy and some of the others is that you play, you make friends, you get to it becomes a third space. You get to hang out there and do the thing. And it's, you know, kind of like D&D night around the table with your friends. Sometimes it's not the D&D, it's the fact you're hanging out with your friends and you happen to be playing D&D
Correct.
while you're doing so. It's the excuse for getting together. But that's part of the stickiness of a lot of lifestyle games is some sort of social component.
Yes. And not all. Like there isn't a universal for any of these, but more often than not, if you were looking at some of the things that set them apart and makes the good ones go on for a while, it are those they've included elements to assist with that. Yep. Okay. So all of those things having been defined and said, pardon why So let's let's say we've got a game like Slay the Spire or Slay the Spire 2 or any MMO. Why do these need to not be static? Right? When we talk about these, even like

Binding of Isaac got balance changes forever, right? So did Enter the Gu- Enter the Gungeon got fewer. Slay the Spire is getting tons and tons of like um early access balance changes, right? MMOs change stuff up not infrequently, right? Wow is pretty notorious for having new systems and new styles of power acquisition every expansion. Um so they they change stuff.
Legends has seasonal actually has usually at least one patch a month as well as big seasonal updates. Yeah, and most PvP games have what I will call like a wobbly top balance. Right? It is It is very rarely a balance that like spins perfectly and never wobbles. It is almost always wobbly on purpose because otherwise you end up with stagnation where like one deck is the best deck Yeah. in in Magic or Spire

or whatever, right? You have one character that's the first pick first ban character in every game of League. And that's not good for the game. Yeah. Actually, an easy thing easy way for a lot of people to understand would be, hey Will, if we took Magic the Gathering
Uh-huh. today and said there's never going to be another expansion, Uh-huh. this is it. All the cards that have ever been released have been released. Lock. Okay. Do you think people would still be playing with the same way three or four years from now? Or would there be innovation in decks or other things?
There would still be innovation and I can tell you this for certain because there is a format that is only cards made before the modern borders. It's called pre-modern. Okay. And it recently got a ban update because someone figured out a new thing that was particularly egregious and people are continuing to innovate with old cards. Cards that are uh let's see, it was seventh edition. So, like seventh edition and before are all the cards

that are legal in pre-modern. Uh people are still breaking that format. So, yes, I think they would absolutely continue to do it. But I think it would become a less vibrant scene because people would feel that they've become solved issues. And almost every multiplayer game, like it's fun. People find things, they find new ways to do it. Devs want to like Let me take League of Legends. Hey, let's change the jungle like they're like Hey, we want the games to be a little faster now. So, we're going to make these couple of changes. Hey, we think the top lane is unhealthy. It gets left on an island. People don't you know, it feels more cut off from the rest of the game. We want to bring We want more reasons to bring the jungler top or you know, make mid also roam top to play for the things. Where they'll come in with design goals that they think will help keep the game feel relevant and current and paced and even just break it up a little bit. Let's have some fun. You know, let's What would happen if? And I think that's one of the things that keeps people playing a lot of these

games for a long period of time is almost without exception even if you haven't played League of Legends in say five years and you go back in a whole bunch of the stuff will have changed, but you still can go in and go like, cool. I know what I need to do. I need to knock down the enemy spire. I know I'm going to be taking a lane. I know I'm going to be killing creeps, fighting against other people in lane, using the gold to buy gear. You know, the gear's changed. Oh, look, there's a recommendation for what gear I should buy now. Like you could make your way through a game because the fundamentals are the same even if a lot of the exact strategy and minutia have changed.
Yeah. You won't be a top-tier player Yeah.
but you can play long enough to kind of learn and do fun things. Yeah. Um And but it feels different and it feels fun and it feels refreshed and that's part of what you need for a lot of these games and where I think roguelikes really shine is because they're built in to feel fresh on every game. Like that's built into the DNA of most really good roguelikes

