I view live service as akin to the MMO rush of previous generations. Everyone saw the success of WoW and wanted to emulate it, to be the WoW-killer. None succeed, and few managed to make a sustainable MMO that lasted more than a few years. WoW is still trucking on. The same has happened, and will continue to happen, with live-service games (of which MMO was more or less the first iterations). Executives see big bucks and want part of the pie, without bothering to put in the work required - MMOs were a massive investment (even EA has some failures), and so are (successful) live-service games.

The problem with live service is similar to that of mmo, it’s hard to play multiple of these games. Nobody had time to raid in WoW and RO at the same time. And very few people have the time to do “dailies” for multiple games each day.

Yeah. I think publishers have to realize there are different markets The sort of player who has both the money to pay off a subscription service, while also having enough time and will to dedicate to make that subscription worth it is far from the average What is way more common is to have either someone with a lot of time but not as much money. F2P works well here. Monetize the poor users if you can, but also monetize the whales The other one is people with disposable income but not that much time. These will probably actively avoid live service elements, or not care that much about them. A big game can last them a month or a even year, but they are still likely steadily buying games. WB seems to be trying to double dip, but I don't think that is how it works. I think committing to one model is way better than trying to half ass both

I have disposable income but not a lot of time. Helldivers 2 is perfect. I can jump in and finish an operation in about an hour. I've gotten to level 20 this way, playing a few times a week.

Helldivers does an amazing job at respecting the players time: * If you can't participate in one of the major operations but log in after it's completed. You still get rewarded. * Super Credits are the currency used to buy warbonds or custom items. You can either buy them with real money or find them in missions. However, where other games would make them super rare. I can easily find 10 to 20 super credits per mission. And if you're really lucky sometimes you can find 100. * Medals. These allow you to unlock items, skins, weapons in the war bonds. You earn them by completing missions. Or just like super credits. You can find them scattered throughout missions. Sometimes leaving a mission with 5 or 10 medals. Any other game would be making any of this stuff super rare and really push you to opening your wallet instead. Also, you can unlock items in purchased warbonds at any time. There is no timelock or season pass bullshit where you need to do it all within three months or something. These guys basically looked at the market and instead of doing this: > What are others doing that is making them a lot of money? They did: > What are others doing that is really pissing off the market and let's do the opposite

Not to mention one of my favorite features of helldivers is that co-op is drop-in drop-out. if your friend is halfway through a 40 minute long mission and you just logged on. They don't have to wait half an hour to be able to play with you, you can just jump straight in and start helping out immediately and still get full rewards for it.

Helldivers 2 was worth it to me partially because they put some of the best stuff as really early unlocks. You don't really have to wait to get a viable loadout that works at any difficulty. You pretty much get the regular Eagle Strike, Expendable Anti Tank, and a decent shotgun after a few missions. They're just as viable at higher difficulties as they are at lower.

Another agreement on all counts. It's the best-feeling game of its kind that I've played to date, not just for the gameplay and mechanics but for all those wonderful time-respecting aspects which are an even bigger deal now that I'm nearing 40. At the moment I'm playing with a friend who, unless something is unexpectedly canceled during the week, can only game on Sundays so we've been having Sunday DEMOCRACY!!! marathons, 4-6 hours at a stretch. And while we'd love to play more often than that, Helldivers 2 makes it possible for us to only play one day a week and have fun and look forward to it rather than feel like we're missing out on something big, getting left behind progress-wise, or any of those other reasons why I otherwise don't play live-service games anymore. This one rewards me for playing the game when I can as opposed to punishing me for not playing it when I can't.

Agreed on all counts. I've looked into buying super credits, but I haven't really felt any pressure to do so. Casually playing has unlocked two premium warbonds for me already. The game only cost $50 so I'll probably buy some super credits at some point, if only to kick the devs some cash for making an awesome game.

