They can also be some of the best, most engaging, and longest-lasting forms of entertainment
Emphasis mine. Longest-lasting is the one thing live service games are guaranteed not to be, which he gets to later.
The thing that really truly makes a live service game a live service are the updates.
Games got updates before live services, and games today that aren't live services get updates.
Then the author acknowledges the existence of expansions and patches before live service games but doesn't see this as being at odds with his definition. Expansions certainly didn't take "several years" to release back then, like he said, and they still don't take that long now (they still exist, which he also acknowledges). While the updates that came along with World of WarCraft were large and significant, it also wasn't out of the ordinary for PC games to add content like maps and modes for free, no subscription required, because just like today, new content drops bring players back to check it out.
Magic: The Gathering and Dice Throne get regular updates. These are tabletop games. Are they live services? Of course not. They're selling you a product, not providing you a service. The regular work the developers do on those games are just R&D that any producer goes through to make a product. The "service" of live service games are that they're providing the server for you to play on alongside those updates, but the server code is just a part of the product that they withheld from you in order to make you dependent on them and eventually have to spend money. Live services are not services; they're just bad products, because they didn't give you everything you paid for.
The author then discusses all of the manipulation that comes along with live service design, and I too find that gross, but from my perspective, that's just part of the bad product that they built. Chicken and egg. Customers were perfectly capable of the technical requirements of running a vanilla WoW server, and it was only Blizzard's legal department that stopped them.
I think the industry as a whole should be finding a better way to preserve these games and also to provide some legal avenue for paying customers...to continue playing them even when the publisher has thrown in the towel.
Exactly. This is the problem. These companies won't do this unless somehow forced though, because that dependency on their servers means you have to play the game with the lengthy grind that they dictate so that you stay subscribed longer (even though the house rules on the community server speed up the grind to be more fun), stay online longer through manipulation, and keep getting opportunities to spend money in their cash shop. Even games that aren't monetized like a live service do this nonsense, probably out of some attempt to prevent piracy, but it just ends up just making the game worse along with it. I no longer buy or play games that are dependent on an external server; even this definition has some blurred lines with games like Hitman.
It's okay to make a multiplayer game that people may only play a handful of times before putting down, or a single player game that you play through once that has a deathmatch mode attached to it. Some of the most successful multiplayer games of all time, including ones that are still popular today, started as great single player games with multiplayer attached to it. If it really gets its hooks in people but needs some touching up, put out some patches and expansions for it. It doesn't need to keep getting new content forever, and thinking that a game can or should do that is what leads to all of this nonsense. Give us the servers. Give us LAN. Give us direct IP connections. Give us same-screen multiplayer. Sever the dependency on a server that I can't control, or I'm not buying.