in a way that you don't get in other games. So, it's almost like roguelikes almost are cheat code because they've optimized towards a set that helps them be feeling fresh where other games need to Hey, we're Final Fantasy. We need an expansion Right.
with a couple of new classes and a couple of new raid boss mechanics and other things. Yeah.
Or you know, we're an ongoing game like Counter-Strike or Dota or League of Legends or OverWatch or these other ones where you know, we need to mix it up a little bit every once in a while to keep it feeling fresh and fun and paced at the level that people are currently wanting to feel paced at. Yeah, someone brought up chess. Ooh.
And chess is sort of an interesting one. I would argue that the advancements in chess aren't rule-based, but are rather engine-based which is like I I've been avoiding talking about it cuz I don't want us to get too in these weeds. Suffice it to say, as chess engines get better and better, the strategy of chess does evolve because it becomes easier

and easier to go deeper on book and to practice more complex engine maneuvers. It gets real weird. It gets like top-tier chess gets really weird with some of that stuff. I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole one morning and woke up Yeah.
But I also think that there that also that is true, but in a way it isn't. Like I think all of the growth in chess for the past five to 10 years has come from different a different format of chess, speed chess. Oh, that's right.
that you can play it on like on a like yeah. Yeah, bullet chess, speed chess, like variants of chess that you know, you get to go in and have quick let that it is a different experience from let me sit down and play for 20 to 40 minutes Yeah. or longer possibly in this environment. It's let's get a match done in five. Yeah. It's still the same basic not basic. It is still the same rules with one change. Time clock. Yeah. But

all of the growth I think has come out of that. I think that's also true. Um All of this does come with a significant drawback that I wanted to bring up as we as we talk about this evolution, right? Cuz like these games evolve, they bring new players in, they keep their current players happy. But they need to evolve. They can't stay static.
Correct. But that part of it's the monetization model, too. We need an expansion. Right. And part of the problem with this can be if you're not careful that it's harder and harder and harder to get into the game. Yeah. So and I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to put I'm going to put my you know, I recognize that WoW is in a unique position, but man does it suck that they're in this position like flag down here. Um WoW is like very difficult to onboard into because

the game has stratified so many layers deep because of all of the expansions and add-ons and changes and everything else over the years that it becomes very difficult to onboard a player effectively into all of those systems. Right? So, that is the danger of all of this. Like I am a person who picks up new games professionally, right? I am a person who professionally plays games in an entertaining fashion on the internet for all of you, right? And I had a hell of a time getting into WoW. Like just an absolute hell of a time without a lot of external resources and a lot of help from the community and a lot of other stuff. Um that is the downside to all of this is that when you evolve, you risk making it more difficult to get new players in in order to keep current players occupied. Right? In order to keep current players happy, you make it hard to onboard new ones. And I've seen very few games not have this problem and I'm going to call a league for not in one way and I'll tell you why in a minute, but well, this also isn't like

15 years ago. One of my friends was playing some it was like a login battle with your friend like asynchronously kind of like grow up on fights or turn-based No, it was an asynchronous battle with your friends Yeah. and collect care champions and make a roster and Sure. you know, send them on little adventures and um the game had been going I think it was a Chinese game or Korean. I can't remember which. It'd been going for like five years and I logged in and it was the whole thing was incomprehensible because they'd started with their core system. They'd run a while and they'd realized something wasn't balanced. And so they added in a new set of currency because they didn't want to devalue the initial stuff people had invested in. And the new set of currency could buy a new set of items and pets. And then an expansion later they added in like a whole new system of pets which interacted with both currencies. And an expansion later they realized that was broken so they added in another currency

where new and like so five years in when you got in it wasn't here's your thing. It was you had to learn 14 expansions worth of stuff but all of them had been added on to fix the previous thing. So, it wasn't a through line. It felt like 14 interconnected systems that you were trying to navigate through and it was literally incomprehensible, but it kept their current players only had to learn one thing at a time and so it kept all those people entertained. And part of that is not having the really strong I'll call it designer despot sitting at the top saying, no, this is not a democracy designers and artists and everybody else. Here is what must happen. Yeah. These all must integrate. Did we [ __ ] up over here? Sorry, we have to fix it and live with it in such a way that doesn't mess up our players because League for example, if you go in, you don't have to go learn 14 subsystems. Like they've had a design director on top who's been