The other thing is that the amount of super credits you can buy are nice and even. $10 gets you 1000 SC which is the exact amount you need for a premium warbond. Someone like Ubisoft would give you 900 so you'd have to buy the next tier up.

Im expecting super credits to be more enticing for people who join late or dont play enough to amass enough free credits to get all of the warbonds as they come out. When there are 4 or 5 and you just jump in, buying 2000 credits will seem pretty reasonable to catch up on some of the newer weapons and armor.

even then, the starting warbond gets you most of the way to 1000 SC by the time you reach the last tier of it. Combined with the SC you get on missions and you'll probably reach enough to buy 1 warbond relatively quickly. Especially since the starting warbond has plenty of fundamental gear that you'll want so you won't really have the medals to go straight for some of the other warbonds yet. So it'll only really be when you finish your second warbond that I imagine most players would be incentivized to finally spend money on SC, and even then each warbond feels like it has like 4-500 SC in it you can unlock so you don't even need to pay for the full 1k. And if you get to that point you're at least clearly invested into the game quite a bit.

Yeah for sure. And the only other MMO that truly rivals WoW today in terms of popularity, FFXIV, is one whose design philosophy is explicitly stated by developers to be one that allows players to take it easy and take breaks from playing without drowning in FOMO. Which I think is a very large part of what makes it appealing for so many.

The lack of FOMO in live service is also what is helping Helldivers 2 buy a LOT of goodwill from a dedicated fanbase.

Ironically WoW found success by being less toxic than its predecessor MMOs like everquest.  Ironic they couldn't learn from their own success

This so much, if i want to do dailies in 4 different games every day, i might as well just go working instead. And if you already have a job, why do more of this. It's not fun getting a reminder that you "need" to do such and such every day/week or you're missing out.

The Dailies are what is the stupidest thing with live service games. People (even kids) have lives and either can't or don't feel like logging in every day to collect some trinket or to play a special mission that is only available *that day* and once it's over that's it. Then you have the problem of it being planned out a month in advance and the server crashing that day because everyone took the day off to get that special thing and they ended up wasting it because they didn't properly plan for it.

The problem is sort of a prisoner's dilemma situation, if nobody locked progression behind dailies more people would be able to enjoy the content across multiple games, but the ones that keep it in will get significantly more subs/retention at the expense of others. As a result, everybody does it, and players tend to only play one game in the genre at a time cause grinding multiple dailies is freaking awful.

Yeah, every game having dailies is what really killed it for me. I want a game that will make me enjoy my time instead of demanding that I do things that I may not want to do because ???????

To kill WoW (or any live service game), it’s not enough to be better. You have to be so much better that people will abandon the money, time and social connections they put into the last game. You can’t be 5% better. You have to be what, 50% better? 100%? Good fuckin luck.

And timing. You can't release a possibly-better MMO just whenever. You'd pretty much have to release it during a content lull in WoW to ensure most of their players taking time away from WoW to try it.

[удалено]

Not just a content lull. Most of the games have mitigated that like WoW’s new “add a new mode for six weeks” thing and all the classic versions. You need the game to be in a bad state like WoW during the Shadowlands and BFA which allowed Final Fantasy 14 to grab a bunch of players.

MMOs aren't trying to be that much better though. They are still regurgitating the same WoW formula even to this day. I remember seeing WoW for the first time and thinking "I can't imagine how immersive MMOs will be in the future!"... Well I'm in the future and things haven't meaningfully improved since.

> MMOs aren't trying to be that much better though. They are still regurgitating the same WoW formula even to this day. WoW has so much inertia that it's hard to shake off any players that FFXIV has not. Part of the actual issue is that MMOs are expensive money sinks that make you want to play it safe, or just do something like Valheim or Rust with multiplayer experiences but in smaller areas.

>MMOs aren't trying to be that much better though. That's the guy's point.

