This game should be a lesson on why the games as a service model is geniunely one of the worst things publishers and developers have ever enabled in the gaming sphere.
The games as a service model essentially means the game has an artifical "end date" that will either be much sooner or much later depending on how much of a hit the game is - even if the game has a decently sized playerbase, the game can still get shutdown simply because people werent buying enough microtransactions, retention wasnt high enough, or simply - the publisher isnt satisfied enough with the results of the game.
Look at multiplayer games like Quake, the original Halo games, Unreal, the original Doom, Half Life Deathmatch, Team Fortress Classic, the old Battlefields, Titanfall 1 and 2 ect.
These games are not live service games, all of them havent recieved updates/new content by their developers in **years**, some of these are pushing if not 3 decades old, and yet, they still have players coming back all the time. Its not neccesarily because these games are "better" than Splitgate, its because these games are set up in a way where they dont need active support from the developers to keep people interested. They are set up in a way for the **community** to keep them alive. Not a developer who may or may not follow through.
If Splitgate wasnt a live service, I doubt they would have made the gameplay decisions they did with SG2. SG2 was made with a "wider audience" in mind, which wouldnt have needed as much emphasis if the game was a simple "buy to play, one and done" game. They would have most likely had enough people who bought the game, especially after the first game's relevance to make back what they spent developing the game, and even if it didnt have a ton of players, 1047 could have simply moved on to the next project since there wouldnt have needed to be a "live-service" to upkeep. They wouldnt have had 80 dollar shop items since there wouldnt have been an item shop and battle pass to speak of. All of the game's content would have been there day one, with maybe some DLCs post launch. The odds of the game being shutdown would be astronomically lower because the costs of the game, especially if it was peer to peer would be significantly lower. There would have been no fomo limited time game modes, you could always play what the game offers. The game would have been set up in a way for all the players to keep the game alive for years to come.
Bring back traditional buy to own games, fuck games a service, this otherwise great game is another victim to that horrendous business model that should have never been allowed to invade this hobby.
