Not only do live-service games need to instantly attract an audience to keep their publisher from impatiently pulling the plug like a kid tired of an old toy, but they also have to maintain this momentum while “successfully monetizing” their player base (usually with crappy gambling mechanics). After surviving the first phase, these games are immediately forced into direct competition with other multiplayer titles that are probably more fully formed due to years of patches and live playtesting. While it’s not impossible to overcome all this—some, like Apex Legends, have pulled it off—most need some combination of originality and luck. As for the former, if a game is expensive to create, like most of these live-service projects are, this generally leads to a shorter leash from publishers when it comes to taking creative risks, making novelty difficult to implement.
As for the luck part, virality is hard to fake. Whether it’s Minecraft or PUBG, which began as an Arma III mod, many of the most popular recent online games didn’t come from the traditional AAA pipeline in the first place. Even Fortnite, which is from an established publisher, began as a co-op zombie-fighting thing before abruptly pivoting towards the Battle Royale trend. (If you predicted the game would become one of the biggest phenomena in the world after watching its generic initial trailer, you are a veritable Nostradamus.) Speaking of megahits that encourage children to nab their parents’ credit cards, Roblox was initially created by a tiny core team. Last year, it somehow had more “hours of engagement” than Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. Of course, for every Roblox, there are a thousand other projects that don’t remotely catch on. The entertainment industry is unpredictable; video games are no exception.
These long odds haven’t deterred publishers. After all, corporate executives and shareholders usually want to take big swings that could make them billions rather than pursue more stable gains (which would probably be more beneficial to the rank and file). After all, for many CEOs, the worst-case scenario is flying out with a golden parachute as their subordinates take the hit. Most of Highguard’s team was laid off within weeks of the game’s launch. The studio that made Concord was shut down after its release. Last month, Sony shuttered Bluepoint Games, the studio that handled the Shadow Of Colossus and Demon’s Souls remakes, after reportedly scrapping an unannounced live-service project they were working on based on God Of War. The silver lining is that Sony, which also published Concord, seems to finally be stepping away from this forever game model—why they didn’t do that by giving Bluepoint another remake project instead of firing everyone is anyone’s guess.
Those are just a few examples that tie into a bigger trend in a rapidly shrinking game industry where around a third of developers based in the U.S. have been laid off over the last two years. That’s, uh, really bad. While these live-service layoffs obviously don’t account for all of that, they’re one of the most obvious places where corporate trend chasing has cost jobs.
Hopefully, we’re living in a time delay. It takes a very long time for games to come out these days (Concord was in development for eight years), so even with these high-profile failures, we have to wait a bit before we can tell whether publishers are making a pivot. The same thing happened with MMOs back in the day, as studios chased a World Of Warcraft-sized windfall to limited success: remember Curt Schilling’s now-defunct 38 Studios and its unreleased Kingdoms Of Amalur MMORPG? Rhode Island certainly remembers.
But it’s hard to shake the fear that this may not be a fad, and that these companies will keep coming back in a gambler’s fallacy death spiral, until the professional game industry as we know it is completely unrecognizable. Yes, there would still be cool games. There will always be little freaks who spend their weekends coding and risk-takers who quit their day job to make their dream project. But if there isn’t a stable professional field to facilitate large-scale development, then an entire strata of games are at risk. Maybe Concord, Highguard, and the other belly flops from the last few years will be a true wakeup call for the suits. If not, these dead-on-arrival forever games are here to stay.