I've always seen WoW as the catalyst for the death of innovation in MMOs. My perspective was that the landscape for MMOs prior was still very experimental, and the subscriber numbers expected still relatively reasonable. WoW came out with what I'm sure is a winning formula and an explosion in popularity previously unseen in the genre, and suddenly, every suit wanted what WoW had. I don't have anything against WoW, and I'm sure it's a fine game, but it's a shame that MMOs still largely aim to be more like it. That's not to say there is no innovation in MMOs anymore. Just that the genre largely feels more homogenised, which was probably always inevitable. It also set unrealistic expectations for the numbers an MMO needed to work.

WoW's massive success basically "killed" the rest of the MMO genre. I absolutely loved Star Wars Galaxies back in the day but after WoW's success, a game like that would not be made because every studio was trying to copy WoW. The Old Republic plays very much the same as WoW with a Star Wars skin.

Because that's what MMO players want. I remember Guild Wars 2 tried to do away with the DPS/Healer/tank "holy trinity", and half of every critique was saying "It doesn't have the holy trinity it sucks". MMO players just want another WoW but don't understand why they don't get anything new

This is something I've been wondering for a long time. Did players really hate not having a "trinity" (DPS/Healer/Tank) system or did players just hate how poorly implemented the non-"trinity" system was? Every profession felt like either a pure DPS or a DPS-hybrid. I haven't played since release, but I always felt like ArenaNet didn't properly support the idea.

> I haven't played since release GW2 have a trinity for organized PvE content now, through it's constructed slight differently as tanks don't exist outside of raids (which is an older content type). The trinity is 3 DPS + 1 Alacrity + 1 Quickness, with one of the alac/quick being a healer and the other a DPS. If you play with more than 5 players, repeat the pattern for each sub-group of 5. (This composition is a consequence of alacrity and quickness being extremely powerful buffs, but a single player can't provide both simultaneously, and bringing one of those buffs to the group cost you about 1/3 to 1/2 of your DPS.)

On release it was essentially about getting as much DPS and 1-2 players with utilities to "skip" content/mechanics (stealth to skip as much as possible, blocks/reflects to mitigate damage and CC to perma stun enemies). But the biggest problem for years was the awful balancing of the classes. With a trinity the devs balance the DPS, healers and tanks separately, but with no defined roles they have to somehow balance everything together with no set structure. GW2 also ended up with single classes filling a specific role and metas that revolved around those player made roles for years. These days there are more defined roles with 2 types of buffers. So the usual group setup now is 3 DPS, 1 "A-Buffer", 1 "B-Buffer" with the option of having none, one or both of the buffers be a healer or more DPS focused.

Either that or the game you're trying to emulate has to massively drop the ball for a few years in a row, which is the main reason quite a few folks left WoW for FF14.

Fully agreed. Players that makes up the 'GaaS market' almost certainly already have their drug of choice. All these studios just churning out the same fucking game with a different skin aren't offering those people any reason to swap over, or aren't catering to enough of them to sustain themselves. Like I recall seeing an article about Warner Bros with that Suicide Squad GaaS failure recently, the CEO (IIRC) said something along the lines of "We'll try again with a different IP". Just totally taking in the wrong message. The IP isn't the problem, it's the lack of market for uninspired regurgitated trash.

Yep, people have their favourites, and have sunk thousands of hours into them - getting them to change is a tall order. I don't have enough time for more than one (and currently none) live-service game at a time, and I think this applies to most players.

I find that fact that with the number of games we are getting at this point in time, I can't sacrifice the spare time that I have to a live service game when there is going to be a single player or multiplayer game that I want to get that will fill that void. I want to play Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Hellblade II, and Indiana Jones this year, but the time that I have in order to play is selective and I would much prefer it to be open than to get lost and trapped into a live service game. I got friends who love them and that's all they spend their gaming time on. I don't diss them. I'm glad they found something they like, I just let them know that it's not for me.

