I think I am being a bit overparanoid here but this released on MS's platform and now it has a big MP update. Regardless if they promised MP long ago, the timing is uncanny. MS (and all other AAA) has their other GaaS platforms so this would not surprise me. A marketplace coming in would also not surprise me - especially if "enough" people are playing this now. What is everyone's thinking on this?

What does GaaS mean?

Games As A Service.

I don't think so. If Hello Games were the types to do that they wouldn't have made all their updates free. Plus it would be an incredibly stupid move. The game has already faced enough controversy without introducing a lot of microtansactions.

BTW offloading certain scientific/physical computations to the cloud sounds more realistic to me as Microsoft already did with some Xbox stuff if I remember correctly. However rendering/doing almost everything in the cloud I'm very skeptical about as per my previous post. (Somehting I read about on a German news site about the visions of the Xbox team that in about two generations or something traditional consoles would die out due to that cloud service reasoning. GeForce NOW is something already in beta by NVIDIA hitting the same vein.)

And this could also doom us to have less and less games playable offline/during Internet outages or whatever.

Generally correct.

Further, we already hear about nasty bugs affecting some NEXT players, PS4 and PC alike. In gamedev, it is accepted practical wisdom that you're not going micro until your updates are practically bug-free (speaking of gameplay-breaking, nasty ones), as people tend to hate you when they get bugs affecting things they paid for. And rightfully so.

It is then entirely understandable that a studio of Hello Games' size may well never be able to push out updates as bug-free and reliable as giants like Blizzard were/are able to. Because of both smaller community (thus way less useful feedback) as well as massively smaller team to debug, test and polish the product. This is quite normal and fair, and in me book is the main reason why NMS should never go micro.

That said, it doesn't mean HG can't get any support in the form of regular payments. And we hear there are somethings for PS4 plus and Xbox one X of the sort - or at least are about to happen. As long as those remain of any sort which would not make players who don't buy those to feel anyhow "inferiour" in any significant way - mostly related to gameplay, - i'd say this would be alright. Indeed, some fans would _gladly_ support with extra cash if given some cosmetic features to mark their extra support, simple as that.

So yep, in this regard, i think HG is going basically OK.