500 live services

 End me

There is something insidiously broken about the products known as 'Live Services'. Time hungry always-games that endeavour to become stable hobbies of everyone's lives even more so than gaming itself, swallowing up every bit of free will and personal responsibility until that person is a machine spitting out notes with abandon. Or at least, that is the future that the purveyors of the genre type are shooting for- and as many have pointed out it's a fools goldrush. There are only so many hours in the day and a successful Live Service needs an insane amount of traction to justify it's own existence- so the more that come out, cannibalising the genre's player base, the less chance they all have of succeeding. It's the MMO spiral all over again, proving that lessons are never learnt and trends rarely chased in honour and good will. Thus when it all falls apart, it's predictable.

But... they just won't stop. With all the failures, screw-ups and ill-fated nowhere projects- still this pursuit remains nauseatingly popular. Let me be frank- some of the most horrendous financial failures of the past few years in the games industry have been a direct result of Live Service attempts that have slid cleanly off a bridge. Marvel's Avengers, Babylon's Fall (had to look up the name again) and judging from early player numbers and how they're stacking up against similar genre games that also flopped- Suicide Squad kill the Justice League! In an industry that is increasingly being flagged as 'high risk' by studios who complain that they can't figure out a way to make these ventures profitable, whilst smuggling millions in bonuses purely for management, they insist on trying to cram their foot in the most crowded doorways on offer. So who is the real problem here- players not buying $70 disappointments, or publishers nuking themselves in the foot?

Of course the promise here is immense. When we talk 'high risk high reward'- the reward does not get higher than becoming one of the couple dozen Live Services that don't tank to oblivion. Just look at Fortnite- the billion dollar property that is pretty much single handily financing all of Epic Games' flights of fancy. Epic wastes millions giving out free games trying to tempt people to their mediocre store- but with Fortnite footing the bill they can waste ten times that and not even worry about annual overheads one iota. But therein lies the problem. There already is a Fortnite. Joe Schmo off the street isn't going to rock up and develop another one. You can't just leap frog the industry leader like it's nothing- they aren't really pushovers- how do you think they got to being leaders in the first place?

Then again, isn't a failure of a launch just the perfect excuse for layoffs? Who wants to readily admit to overhiring during the pandemic, making a logistical mistake that reflects poorly on your own judgement abilities, when you can instead push forward a doomed-to-fail product with far too much funding behind it and then use the fallout as a smokescreen excuse for mass firings? I mean I would never go so far as to outright accuse any company's of doing that exact thing- all I'm saying is that if I were in the position of an executive who had tipped the balance sheets the wrong way and I knew about a landmine of a genre just waiting out there for me- well, I would weigh up either option. Either it's a smash hit success in an extremely unlikely twist and I never have money problems again, or it bombs as it's most likely too and the spotlight is no longer on me. Makes sense, no?

Which might just count a little bit towards the results of a recent survey reported on by Games Industry in which 537 development studios had their future endeavours sized up. The report found that 95% of these studios were working on developing or were currently maintaining, a Live Service game. Which is a horrific stat to just throw out there. That is a vast majority of modern studios within this survey committing to this over-served and underloved genre type with nothing but failure in their immediate future. And to be absolutely clear- this is a commitment they are making. Live Service games are the only types that shackle parts of the team to it's development indefinitely, making them choking not just to players but developers at large.

Just take Naughty Dog, for example- peons of 'the house of Sony' that are very much the golden boys of single player narrative led story games. As Sony found themselves bitten by the Live Service bug, they tried to squeeze new shots at the big boys table with all of their first party studios, even getting Naughty Dog developing their own Live Service game at one point. That was until the studio recently publicly cancelled the project citing the incompatibility of the project and it's requisite management with their general model of sinking every scrap of effort into making their upcoming games as good as they can be. Can't be their absolute best when a portion of their developers would be off supporting a poxxy Live Service at all times, now can they? And if Naughty Dog, Industry leaders, can't make sense of this model- what the hell chance do the rest of them have?

And it's not as though Live Service games are particularly fulfilling to uphold. Just like with MMO's before them- the very nature of an online-centric ingame-store support game limits the potential of design. Suicide Squad characters have to reduce their iconic abilities to gun toting- because that fits into the needed griding formula better, Metropolis can't focus on individual world details as much as the last Arkham game did- because the game needs to be able to render four simultaneous players at once. You'll never get a live Service farming sim to the level of depth as Stardew. Nor a colony management game like Rimworld. You're pretty much limited exclusively to open world action adventure games and RPGs. Because god knows we don't have too many of them yet- right?

I want this to stand as exhibit A whenever the counter arguments arise to the steeply rising price of games. Those that complain that we are being entitled little cheapskates that want the developers to starve on a pittance of nothing. Please remember, that not only are the producers the one's writing the cheques that embezzle millions into their own coffers, and that unjust ratio isn't going to suddenly stop because they're making more money now- but that these numbskulls are content gambling entire productions on a jackpot they will never see. Every side always blames the other in sessions of conflict. But for real- it is their fault!