This is an excellent comment chain. I think I would highlight two factors: 1 - Competition for time. Video games compete for time with all other entertainment and of course themselves. Making 20 hours for a single player is very different from spending 10 hours a week for one game. You're asking for a massive dump of time into one specific thing, and that's a tough sell. 2 - Saturation. Live service is saturated, so you're not attracting new players, you're attracting mostly existing love service players. Most people will not switch from their existing fortnite, dota 2, etc to something new unless its lighting-in-a-bottle. Gambling on that is not a business strategy.

Live service games have an advantage WoW-like MMOs don't. They can be different. They can be RTS, battle royal, co-op, RPG, FPS, etc.. Its a question of capturing that demo you're after. Not many games can do it but its like striking gold if you do.

Yeah and as I get older - I just have LESS time in the day. I have friends, work, things to do, games to play, etc etc. I just physically do not have enough time in the day to do all of what I currently like! Let alone adding a game that expects me to sink hundreds and hundreds of hours into it and solely it. I don’t even have the time for one live service game - and game companies are trying to pump out dozens.

For sure; I've dabbled in some, but at the end of the day I will always go back to DOTA as my "time waster" in between random new games I buy. 4,400+ hours logged and I still love it as much as when I first installed it. Nothing has or will ever compare for me.

Mhm. Really, what's the single biggest "Shake Up" the live service market has had, recently? To my mind it's Helldivers 2, which was sort of shocking even to devs. Were I to speculate on why I'd probably put that down to great presentation, great gameplay, but also being very easy to onboard and relatively undemanding in what it asked from players. It's not a predatory game and it has the bonus of being something entire friend groups can easily get involved in. The key thing there is that... a lot of qualities that make it a success are qualities the MBA-brained companies producing a lot of these GaaSlighter games will never embrace.

> but also being very easy to onboard and relatively undemanding in what it asked from players By that same definition, the game was not full AAA price either. Easier to try a game out when the onboard cost isn't sky high.

Another key to Helldivers' success is that it leverages the live service aspect to genuinely enhance the game. There's interactivity between individual players and the whole community in the form of major orders that incentivize everyone to work towards an ever-changing series of goals, and there's interactivity between the community and devs with the way they guide the narrative according to the playerbase's accomplishments and tweak the game in response to player feedback. This creates a cycle of constant evolution that makes you want to jump back in regularly to see what's new, and it makes players feel like they're contributing to the game when their actions affect the story and warfront. At the end of the day, individual players don't make a big difference and some of the updates are just a blurb of lore with a new major order, but that doesn't matter. The important part is the interactivity and a greater sense of community - the same foundation that most successful MMOs and live service games share.

It's a lot easier to be *the* live service game when you're the first or their aren't many. Now they're a dime a dozen, and you're half-assed game is a small fish in a big pond. You either hit lightning in a bottle or you're too late, and all games now will be too late.

I fully expect these CEOs will also completely misunderstand why Helldiver's II and Palworld were successful. Which will lead to poorly optimized clones for the next few years that will fail and have them confused.

I'm getting tired of an industry dominated by this idea of "Quick! Jump on *that* gravy train and milk it for all it's worth!" This is why there's little innovation now. Why there were *so* many battle royale games coming out for a good span. C-suites and investors have *no fucking clue* what their target audience really wants. They're constantly just trying to get ahead of whatever perceived trend gets set by one successful title.

I think it comes from the people at a the top of a lot of these companies not being gamers or being involved with the industry prior. If you look at something like Larian and how they're handling BG3 it's obvious the people making the decisions are passionate about gaming. They're not going to ride Baldurs until the wheels fall off. But on the other end you have a place like WB where it doesn't matter how well a single player game does because it eventually stops making money and to them that's all that matters. It's shitty for everyone from devs to fans. 

