Good evening. You're listening to Three Moose Ahead. I am Len. I am your host for this week.

And if you pre-order and buy the season pass, you will also get our good friend Rowan Kaiser.

Good morning. And we're talking today about the concept of games as a service as it specifically pertains to strategy games.

But before we get into specifics, Rowan, what exactly is games as a service to the uninitiated

and how has it sort of found its way into the industry over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so?

Games as a surface is basically the idea that a game is never ending and you're kind of paying

a subscription fee to continue playing it.

Or, you know, some level of, um, free to play is also games as a certain. Basically, a game is

alive and it keeps being updated and built across as far as it goes. And we see this in, you know,

games like Fortnite, which is sort of the ultimate game as a service.

Any massively multiplayer RPG that has a subscription fee is constantly adding new content in order to make people continue paying those subscription fees.

And in strategy games, you see it in things like paradox with how they do an expansion every four to six

months or so for most of their games across the past decade, although that might be changing,

which I'm sure we'll talk about some. Or a more traditional form is something like civilization

has done since its third installment, which is, or maybe the second actually, which is sort of

having a consistent set of expansions and occasional patches that kind of revamp the game

to continue making it fresh for players as they, as before, you know, they're ready to do

full sequels.

So, yeah, it's basically the idea that a game is not done at release.

And people should be continuing to pay for it at sub-level

in order to get new stuff and continue enjoying it.

Yeah, I think SIV is kind of an interesting one because they, within Siv's

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