The beta was fun, although the monetization was bad even back then.

But the official release made all the wrong decisions to amplify the worst parts of gameplay and dial up the monetization. It was like they got all the player feedback backwards.

Do you even have to pay hosting costs, if you put a game on steam or does valve not distribute your game for free?

If I'd have to guess the bigger issues with a game like this would be licensing or that delisting allows some form of tax advantageous asset depreciation.

The catch is a free to play online gaming service isn’t a “game you own” in most cases.

It's not going anywhere until people stop playing the games spending ridiculous amounts of money in them.

Fixed that for you. The problem isn't the casual players, it's the people spending $500+ worth of skins and battle passes on one game. Those are the reason GaaS are so successful.

If people play, it becomes popular, which attracts more players, which attracts spending. Even if you spend $0, you are still supporting the type of game it is by playing it.

I would venture to guess it's to avoid potential licensing issues that could arise down the road that they don't want to deal with.

This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There's no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo's platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.

Not to mention the GAAS titles which are competitive in nature. The whales thrive on having a mob of casual players they can crush with their P2W advantage. If the whales were only matched against other whales, they'd win less and play less.

The Nickelodeon fighter game is still available I believe, but you're still right in that there's still basically nothing to hold a candle to Smash Bros.

Rivals of Aether II is a more realistic contender to Smash. It had a really good turnout at Combo Breaker this year.

This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.

I bought the first Nickelodeon game a couple months after it released, and the online was already dead, I literally couldn't find a match. Just went ahead and got a refund on it.

It's going offline. You can still play it.
If you never owned it then it doesn't matter.

Pretty sure hosting costa arent it, the only thing possible woyld be licensing issues for the IP's otherwsie they could leave it on steam forever and STILL make money off of sales. There are games that do this by making the players host their own servers each match.

The reason that games are even hosted on "official" servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP's they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.

The only issue was having to have a "matchmaking" server but even then, steam has the tools to replace that entirely.

If you aren't already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can't just drop "support" (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.

The worst part, the demo was actually pretty good.

They literally could have released this game with mod support, and sold it for $20 and it would have been a fun party game.

Instead, they kept going on with BS games as a service.

Same here. There’s been a few games I’ve seen on here recently that look interesting, even some “indie” titles, but as soon as I get to the Steam page and it lists online only, I’ve lost all interest.

Miss me with that bullshit.

The business model isn't terrible, it makes money, but it is terrible for the consumer

I am aggressively opposed to anything that is profitable at the expense of the consumer. That is a terrible business model.