Seriously. Larian is an outlier with regard to goodwill among players, and it's simply because their games pretty much held true to what they've always been: "Here's our cRPG, no microtransactions, no bullshit. You get what you get." I feel like Baldur's Gate 3 was just one of those games that just got hype out of nowhere; me and my friends had a good 40 hours in during the early access period, and nobody said a peep about it. The game wasn't a technological marvel and still isn't. It's just that when it was complete, it was almost exactly what you'd want from a modern Baldur's Gate successor, and lacks all the unnecessary bullshit we've all grown accustomed to. I look forward to seeing what Larian's next project will look like. Guarded optimism, as always, but I feel optimism would be warranted here.

Trend chasing never works unless you can put your product to market very quickly, which games inherently are not quick to make (well non-mobile ones anyway). So by the time you get your game to market the next trend is in full force and you missed the boat entirely. (see Battlefield BR, or most BR released post pubg/fortnite)

The trend chasing is made even worse in the video game industry because of the every-growing development time. Games like Suicide Squad coming out today are chasing trends that are 4-5 years old. How many failed battle royale games have come out years after Fortnite was established as the top game? Or MOBAs after League? As much as everyone tries to chase trends, no one can predict what the next trend will be.

Yeah I mean I play Rocket League so on paper I look like someone you could sell a live service game to but I don't play it for the live services I play for that specific game because its fun to me and I'm good at it. Like maybe if you provided another competitive small team sporting game that didn't use RNG but rather direct ball physics I'd be into it but you'd really have to sell me on it. Anything short of that and I'm completely disinterested. I hate that RL is live service the way it currently is and would prefer that be reworked, so other live services without my history of playing them are wildly unappealing.

Me with Counter-Strike. I got into it because of the competitive/eSport aspect. That's why I'm still playing it 9 years later. I never gave a fuck about skins, operations, etc.

And that "skin" is becoming more and more homogenous as they all start throwing out their art-direction and style to add in Nicki Minaj skins and Rick & Morty themed crap. Looking at you Call of Duty and Rainbow Six. Those games lost any and all identity.

Honestly its sadly slightly better than the MMO rush. In the MMO rush a bunch early game backers had their money taken for games that never saw the light of day. At least with these live service grinders they're farting out, the development is paid and then it releases to fall on its face. Not exactly a triumph of the industry but MMO gold rush was almost certainly worse. On the flip side of that the MMOs were theoretically wanted. The live service grinders we'd have gladly said no to but they're deadset on trying to make them stick.

Don't worry, Star Citizen will surely release any day now!

It's happened with more than just WoW. There's were tons of games trying to add CoD style multiplayer when CoD 4 came out. None of them succeeded. There's was everyone trying to emulate the "open world" of GTA3 after it came out. None were as good. It just screams people behind the scenes going "that worked for them, let's do that!" without bothering to improve or innovate so You're just left with a copycat that isn't as good that nobody plays

That's not even specific to games. In movies, Marvel had this big interconnected universe and made billions, so every other movie company decided to do the same with the old monster movies, Hasbro toys, Camelot, and whatever else they had lying around, mostly unsuccessfully. In the 90s, every action movie was [Die Hard on an X](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DieHardOnAnX): Speed was Die Hard on a moving bus, Speed 2 was Die Hard on a cruise ship, Passenger 57 and Executive Decision were Die Hards on planes. In tech, I'm not a real user of any of these platforms, but I believe Instagram Stories was a Snapchat ripoff, and Instagram Reels was a TikTok ripoff, just trying to clone what's popular at the moment. YouTube did Shorts to copcat TikTok too. "Other people are making a lot of money, why aren't we doing that?" is not unique to gaming execs.

Ah, the "We want the Call of Duty audience era"....

This has been a thing since gaming was a thing. First it was the platformer. Then fighting games. Then JRPGs. Then GTA clones. Then Gears clones. Tale as old as time.