dictatorial on saying these things cannot change. Yeah. And very few systems have that or the luxury of doing that because it's also really hard in some games. Like, oh, how do we do this while keeping, you know but it's very as I said, very few games have managed to do that. And I think one of the one of the things, too, and this sort of goes into this evolution is sometimes evolution looks a lot like ripping everything up from the floorboards up and starting over. Mhm. Which is kind of
Final Fantasy 14's a good example. Right. Yeah, 14's done it uh once famously Yeah. and we're about to get the second actually the third iteration of the combat system. So, the first one is that Final Fantasy 14 uh in 1.0 we will be brief sucked. It sucked a lot. No one wanted to play it. It was bad. And then

they were like, uh well, I guess the entire company's going to go bankrupt cuz we put all of our money into this MMO and no one is playing it. We have to do something so they flipped the entire game in about two years into version 2.0 and that's where it's That was the first one. They they had the They basically had the the thing to say, we're not going to try and patch out weird thing. We are equivalently relaunching with all new everything
systems like everything. Right. And then And it worked for them. Yeah. Which is famously like it did not for say Star Wars Galaxies.
Yeah, it does Yeah, correct. There's a bunch of survivorship bias around like, "Oh, we can just relaunch the MMO." No, you're not Final Fantasy XIV, you can't do that. Try again. Um and then the second one is that they initially every player had three resources at least HP, MP, [clears throat] and TP. MP is mana points, TP is technical points. TP was a currency used by non-magic wielding classes to do a bunch of things. Oh, that's right. Like yeah,

warrior etc. Yeah.
Right, correct. And they ripped that entire system out. Ripped the whole thing out and they were like, "Yep, we're done with this. We're going to redo the combat system to not include TP." We're about to get the third iteration of the combat system um which is uh they're reworking every class to have two control modes, one called reborn and one called evolved. Um and the core impetus behind this is severalfold. Uh one, they need a way to remove a thing called the two-minute meta, which we won't go into cuz I could spend an entire hour talking about the design of the two-minute meta. Um and the other one is uh they need to make it so that all classes play on a controller because they're launching on the Switch too now. So, they'll be on every major console. So, now we have a tab-targeted MMO that needs to play on every major controller. And so, they're reducing button bloat by adding additional functionality to buttons. Um Cool. So, like there's an aggro control

move. Most MMOs have a provoke. XIV also has a move called shirk where you transfer your aggro onto a teammate. They reduced those two buttons into one button, which is if I target an enemy and use the button, I provoke. If I target a friend and use the button, I shirk. And it has two charges. So, that kind of thing. Um it's a pretty major overhaul, but you have to be a XIV player, I think, to understand some of the ways that it's a pretty major overhaul, and I don't want to bore everyone. Um but you got to you got to like this is one of the big things that I I wanted to talk about is sometimes it's a gradual evolution, right? And like adding on additional systems like WoW does. One of the one of the groups that's done a pretty good job with that actually is No Man's Sky. Mhm. DE has also done a pretty good job of it, although both of them have sort of ended up in the same place, which is they've added more content, but it's all content islands. A lot of it doesn't integrate together terribly well. Like it's
of goes back to that design despot thing, which is and the I said the old game I talked

about where it's like you get in and suddenly it's like, "Oh, you have this here, but this part over here and this part over here and this part over here." And like none of them are fully meshed and integrated. Yeah. And that's how because that's just it's hard, but again, it's long-term games, you need to both keep adding things for people to do so they don't run out. You extend the treadmill. And you have to address imbalances Mhm. and things that aren't as fun because there are always other games coming out and other things to compete with attention.
Right. And so, like no game will stay a forever game if it isn't continuing to evolve and stay current and feel like the pacing and the play and the topic and the meta is enjoyable compared to other things you could be playing. Right. Although, I will say there is this other there's this tension, right? Cuz like yes, you're absolutely right. And also, there is the what I will call

