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When Jim Ryan departed his role as CEO of Sony, he left behind him an intense commitment to Live-Service games. Most of them have not panned out. in production games from studios like Guerilla and Naughty Dog have been in development for some time. The purchase of Bungie signified a tilt by Sony towards leaning into the Live-service market. It has not, from what I can see, paid off.

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Online was canceled in December of 2023, and many of Sony's other projects either have had no updates or were similarly shut down, namely the most recent release: Concord. Sony is not the only studio and publisher leaning into the Live-Service system, of course. Capcom has also made forays into it, testing the waters with things like Monster Hunter World's time-limited event quests, daily bonuses, and seasonal events, a first in the series. Their biggest push, Exoprimal, ended its updates after 4 seasons, nowhere near the 10-year plan many of these types of games are pushing for. But Exoprimal and Monster Hunter World at least get to stay playable. The hype for Monster Hunter Wilds understandably has drawn many players back along the Return to World campaign. Many games are much less lucky.

Square Enix's bevy of live service offerings, including mobile games and the Splatoon-adjacent party shooter Foamstars have suffered their own closures and shut downs. On April 29, 2024 Nier Reincarnation closed its doors after ending its story. A story that no one will be able to experience outside of YouTube videos as there are no plans for an offline version of the game. Following that, Square Enix announced that the global version of Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius will be shutting down in October 2024, taking its collaborations with the likes of popstar Ariana Grande and Lara Croft of Tomb Raider with it, unless you can and play the Japanese version. Foamstars also is no longer retailing for its $29.99 price tag starting October 4, 2024, shifting to a free to play model entirely.

There have been many incidents in the past year alone of Live-Service games failing to either find their audiences or not doing anywhere near the amount of success that they were intended for. Destiny 2 released a highly acclaimed expansion in The Final Shape, the culmination to a 10 year long story arc that had begun all the way back in Destiny when it first released. All that critical acclaim did nothing to shield the workers at Bungie from layoffs that occurred in October 2023, before the expansion launched, and in July 2024, just after the beginning of the first big story arc of the new year plan for Destiny’s world going forward. 

The thing this is bringing to mind for me is, how tenuous it all is. Entire games could, either for reasons of losing staff and being unable to meet the previous standards or complete shutdown of the game itself, disappear entirely, vanishing from people’s consoles and phones and computers like dust in the wind. Years of people’s lives suddenly vanishing into nothing. It feels like such a phenomenal waste; both of people’s time and hard work, and money. 

Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia shut down in February 2024. A mobile game centered around a celebration of Final Fantasy’s history, a la the previous Dissidia games, featuring characters beloved and obscure. One story chapter could be about Judge Gabranth from Final Fantasy XII bonding with Gau, the wild child from Final Fantasy VI. Another would be Aerith talking in person to Kadaj, the Sephiroth clone from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and trying to get him to be his own individual self. None of this excellent character interaction (in my opinion at least) or its turn-based turn manipulation JRPG gameplay saved it.

The Global version never even got to read all the story content released in the original Japanese version. The servers were separated by about a 6-8 month delay so global server players got a glimpse of what was coming, and in this case, what they would never see. I do not know the reason for the closure of Opera Omnia and I may never. It could have been anything from not quite being profitable enough for Square Enix or simply not having any where for the game to go. For all my praise, it is me mourning the death of a gacha game. I spent money on this game. And now, everything I spent it on is gone, lost to the digital abyss. Thankfully, they have stated that all of the conversations and cutscenes from the game will be preserved on the official Square Enix YouTube Channel, but who knows how long that will remain.

This is a fate that awaits any and all of these mobile games, or digital experiences with monetization. People can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a single character or an outfit or a piece of gear (Apex Legends’ extremely costly and grind-heavy heirlooms come to mind) and then as soon as you get it, you could get an announcement saying as much as “Sorry, all your effort and investment is gone. We’re shutting down the servers in two days.”

All this can happen to a game you like or a game you don't. Things you love can go belly up in different ways than just shutting down. In chasing the money of these kinds of Live-service endeavors, their identity can be compromised in favor of more cosmetic real-money transactions, battle es where you have to pay money to get the full rewards, or even just by trying to make it so as many people as possible play it, trying to please everyone and ending up pleasing no one, or at least no longer pleasing me, in the case of Destiny 2.

I watched the game prioritize doing repetitive missions and extremely mind numbing collection activities. Progressing seasonal storylines and leveling up the season experience was simply centered around doing the same activity on higher or lower difficulties, hearing the same voice lines, over and over and over. And, to add salt on the wound, Bungie announced that they would be reviving their single player sci-fi first-person shooter series Marathon as, of all things, an extraction shooter.

It’s enough to start driving away even the most die hard players when they feel that everything they're doing or looking forward to is not a priority in the industry at large. It's made even worse when any sort of challenge reward is nothing more than a funny little label to hang over your character, or an in-game weapon that will be outclassed in a couple months anyway. Power creep, feature creep, attention creep all factor in. After all, when you have one game that already takes daily job-like clocking in and clocking out, where are people who have other, real-life responsibilities going to fit in your new time sink ritual game? People stick with what works.

