Last week,Hyenas was cancelledjust weeks before it was due to release. It joins Apex Legends Mobile, Battlefield Mobile, Rumbleverse, CrossfireX, Pac-Man 99, Pokemon Trading Card Game Online, Blaseball, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt, Lemnis Gate, Auto Chess, Knockout City,Marvel’s Avengers, and all online functionality of theNintendo 3DSand Wii U as live-service games or online services that have shut down this year alone. There are probably more that I can’t think of off the top of my head. So why are companies still making live-service games when so many fail?
The first reason is that games take so long to make. We only saw the impact ofBreath of the Wildon subsequent video games years after its release. Triple-A games can take nearly a decade to produce these days, and those just beneath them in terms of budget and scope could easily take half that. So perhaps these games, some of which released the same year they were closed down, others of which didn’t even make it to release, are simply behind the times thanks to long development cycles?
I don’t think that’s the answer. Or at least, not the complete answer. The rest of the answer is shareholders. Shareholders, executives, and the rest of the people sat at the top of games companies, who care about the bottom line and nothing else. The people who see FIFA – sorry,EA Sports FC 24– release every year and make EA a bucket of money. Who look atApex Legends, Fortnite, and Warzone and see games with years-long lifespans that don’t show any signs of stopping. Executives see these cash cows and they want some of that. But it rarely works.
When was the last time a new live-service game successfully launched and kept up a reasonable playerbase over time? Okay, when was the last time a new live-service gamethat isn’t a sequelsuccessfully launched? Counter-Strike 2 and Overwatch 2 both brought over their entire playerbases thanks to the originals being rendered unplayable, and have the backing of Valve and Blizzard respectively.
I can’t think of one.Blood Bowl 3is struggling, as fans play as much of the previous edition as they do the current game anddevelopers admitthey’re still in a “transitional period”. Not even Apex Legends Mobile, which rode on the coattails of its hugely successful PC and console sibling, could prove cost effective enough to keep servers online.Pokemon Unitemight be the last successful live-service game I remember launching, developed by the might of Tencent and using the cultural monolith that is the Pokemon IP. Even then, it is hardly talked about in the same breath as its contemporaries.
And yet studios still see live-service as the way forward. At this point, though, the market is saturated. Surely a new live-service game is aiming to tear customers away from their existing live-service predilections, rather than enticing new players into the live-service bubble? This is flawed logic, though, as the more time and money you put into a live-service title, the morestuffyou have in them. More skins, more stats, more friends to play with. The longer you play, the harder it is to leave. It’s why the system works, for existing live-service games anyway. It’s why Niantic’sPokemon Gofollow-ups have nearly all failed; because your core audience has already spent hundreds of hours levelling up in Pokemon Go, and you may’t play more than one of these games simultaneously.
There’s no more room at the inn. Blood Bowl 3, which I mentioned earlier, may survive due to the fandom the game has and the niche hobbyists who play both board and video game variants. But for a new game, not attached to an IP the size of Warhammer or Pokemon, not a sequel to an incredibly popular live-service game, what chance does it have? eFootball has its own version of Ultimate Team, but just an average of 8,832 players over the past month, compared with EA Sports FC 24’s 47,883. If Konami can’t match the EA formula, how can smaller studios?
The current crop of successful live-service games will likely continue to thrive for years. There will be peaks and troughs, but they’ll be fine. The players are already in the system, and they’ll stay there as long as new content is put on their screens. I don’t think we’ll ever see another live-service game be successful in the same way. Not a brand new IP, and probably not Ubisoft’s XDefiant, despite the throng of recognisable faces joining the fight. The live-service bubble burst years ago, and only the big dogs currently running the show will see any semblance of success.
