Servicing a live service

Ten year plan!

I have been critical of live services in the past, extremely critical, in fact; "Burn all live services to the ground" kind of critical. And although I have no intention on shifting my stance in that department, I would be lying if I didn't admit that the idea of a 'Live Service' does tickle me some. Heck, in the 'Mods' blog post I detailed how much I enjoy an experience that I can come back to time and time again, what is a 'Live service' if not exactly that? Of course, there a few extra factors that are put into these types of games that make the deal raw, but today I want to be a little more positive, I want to focus on the effort that goes into maintaining these games.

When a game is announced as a live service; a few things become readily apparent to the user base off the bat. The game will feature some form of monetisation in order to support development well past the initial influx of game purchases and the story of the game will, inevitably, be an incomplete one. The former can be overcome with the mindset of 'well I'll pony up a bit now and then depending on how much I think the developers have earnt it with my time' whilst the latter still bugs me and has me thinking about the whole 'Sequel-itis' epidemic which is threatening to sink Hollywood. (And just might.)

Behind the scenes, a 'live service' model means that the initial game will be worked on by a full staff just like any other game. However, once the launch period is over and done, the main team has to move onto their next project, leaving behind a much depleted B-team to keep the lights on and handle updates. This is never a move that is made readily apparent either, developers try to make the audience think that they devote their full force behind that game for the rest of it's life cycle. (despite admitting to active development on new products... nevermind, gamers are idiots, I'm sure we'll never notice) Therefore, that B team is given the monumental task maintaining the game, whilst managing the community and working on brand new content, no small task.

The pure act of maintaining the game is one that can become someone's full job. Modern games have so many moving pieces and aberrant bits of code that have been touched by so many hands, that it is almost inevitable that the final product ships with bugs. Due to the push from publishers to maintain the same development-to-release window that they've held for the past ten years (2-3 years), often there is little time to completely clean the files before launch day. Once players are actually on the game, that task becomes monumentally more difficult. Imagine trying to fix the slats of a bed whilst an entire playground of kids jumps up and down on the mattress, and you'll be envisioning their struggle. Not to mention that, when new content is added, often a whole slew of bugs follow, making the job feel like trying to build a dam against the ocean.

Fallout 76 is a prime example of what happens when the ocean often wins. There are golden periods, two to three weeks after new content launches, that this game is actually playable; mostly, however, we have a product that breaks down more an Alfa Romeo. (Car Jokes!) Recently, Bethesda lite (as I call the team behind FO76) released their very first new vault raid to the public. The stage was set for a whole revolutionary change to the Fallout world, they even made sure to soft launch it on PC first for an opportunity to iron out the kinks; but then the raid dropped and everyone's game broke. I'm talking instant, perpetual crash screens; back to the days of the game's first release. Bethesda lite tried to institute 'instancing' technology into the game in order to make raids more manageable, but instead they managed to make the servers more skittish then your average Abra. (Pokemon Jokes!) Maintenance is not a job to be taken lightly.

Managing the community is another, often overlooked, variable in all of this. The type of community that you foster with a live service is fundamentally different from the type you see with a normal game. In normal releases, players will talk about the things they like about the game and the things they wished were improved, all you have to do at that point, from a managers perspective, is encourage the positivity and report the bugs back to the team. In a live service environment, your average community manager better be ready to be hit with complaints 24/7. These masses have been sold on the premise that their opinion can help shape the future of the game and they don't take that responsibility lying down. Whenever there is something contentious about the game you'll find thousands of comments telling the developers to do a slew of different things in order to fix it. At that point a community manager has to get the pulse of the public whilst trying to stop people from murdering each other over the Internet.

Another important element that comes into play is the establishment of the projects' perpetuity. The second that a game's community manager goes dark, the narrative runs crazy amidst the community about how the product is on Death's door. Just look at Hello Games' Reddit after the release of No Mans Sky. Sean Murray told everyone to go quiet so that they could focus on the game and in the mean time the community tore itself apart with speculation. There were posts accusing them of lying, posts claiming that Sony had cut all ties with them and even posts claiming that Sean had taken all the money and left the country. Without the voice of a developer to reassure them, rumors ran rampant and sunk the company's credibility. If they hadn't released some solid updates in the next few years (Nothing near what was originally promised but things that were enjoyable enough.) NMS might never have recovered.

Finally there is the most important aspect of a live service. The biggest promise that all of these types of games make is the assurance that the game will be languished with new content forever. This tickles the fancy of those who want to live in that video game world they love so much, or those who just like to buy one game and see how it's changed several years down the line.To this end, most live services tote around a 'road map' of promised content in order to keep fans salivating and put the developers on a time limit. During the lifetime of the game, developers will be expected to give fans everything from content as small as events to things as monumental as world changers, and they better be able to deliver.

Breaking the promise of a roadmap seems never to cross the minds of fans, despite how easy it is to do. Roadmaps cannot foresee development concerns or hold ups, so no one should be surprised when changes are made. Yet when it happens, not only are fans surprised but often deeply offended. When Anthem first launched in an incredibly compromised state, diehards stuck with it due to the tantalizing roadmap that seemed to promise that the game would resemble a finished product in a year or two. This roadmap was, however, clearly penned in a time before the release, because anyone could see that Bioware lite had a monumental amount of work ahead of them to make the base game likeable. Steadily, Anthem began to roll past roadmap due dates, much to the dismay of fans, before Bioware lite just subtly blitzed most of the roadmap in an incident we have come to know as: The blip. (MCU Jokes!) When you have a live service that is so buggy and incomplete that you have trouble stitching the pieces together after launch, all you are left with is an incomplete game, and fans will most certainly notice.

Embarking on the 'live serivce' adventure, is an incredibly risky proposition for any developer to undergo. When it goes well, you may have secured a profitable endeavour for the next couple of years, just look at the recent two Assassin's Creed games. When it goes poorly, you risk sullying the reputation and consumer respect of even the most venerable studios, a la Bethesda and Bioware. I can't say whether or not the model is healthy for the industry as a whole, I lack the imperative data to make such a statement, but I can cast a critical eye and see that the practise does not look sustainable. Each product requires teams to spread themselves more and more thin, to the point where you either grow too fast to maintain quality, or too slow to keep everything running. That being said, these types of games still make 'stupid money' (I'm really getting millage out of that 'TMNT' line.) so we won't see them ramping down anytime soon.