affectionately the hoodie problem. Sure. Y'all are a bunch of gamers, right? You have that hoodie, right? That one hoodie that's been hanging out a little too long. It's not really the best looking anymore. It's super comfy, though. You'd never get rid of that hoodie, but you probably wouldn't wear it out to dinner with your partner's parents. You probably wouldn't wear it on a date, right? But you do have that hoodie. And that hoodie you wouldn't give up for anything, right? So, like there's a tension between like patching the hoodie and washing the hoodie, and also not wanting to like accidentally disintegrate the hoodie the hoodie. Yeah.
[clears throat]
Um and I think that that's uh that like that's a big part of it. Um that we uh have this sort of tension between keeping a game fresh, No Man's Sky, Final Fantasy XIV's expansion, and also not keeping like you know, if you're a legacy player, how are you going to feel when they roll out this entire new system that doesn't

look anything like the game that you left, right? In WoW, um if you go back to WoW now, your character probably isn't the same level that they were the last time you played because of stat squishes and level changes, right? There there's this constant tension in these forever games between updating things to make um uh to make them palatable, to keep them relevant, and also not alienating the people who might go in, right? I uh for a while I was playing Honkai Star Rail because I thought it was nifty and kind of weird, and I liked the the very bizarre story that they were telling. Um and I tried to go back. Uh I was like, "Hey, I wonder I wonder what Star Rail's up to. I'll reinstall it." And the returning player experience was so bad, I was in game for less than 5 minutes and uninstalled it again, right? Like there's this there's this uh tension uh between keeping it fresh, relevant, and shiny new, and also

not
Correct. And keeping it familiar, which is actually one of the things I would point at Warframe and say that they've done a great job with. Because you get back into Warframe and you load right back in where you left. Like I I I took 6 years off from Warframe, and I literally loaded right back in where I'd left in the same gear that I left with, and nothing had changed. Which was great. Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah, lifestyle game is in forever games, you know, again, interchangeably, are such an interesting thing because they can't stay Excuse me. Very few can stay static. The games like say certain roguelikes can't. Slay the Spire can live how it was forever. Civ 5 with whatever amount of expansions you've done. Like there's certain games where that with certain people will replay them. But again, that's kind of the A-level. The game's

designed for replayability versus the S-tier level of the ones that have kind of the highest chance of becoming the breakout forever games like again the Leagues and the Final Fantasy XIVs and the Overwatches and the Destiny, you know, the ones that people play for years and years and years. Have to keep the people or have to keep you engaged. Have to have a way of gathering money that pays for the team that keeps making the stuff that keep people engaged. And has to add stuff while still remaining familiar for people both playing and to bring people back in to play again. And it's a really tricky balancing act. I mean, there's it's one of the reasons some of these games end up with so many people working on parts of it. Because we Remember we were talking about the um layoffs over at Fortnite. Yeah.
Uh couple weeks ago, and we learned that they laid off a thousand people. But we also learned that they'd had 3,000 people.

So, 3,000 people are But again, this is working on all aspects of it. So, this is around the world. So, not just the game, but all the regions and the storefronts and the special events and like just the things that permeate in, the translation and the localization of keeping a live service game that's played in so many places and regions and languages with, you know, selling so many things. Hell, I'm guessing a lot of their skins or some of their skins had region locks due to IP licenses. Did you pick up, you know, your demon hunter K-pop demon hunter skins, were those a worldwide license? Or those only say in North America and Japan? Could you sell them in Like there's weird things like that that come in, but even so, 3,000 people working on one game that's already out. Yeah. It's Yeah, it that that one still boggles my mind. Like I did not have a

like an understanding of the scale of Fortnite until we were like, "Yeah, they laid off a thousand people." Like what? Yeah. For Fortnite remains one of these big ones, right? I think the biggest lifestyle games right now are probably Fortnite, Mhm. the big three MMOs. That's uh if you're not familiar, that's WoW, um XIV, and RuneScape. RuneScape is bigger than you think it is, and yes, it is absolutely still relevant, and no, I'm not talking about RuneScape 3, I'm talking about old school RuneScape. Old school RuneScape is one of the biggest ones. Um Roblox, unfortunately, uh and probably Minecraft. Minecraft and chess are probably like the biggest the biggest ones. Uh and they're all so big that they boggle the mind at this point, I think. And it's interesting like part of running a lifestyle game or forever game at scale leads to