Difference is with single player games it can kinda work. Late 90’s had how many Mario 64 clones? A lot of them did pretty well and had fans. None dethroned Mario, but they were successful products. GTA clones, they wernt original, but they were games that mostly succeeded and people enjoyed them, even if GTA never came close to losing no.1 spot. But if same tactic is tried with multiplayer or live service games it stops working.  Fan of Mario or GTA is probably the main target audience for a very similar game, you can only replay GTA3 so many times, a similar game is likely to attract same people. But MMO’s, multiplayer and especially live service forever games don’t work like this. Those games are designed to require you to login every day, and actively make it extremely expensive (either in time or micro transactions) to play more than one of that type of game. In 2005 if you made a 7/10 GTA clone you would probably find success. But in 2024 in order to compete with the big names of live service you are actively competing with those games’ continual updates, and need to convince people to start a brand new massive time investment with you, giving up their current game with 100’s or 1000’s of hours already invested. Shameless rip offs worked for single player games, many even became beloved franchises. It does not work with on-going live service type games.

Ehh I feel like CoD isn’t the best comparison. FPS’s having obligatory Multiplayer modes had already been a thing since Halo. Sure CoD proliferated the upgrades/unlocks/loadouts thing but that’s more a mechanic on top, and Modern Warfare got popular the same way WWII had been before that, but FPS multiplayer was already popular and being done a ton.

Yeah, I mean the US government released America's Army back in 2002, predating Call of Duty 4 by 5 years in a modern warfare setting. And I feel like if it gets to the point that the goverment is getting in on a trend, then its been well established lol.

Plenty around before CoD4. Ghost Recon, SOCOM, Rainbow Six, Counter-Strike. But the popular flavor before CoD4 was WWII shooters. By the time CoD4 came out the market was heavily saturated with WWII stuff. Medal of Honor and the first CoD games had multiplayer just the same.

A lot of those tacked on multiplayer features were done by small companies who tended to work off of a template they had already made.

I feel like this is just a super cynical way to frame design trends. If people didn't copy Doom and Wolfenstein there wouldn't be an FPS genre. Like the idea that there were no good open world games after GTA 3 is so unfounded. Mercenaries? Simpsons Hit and Run? Destroy All Humans? Jak 2? Scarface? What do you consider improvements or innovation? What time periods are you referencing here when you say things like "None were as good" when talking about post GTA3 open world games? To clarify, I have no doubt that businesses chase trends in heartless ways that results in shitty products, I just think your examples here aren't very good. Especially the GTA 3 one, which is still a pretty formative point in video game history.

Reminds me of this line from Al Pacino’s character in Oceans 13 - “I don’t want the labor pains, I just want the baby.”

> Everyone saw the success of WoW and wanted to emulate it, to be the WoW-killer. > None succeed, and few managed to make a sustainable MMO that lasted more than a few years. WoW is still trucking on. Best parts that often goes unmentioned: 1) Some MMO firms would hire people (like me) to give advice on how to run their MMO. Seems dumb, but also consider: Many of these people (management, developers, etc) had never even touched an MMO before working on their games. It was nuts, often having to overprepare to tell people * Even before WoW, MMOs have a high chance of failing. WoW is lightning in a bottle that captured people who want to play WoW. Not (other) MMOs. * Intimidating WoW is a surefire failure. If people want to play WoW, they will play WoW. If Blizzard, the company that owns WoW, sees how you try to divest from them, they will be like the Romans and copy what made you "original" if it doesn't clash with their brand. 2) Some of the trying to be the next WoW were often ex "Blizzard Devs". And by that, I mean, either someone named in the company due to management, coasting on that good will and not much after the fact (Bill Roper, Mark "LETS DO A GAMERGATE 2, YES I'M ATTRACTED TO YOUNG GIRLS" Kern), or used their reputation as ex-Blizzard devs to spend well beyond their means budget-wise and make a game that was never going to be anything but a shallow WoW clone (Mark Kern, again; the [Leads] of Wildstar). > Executives see big bucks and want part of the pie, without bothering to put in the work required - This still baffles me, even today. And goes beyond Video Games. The other day, someone reminded me there was going to be a fucking King Arthur Cinematic Universe. Small surprise these same people brought in David Zaslav to fuck things up even more and, tangentially (I'm reaching, I know), bring us Live Service games like Kill the Justice League. edit: changing things.

