: Completely agreed. This approach also hurts your original game by making it
: feel 'outdated' quicker. You flood the market like this and of course
: you're going to get low player population in shorter and shorter amounts
: of time. The pace will just keep accelerating until something implodes.

: Hell, Halo 3 still feels like a pretty new game to me, and yet by the gaming
: industry's methods its already an 'old classic'.

: Microsoft and other companies need to work on preserving things, not
: replacing an item with a planned limited lifetime. If folks kept their
: servers online and kept up with supporting games with playlist tweaks or
: little patches, AND we didn't have a hundred sequels trying to vie for the
: next ten minutes of a teenager's attention, I think we'd see a lot of
: great games still active, even if its in a smaller scope. The main Halos
: should be as persistent as Counter Strike.

: Look at board games - Hasbro will always be producing some new twist of
: Battleship or Monopoly to draw folks in, but they are also still producing
: the classic version, because its a great long term investment, and even if
: its never a 'hot product' again, it will always be there for the fans of
: the game.

I dunno... I know that's an ideal situation, but I think it's more complex than that. Let's say you release a great game that has a promising life. A competitor releases a game, then learns a bit and releases another one. Then learns from your game, and releases another one.

You could say your game is solid enough to stand the test of time without being run down with multiple fast releases, but at the same time media will be all over the fact that your game is already outdated simply because newer competing games have already 'improved' and are taking the spotlight. Feels more like a self-fulfilling need to keep at the top in order to be successful / compete in the mainstream market. Once the ball starts rolling...

Of course, if you don't care about being top of the ladder, then what the competition does (or how much more attention they get) won't matter. But for the big guns, I think as much as they want to have a flagship game stand alone successfully for a couple of years, it may simply not be possible in today's market. *shrug* And of course there will be hard core fans who don't care about mainstream, and just want quality and are happy having a game for a couple of years; forget the competition. There are people like that here. But for mainstream, mass market demographic, on that scale of success, the spotlight is very short lived and fragile.
And that sucks. Because publishers want that spotlight. And if it dims, they'll move on to NEW SHINY GAME to get it back.

Considering how long the current gen consoles have lasted before a new product release was on the horizon, I think they know how to make something good enough to last; which makes me think for games they're purposefully focusing on bigger, but shorter lifetimes, rather than solid and durable long-term games, in order to remain competitive.
And that sucks. (for we who want the latter, at least)