Some Modern Examples:
Concord lasted two weeks.
Babylon’s Fall didn’t make it a year.
The First Descendant lost 97% of its players.,
skate. is fading fast, and its Steam reviews only recently clawed their way out of “Mixed",
Skull and Bones has probably shut down
KTLJ is a trainwreck, same with Gotham Knights
Even Marvel Rivals, the most “successful” newcomer, has dropped 90% of its audience since launch.
Marathon looks to be a failure
The “forever game” era also gave us LawBreakers, Battleborn, Anthem, and others that didn’t even make it past 1 or 2 years
Games built to be “forever experiences” are dying faster than the single-player titles they were supposed to replace, If live-service gaming was ever sustainable, we’d have more than a handful of survivors left.
Helldivers 2 is still going strong, probably because the developers remembered that you’re supposed to make your game fun to play, unlike all those piece of shit games you listed
Also worth noting the entire dev team of Marvel Rivals was fired not long after it was released, which I’m sure had an impact on the quality of the content produced thereafter
Also Marvel Rivals are doing some really crazy stuff like releasing a new hero, complete balance pass, and competitive season shuffle every 4 weeks
That’s just a bonkers amount of work that I imagine has to catch up with them sooner rather than later
I mean, how can anyone on earth justify playing more than one live-service game? And if you’re going to play one, you’re going to play the one that always has players and that you and everyone else knows how to play. Like Highlander, there can be only one. Perhaps Fortnite will stumble one day and another one will take it’s place, but all the gaming companies will have to wait until then.
Live service games are a natural monopoly and therefore need to be nationalized.
You WILL play your state-mandated no-build solo
also nationalize Pokèmon
how many of those just died because the target audience is already taken? like warframe already exists i don’t need anthem or tfd
It’s so funny Bungie is still going forward with Marathon. What’s the audience there? Tarkov players who also liked Destiny?
One thing’s for certain, the target audience isn’t the fans of original Marathon, or young people who would have been.
The corporate impulse to reanimate a cult classic into a grotesquely misguided attempt at mass appeal after 30 years of peaceful repose
So much of the ‘game design’ for modern live service games is less like game design and more like marketing campaign design.
Reveals, content drops, surprise reveals, ongoing narrative, roadmaps, engagement drivers etc is much more akin to building sales funnels and advertising strategy, never mind monetisation strategies.
And the secret to successful marketing is that you need to start with a product that a) people want and b) doesn’t suck. Marketing companies like to complicate it, because they get paid for their failures too, but that’s the core of it.
So you can take $100m, five years, and a thousand devs/artists/sound people/writers etc but if 80% of that time and money and effort is spent in pursuit of the sales funnel/advertising strategy type stuff it’s gonna take a miracle for you to come up with something more fun and organically engaging than a far smaller project where that was the primary, or perhaps only, goal.
They all want to be the next Fortnite, without realising that Fortnite was a fun game before it become a giant empty pop-culture monolith.
Just one more attempt bro I swear we can have the next Fortnite
If we just throw the right buzzwords at the lightning I’m sure it will go into the bottle again
“Uhhhh Concord only failed because of WOKE, if they’d made all the cast grizzled white men and taken the pronouns out of the bios it would have sold 10000000 copies”Peggle gang keeps winning
Also my phone autocorrected Peggle into something way different 👀
If live-service gaming was ever sustainable, we’d have more than a handful of survivors left.
What’s the basis for this? Just because the market segment is saturated doesn’t mean it’s inherently unsustainable.
And while there’s plenty of failures to point to, there’s also a fair few successes of the past few years, particularly on the gacha scene. I think this is more wishcasting than anything else.
The fact that gacha games are a thing at all depresses and confuses me greatly as someone who was offended beyond belief when games first began having the audacity to ask money for shit like weapon skins 15+ years ago
I was mortified when I learned that the anime horse girl racing game has different monthly spending limits depending on how old the player is. Jesus pissing Christ, why does a fucking bideo game need spending limits, why do people play this garbage, why is this normalised AAAAAAA
horse armor, mobile games, that one fucker at EA, and their consequences
Are there other “lifetime” games out there that weren’t originally made with that intent? I can think of Counter Strike as a good example. CS2/CSGO (I’m counting them as the same game) is 13 years old now and is still hitting new revenue peaks. Last year alone the skins brought in $1 billion for Valve.
Warframe is another successful example.
They just keep going because people keep playing.
TF2 is still going strong as well from what I’ve heard, their all time player peak was like 2 years ago.
I’m still slightly salty about Anthem. For all its flaws it had the bones of a good game. The flight mechanics were fun as fuck and the core loop was solid. Shame about everything else.
Theres an mmo thats been out for decades amd still manages to get people to fork out money for an arguably awful game experience because they gamified being a reddit mod & the people love to fight each other in the chat.
WoW and iRacing be like
all outlived by hexbear
Meanwhile Sea of Thieves has been getting updates for 7 years even though its a buggy mess where almost no game mechanic consistently works.
Even the examples of live service successes usually have major problems if you look deeper at their update history at all
