Why are Live services so often bad?

 So many swings and so few hits

Me and Bungie are no long lost lovers passing in the night sharing whispers of a once sweet sojourn. Maybe once I had something resembling an affection for that studio and their talents, but the greed sullied that right and good, cut me out of the picture deftly and left me cold to all affections. As such, I ain't much one for giving Destiny the time of the day, knowing the temperament of those who run it. Such experience I learned from my time playing Destiny 1, and the hundreds of hours (and money) I put into it and it's DLCs, only for the game to then release a DLC that was the price of a whole new game and tell that if I couldn't afford that blood price I would be no longer allowed to play the competitive online I had enjoyed endlessly for month before. This was a game I had sunk triple digits into, and that was the way they treated me as a customer. Needless to say I commended them for their savvy businessmanship and parted ways without looking back. But that doesn't mean I don't have ears to hear the ways they wander today.

Destiny 2 has been out for a while now, and despite doing the exact same rugpull I just described again, Bungie have mostly kept a much more positive relationship with their audience this time around, or at least they have ever since Bungie split from Activison for the good of the game. (And even then, it only lasted for a little while) But all of those that defended each avaricious turn of Destiny as the veiny slithery mandibles of Activision interference were in for a rude awakening when, lo and behold, we're still getting highly questionable and downright extortionate turns for this game bubbling out of the Arrakis sands every now and then. In fact it seems like every other day Destiny players are raising arms about some shader pricings here, some engram reward locking there or just a bizarre pricing system that's unnecessarily confusing for upcoming content. It at least marks the thrashing of a very living beast, because fans still care enough to let their voices be heard when something doesn't work out, but one has to wonder when will the conflicts stop and the game just be good?

Marvel's Avengers has also had a rough go of things, but considering they've never even had a decent fraction of Destiny 2's playerbase, their slip-ups tend to stand out a lot more. (At the very least Destiny 2 controversies are bumped down search results within a week when the next XUR appearance drops) It seems such a shame because the initial promise was so exciting, but everything just seemed to go down hill once the developers announced it was a Live service. (I'm not kidding, it's been almost exclusively bad news since then.) A buggy launch, questionable cosmetic pricings, lack of content, constant content delays, hugely suspicious 'fixes' and, recently, probably the biggest betrayal of trust that one can possibly do when it comes to marketing a game; they lied about their pricing structure which they said wouldn't ever be pay-to-win. For a month it was.

It's actually all rather incredible how foreseeable this anime betrayal was, from railroad tracks laid months in advance, and I'll try a quick summary for salient points. Basically, Avengers was patched to make the early game levelling slower because the team argued that early gameplay was confusing to new players who were levelling too quickly and getting too many skill points. People who had actually played the game called this out as stupid, because the early game is Avengers' weakest element, but the team held strong. That was, until a free weekend bought some attention to the game months later, after which the team decided to drop the ability to purchase power boosters that sped up levelling. (Selling the fix to the problem you artificially created? That's pretty scummy.) The team were, rightfully, called out for this and after a month of silence (they really did think they could just ride out the controversy) they relented and pulled back the ability to spend real money on it. (Although the boosters are still in the game, because they refuse to just patch the game back to normal.)

Those are just two live services I picked out, but they are good sample. One is perhaps the most successful Live service of all time, (baring Fortnite) progeny of the title that wrote the book on this sort of game, and the other is one of the most recent examples of a game that took everything this little sub genre had to other and callously smashed it together into a, and let's be charitable, abject mess. Destiny 2 is rather well regarded by it's fans, Avengers less so, but both are hitting a wall of distinct diminishing interest. Despite being live services, titles that should be the purest example of a 'forever game', both are burning up and out as people are growing sick after several long years of friction or just a few really bad ones. When asking why it is that Live services are so reviled, and now fading from popularity, I really don't think this comes down to growing bored, but a genuine disconnect this sort of game demands between the player, the developers and the game.

I say this because, in order to make a live service a live service, you need to keep it updated. That's like, the modus operandi of live services. They are games who are 'alive' for the frequency at which new content is added, old events are recycled out, and the ecosystem of the world always provides new experiences year in, year out. But constant development is not a cheap process, and keeping developers on the pay roll demands that these games offset costs consistently. That equation, right there, means that these games need to have some sort of revenue generation to them, whether directly or otherwise, which places it apart from conventional games that just need to attract a decent number of people for that one time purchase. (At least. Ubisoft tends to seek those recurrent revenue streams too) Whatsmore, whether through reasonable deduction or lack of subtlety, this off-kilter relationship is well known to the public, which creates an air of mistrust as we all know that these games are trying to milk us of our money to some degree and every subsequent action is painted by that expectation. 

Suspicion makes the rope that companies have to play with a lot shorter and allows the public to pull it a lot more taut when they feel aggrieved. Simple mistakes become twisted nefarious plots against the good of your playerbase, and I'm guilty of this heightened tension too. To this very day I find myself stopping to ask whether or not that early back-handed special event from Apex Legends was meant to funnel MTX sales like it was perfectly geared to, or if that was a genuine collision of poor ideas and witless decisions. (Whatever the case, I haven't played the game since) Thus I wouldn't say that live services are innately worse than other types of games, even taking into account the general rush-to-service feel that most of these games launch with, but instead that impression is solidified by the inherently rocky relationships these games foster by their very nature. 

But whether or not the general disdain towards live service titles is earned or not, at it's core we can't deny that these sorts of games butt into each other so much more than other sorts of games simply for the greedy way they try to eat up all free time to secure those all-important engagement hours. And that unsustainable shade alone marks a key reason why I, at least, can't bring myself around to supporting these sorts of games. Besides, that very relationship of customer/player balance is true too of MMO's, and for the most part those types of games manage a much better accord with the public. (Provided that the MMO in question is at least somewhat successful.) With any luck the very audible groans that every company hears whenever they announce their latest live outing will finally get the message across that these doomed outings aren't even popular. (Then who knows; maybe we'll start getting more genuinely great games again. Like that Deus Ex sequel I've needed forever now.)