Hello everybody and welcome to Kotaku Split Screen, the podcast where we tackle video games one extremely specific topic at a time.

I am one of your hosts, Kotaku senior reporter Nathan Gray Grayson. And I am joined, as always, by Ashley Parrish.

Hey.

And Michael Fahey.

Hello and welcome.

Wow.

That was a very streamlined intro for us.

Usually something happens.

Somebody with level line somewhere, and it'll all fuck up.

You just jinxed it now.

Hello and welcome.

Anyway, so I guess we should just roll right into this week's topic.

We are talking about, for no reason really in particular, games as a service, which is a concept that has been around for a little bit,

and that is kind of powering many video games these days, in part because, you know,

makes publishers a lot of money.

But I figured it would be an interesting thing to talk about right now because we're kind of in a,

I don't want to say, dead zone for new games coming out, but like, there's just not a lot really happening.

There's not a ton on the horizon.

A lot of games have been delayed by COVID.

So I think a lot of people are playing games that might be more in the service model that have been around for a while and continually update because those games are still chugging along in spite of everything. So with that

said, I think we're going to move into our first segment, which is a speed run of the history

of service games. Speed run. Where they started, where they are going, maybe even where they'll end up.

...