The success of something like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Elden Ring and its DLC, and smaller projects that sweep the awards every year, like a Signalis or Dave the Diver shows that there is good money to be made in things that don’t feel like they are trying to nickel and dime every person who interacts with them. It’s on publishers to realize that.

The post The Live-Service Game Structure Cannot Keep Going Like This appeared first on Siliconera.

Sony’s latest attempt at live service success has proven to be the exact opposite, as Concord has been shut down after only two weeks of its release. Initial reports on its sales were not promising, with player counts for the Steam version barely breaking 700 concurrent players.

The shutdown of Concord is almost certainly some kind of new record. The only game I can think of with a launch this bad was Crucible. Don’t worry if you don’t it, I’m sure I’m one of a handful of people who do. That said, I don’t anything about the game itself, just how badly it did. Released in May 2020 as the first game from Amazon’s publishing division, Crucible was pulled back into closed beta a month later and then canceled entirely by October. And yet, it still lasted at least two weeks longer as a public release than Concord.

There are many things that led Concord to do this poorly. The characters were bland and uninspiring, revealing little about the character personalities (if any). Its most prominent trailer was misleading and suggested a narrative-driven experience that the game wasn’t going to deliver. It charged money up front as a new IP in a market full of free-to-play alternatives. All these reasons are contributors to Concord’s demise, but mostly, it’s simply a victim of the realities of the live service gold rush happening within the games industry.

Big companies are desperate for their own live service game. It’s easy to see why from an executive perspective. A quick glance at the billions of dollars being made by the likes of Fortnite is enough to make any investor ask why their money isn’t going towards the same thing. When a live service succeeds, it can be a huge earner, bringing in a lot of regular income. However, these seemingly obvious calculations frequently collide with the cold, harsh reality of the market they’re trying to get into.

The truth is, the live service market has proven itself to be a gamble. Sure, there have been big success stories. But for every game that makes it, there are significantly more live services like Concord, crashing and burning within months, and now even weeks, of their release. I already mentioned Crucible, an uninspiring hero shooter with PvE elements, but the list goes on.

Let’s not forget the likes of Anthem or Babylon’s Fall, where studios known for single-player games were forced into making live service games that no one cared about. What about Hyper Scape, where Ubisoft boldly asked, what if Fortnite had exactly zero personality? Even within the last twelve months we’ve seen mass indifference to Foamstars and the cancelation of Sega’s Hyenas after it became obvious that no one was going to pay much attention to it if it did release.

These games are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a parade of live service games that have been sent out to fall right into a mass grave sitting off to the side of the games industry. The live service market is one where success can be lucrative, but the failures are crushing and much more likely to happen.

The live service market is wildly oversaturated. Not just because everyone’s chasing after Epic’s V-Bucks but also because the nature of live service games means that there simply can’t be that many out there at any given time. Live service games demand your constant attention, with daily bonuses, time-gated events and other requirements to keep coming back and make the game your exclusive forever game.

When a standard single-player game releases, the time commitment is only as long as the game’s story. An RPG may be a long experience, but once it’s done it’s easy to hop into another game in the genre. For something like horror games, their shorter length means horror fans can easily jump from one game to the next. And what’s more, a lack of players at launch isn’t a death sentence, as players can discover the game months or years later while still getting the exact same experience.

For any given live service game, you have to convince people already invested into the existing similar games to simply stop playing and move over to your project. Players certainly don’t have the time to play more than one, maybe two, at a time, so if your game doesn’t match up, it will simply be ignored. And without enough other players, these games simply aren’t worth playing. The fewer players there are, the quicker those players will disappear and accelerate the game’s demise.

It’s not impossible to succeed, just highly unlikely. Fall Guys and Helldivers 2 show that having a unique enough hook can bring people in, while Valorant and Apex Legends show the importance of good community engagement during development or around launch. But even some of these games are operating at significantly reduced player numbers from their hugely successful launches, while other games which could have succeeded, such as the unique dodgeball battler Knockout City, failed to achieve much success at all. The idea that there is a magic formula for success has simply not played out in reality.

The live service gold rush has been a disaster, and Concord is merely the latest casualty of it. Talented developers have wasted years of their lives working on canned projects, resources have been funneled away from games with more community interest and the few players who have paid into these have simply lost their money to a game they can no longer play. It’s an unsustainable strategy driven entirely by the pursuit of short-term profits. Profits that also have failed to materialize, raising the question of who, if anyone, has gained anything from this strategy.

With Concord shutting down in such a short space of time, I hope it’s the final nail in the coffin for the live service gold rush. While I don’t believe it’s the end for these games altogether, I hope the sheer numbers of them get reduced. And in the process hopefully more publishers will allow developers to build on their strengths and make much more appealing games for their audience.

The post The Failure of Concord Highlights the Flaws of the Live Service Gold Rush appeared first on Siliconera.