I'll just say bloat, and not necessarily in the bad way for bloat, but like if you're like, "Hey, cool. I'm running in 50 countries now, selling things in 50 different digital storefronts online with 30 different currencies, you know, server set up in 14 different country, you know, regions. And when we do, you know, updates and we need to patch and get stuff out to each of those, and we need testing and QA in for each of those and you know, to make sure that we regionalize things so that we don't accidentally offend say our Korean audience with something we put in for our Brazilian audience like the amount of things that come up not even around making the game but supporting the game around that just get big. Oh, plus then the marketing and you know, the sponsorship and everything else that like it games once you go large like that are a lot more complex than if you're

just like cool. I've made Slay the Spire. I've translated it. People can buy the game once. You know, it's been translated and localized. Cool. I paid, you know, $20,000 to get the, you know, Japanese version done where I could change out my strings but now I can go sell it to the country of Japan. Yep. What's my ongoing? Nothing. I can now sell it to the country of Japan. Like there's a real difference on type of game you're running for that. Yeah. The as as a as a really interesting example, someone brought up tech debt. Um Oh, yeah. Fun example. Do you know that they've had to change the server architecture for 14 multiple times? Just going to watch Jeff skin crawl. So Um they made it
and dread that. So so before they had you had a server and a data center. The data center was servers and you could visit between servers and they all shared the same queues. Okay?

But a region has multiple data centers in it. So North America has four. They made it
this by the way is latency that they try and put those as close to big hubs of people. They put all of them in one physical place. Yeah, you know, it gets worse. It gets worse and better all at the same time, I promise. Okay. Okay. So they're all in physically in the same place but they're digital they're digitally different. So now you can visit between them by getting into a queue and transferring your character which takes time. Mhm. But they recent and that that was an innovation. Originally, you could not get across that data center line in any fashion. You'd have to make an alt on a different data center. And then they were like, hey, you can move a character around. And they just announced at Fan Fest that they are essentially functionally dissolving the data center boundaries so that now all North American servers will be in the same queue system and you can freely party with and transfer to any world in North America. So they've redone the server

architecture again. I my hat to their server team. It's Mhm. Like and that's that's the other big thing that we should probably address here too is that sometimes those evolutions are not sexy at all. Like everyone's like, oh yeah, look at the new evolved combat system. Look at the new cool magic cards. Look at the no. Sometimes it's have to evolve server architecture change the way that your routing works or add in a new platform for multiplayer or whatever and it's not sexy at all. It's super cool. Tell me about one of those. Mhm. Let me tell you about what I'm currently doing. Yeah. So as many people know who've heard me chat, I have a couple of games VR games up on the meta and other stores. We did the official launch of we did the official version of Catan in VR. I got to work with the guy who wrote the game. I got to work with his sons

on doing the adaptation. It's good. Like it has remained in the top played games Mhm.
Um for a long time. Meta a bit ago was like, hey, can you add in this one thing? And the reason I we're not actively running a big studio is um when we launched the game, they said, we will have this much hardware. We're like, cool. We could get sales based on that. What they actually sold was this much hardware which meant we got sales based on that. So we got say they had 20% of the hardware so we got 20% of the revenue we were thinking because that's 20% of people. Was unsustainable. Yeah. So like we shut the studio down but we're still, you know, running the game on the side because the people have bought it and people continue to buy it. Six years actually eight years later Meta was like, hey, could you add in these couple things? And we're like, yeah. But the last time we modified the code, we were on I think Unity 4. We're now on Unity 6. So we will have to

update our engine from Unity 4 to Unity 6. Oh, and by the way, the Photon multiplayer that we were using stopped doing updates there. So if we're going to move to Unity 6, we now have to replace our entire multiplayer system because they're not making this anymore. Oh, and like so there's all these so I actually got them to pay us a fairly large amount of money that's going to put one of my engineer's kids through college because he spent roughly at this point eight months working a couple hours a night um to just to move us taking the game from where it was up to the point where we can actually make the change they requested because it took 4 or 500 hours of code probably to move the game, you know, from what we had up to the point where we could actually start working on it again. And like we get lots of cool stuff from doing that along the way but

