According to the bean counters this will save them $17/month in hosting costs

Yeah, they've just ensured the only way a person can play it is through piracy. Very smart move, WB, very smart...

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.

It's not going anywhere until people stop playing the games.

It's not just limited to games...

We see it most prevalently in games because the gaming industry is massive. But this can also happen to your car... Or your fridge...

Here's a fun story:

There were these few blind people who volunteered to have cybernetic implants that would help them (partially) see. The company went under, the patent is held by a patent troll, but the people still have those implants in their head... Which have now either shut down or are malfunctioning...

There are a very small number of games where a changing world is a benefit to the game, although sometimes the approach also means skimping on some development before going live.

Helldivers 2 is an example of a game that benefits from the changing world approach of GaaS and it doesn't have predatory monetization. Playing the game gives enough in game currency to buy optional equipment needed for the changing world even if you only play a few hours a week. Heck, play it more regularly and you can afford most of the thematic warbonds which again and not necessary. The changing world and adding more enemy units keeps the game fresh over time, and the evolving story is like playing a giant semi shared campaign. You play a small part in a shared experience. I don't think doing the game as a single or coop campaign would have been a better experience.

That said, when they do end the ongoing campaign at some point it would be awesome to have some kind of automated system campaign for people to still do things. It wouldn't be as focused, but it would extend the game's life.

MultiVersus was hurt by trying to do SaaS because they added more predatory monetization after the beta where it was bad enough and tried to milk it for everything to the detriment of the gameplay. It is a great example of a game where the SaaS approach was terrible, and that is the case for the vast majority of SaaS games.

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.

It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.

I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You'll see this again with 2XKO, even if they've got a year's worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.