There’s no reason that you or I would find good. There are plenty of reasons that Funcent deems are good enough, and plenty of paying customers to prove them right.

Welcome to the “live service games”. They’re the latest stage of late stage capitalism in video games, and the current pinnacle of enshittification of the industry we used to love so much. Remember my T-shirt metaphor above? Imagine if the T-shirt companies could somehow implement planned obsolescence bullshіt that some other companies use. That’s what we have with video games now.

And that’s all the more reason to move on to a different game and stop supporting parasitic studios and publishers, like Funcent. There are reasons to hope that the industry might be about to undergo a shift away from this extreme, but for that to happen, we-the-consumers need to keep putting our money into games that don’t fit the parasitic model, like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Of course they do. You wanna know why? Because gamers who continue to cling to bad games are a tiny, unprofitable minority.

The irony here is that Conan Exiles is far from the worst offender when it comes to “live service” practices. In the video I linked above, you can see the slimiest examples of that particular cesspool. Funcent knows they can’t compete with them, so instead they carved out a niche for themselves.

Conan Exiles was a niche game to begin with, and they took it to a niche live service game by preserving its niche appeal but making everything else blander, more generic, and easier. It has a unique setting and some eye-catching mechanics, but if you scratch that surface, you’ll find the gruel from Matrix. Sooner or later, you’ll realize that it doesn’t have “everything the body needs” and move on to something that has some actual taste.

Or you can keep complaining on the forums, but they’re not listening to you. Shouting louder or longer won’t make them. Spending money or refusing to spend money won’t make them, either, because Conan Exiles is only one of the games Funcom is working on and Funcom is only one of the cogs in Tencent’s money-making machine.

Yeah, it sucks that they took the game we enjoyed and changed it to something they can milk for ever-dwindling cash until they put it out of its misery. Go ahead and grieve for it. I know I did. Just don’t get forever stuck in the second of the five stages of grief.

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