like that's a tech debt that came from not touching the source code for X amount of time while tech continued to move forward.
Yeah. And you know, to submit to the meta system you it's like, oh yeah, you need to be on this version of Unity or later. Well. Yeah. And so like and we we got some. The only way we're doing this is if you pay us to do this and then we'll also throw in the thing you'd like us to do. Yeah.
But like, hey, this means I'm going to I have a game I can like modify again because we're now up to date and we're putting in some extra cool stuff but like running live games and tech debt and like keeping these things running takes people to do them because even if you have an amazing game, things continue to move on. Yeah. And if you want to run them and keep doing it Yeah. like you have to keep doing it with it. It is truly wild how much um like goes into these and how much like

wow today is not the same as wow was a year ago is definitely not the same as wow was five years ago is absolutely not the same as wow was at launch, right? And we we have these games and they kind of someone in chat mentioned the ship of Theseus. I don't even know that it's that cuz I don't think it fully replaces itself but it is like it is fascinating to talk about the ways in which these games that people have like taken in as part of their identity, right? Like I would be shocked if terribly many if there were terribly many people in chat or in the comments who didn't know someone with a World of Warcraft tattoo. Right? Like that kind of like loyalty and and it's so integrated into your life is comes with so many different necessities to like evolve the game both to evolve the game and to evolve the hardware that supports the game. It's just it's wild to me when like I actually like stop and think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, World of Warcraft can drink in the US. That's correct.

I know. So weird, man. We're old, Jeff, but we're super old.
is part of yeah. And I said that's the interesting part about a forever game is as I said just all of these things you need to do to keep it running in a way that it can be played forever both technically and from an enjoyment perspective. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that is a good place for us to wrap our discussion. Comment section, if you're here, if you made it, let us know down below. What what is your most memorable like lifestyle game evolution? Either in a game that you played or in someone played around you. Was it removing damage on the stack in Magic the Gathering? Was it removing TP in Final Fantasy 14? Was it Cataclysm in World of Warcraft? What was your biggest shake up in um in a lifestyle game? We'll be back next week.
wait, I got a sub quest for that.

Yes. Another one, if you ever want to see a weird thing Mhm. go go just get a piece of paper and map out what your lifestyle game was for like the past 10 or 15 years. Like I think you can get some really interesting memories. You're like, wow, I played League from this and then I switched to this to this. Like you'll find this kind of interesting pattern
map of your entertainment and how you spent some of your free time. Yeah. Just as you look at these because most of these you played for so much Yeah. that it really did become kind of a core part of your identity. Yep. Warframe, Final Fantasy 14. There was a bit of magic in the middle. Um
[laughter]
But anyway, Design Club um what's going on and coming up, Will? Uh next week we will bring you another Design Club. There will also be a breakfast next
guest. Yeah, with a special guest. Next week's breakfast, however, is not on Monday. It's on Tuesday. If you're looking for breakfast, it won't be on Monday. It will be on Tuesday. Matt's got a really cool thing. I think he'll probably tell you about it breakfast and

if not, it's a cool secret. Um Bum bum bum. Uh we'll be here on Tuesday. Uh over on the Twitch channel, we'll be playing Matt's first round of Saros and tomorrow I'm going to be taking on the Final Fantasy 14 patch story content. So please join us for all of that. And if you are seeing this as a vod and you want to join us live, we are currently streaming every single almost every Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. It's Thursday, Jeff. Thursday, excuse me. Thursday at 11:00 a.m.
T-day.
[laughter]
You just said Tuesday first and then you said Thursday and messed me up. Um, come join us. We would love to have you. Our chat, though you cannot see it on the VODs, is nice and jumping and we get as you've seen us addressing, we get lots of people Yeah. and chatting about what's going on. We would love to have you as well. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I think that all that remains then is for Jeff

say bye to the people. Bye to the people. Thanks everybody. See you next time.
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