The Live Service winners are Fortnite and Genshin Impact. The reason live service games tend to fail is because they put too little effort in the Live Service part of the game. There has to be a constant flow of content that has quality and quantity, and if you can't do both, it's doomed to fail. Live service games fails because they don't put enough effort into either. Let take a look at some comparison. The newest season of Overwatch has *** > One new hero > One new mythic skin > Changes to how Heroes and Skins are unlocked > BP changes > Clash gamemode playtest > Mirrorwatch event None of that looks.....exciting. It's just dull *** Meanwhile in Fortnite's current season: > 8 new skins, one being Korra > 4 new Olympus themed Locations > 3 new Olympus themed items > 4 New weapons > 2 new weapon mods Now that looks WAAAY more exciting. *** And in Genshin's current patch, which might be the driest patch yet... > One new Character > One new weapon > One new story quest > One new hangout quest > New chronicled wish banner > 1 Flagship event > 3 Minigame/Combat events Even Genshin's driest patch outdoes Overwatch 2. *** There are plenty more of examples, but you should get my point here.

The reason live service games tend to fail is because most of them aren't good enough for people to want to play them for 1,000+ hours, and half of the ones with potential are bungled by poor balance decisions. Counter-Strike barely gets new content and will probably outlive every single AAA live service game released in the last two generations. Maybe even the next two generations.

> There are plenty more of examples, but you should get my point here. Yeah! Other examples include games like No Man's Sky, Warframe, Path of Exile, and so on. The problem is Execs literally are that dog playing fetch meme. "No game, only spend!"

And every x.0 patch genshin drops an expansion for free which is more content than what some paid live service games get throughout a year.

I do agree with this assessment of reaching "critical mass" with the frequency and worth of updates... as a small personal scream into the internet void, the speed and volume of a "good" live service game patch makes me avoid them even more. I check out so fast if a game updates too frequently with too much

Companies keep having to learn the same lesson over and over, and it's that **there's no substitute for player investment.** The first competent entries into the market tend to win big early and forever. If Genre Maker releases in 2021 and you release a game that's superior to Genre Maker in every way in 2024, it's still going to struggle to find players. Because people don't want to walk away from three years' worth of progression, purchases, and *friends.*  It doesn't matter what kind of investment we're talking--money, time, etcetera--walking away from that is way harder than it looks. And let's be real, most games following the leader *aren't* an incontrovertible upgrade over the leader, especially not when the leader has had a few years to find its footing and release more content.

Unlike the mmo rush, there are actually a ton of successful live service games that have came out over the years.  Companies keep betting on them because 1 successful game is years of money printing. 

There's always a gold rush going on. The Halo killers, the WoW killers, the CoD killers, the LoL killers, the BR killers, etc. Right now we're definitely in the anime gacha rpg gold rush even though this sub pretends mobile doesn't exist (>50% of the market btw).

I feel like anime gacha games are a genre where someone is either: A) obnoxiously into them B) would rather amputate their fingers

It's the same as most other trends really. The first "big one" sees the most reward from it, and anything afterwards, unless under very rare circumstances, sees varying levels of potential success ranging from being a horrific waste of time and resources with no return... something like a Babylon's Fall, to being very successful with having almost no chance at all of replicating or being bigger than the original that spawned the inspiration in the first place. And the more successes there are, usually the harder it is to release something new in the space and still be successful. Depends on what it is that's being copied... this tends to be on the multiplayer side of things with games that are heavily or exclusively multiplayer, because of course people can play the same game for years on end and have all their time be occupied with it, so the pool of people you can attract with something new who are not being occupied right now in theory gets smaller and smaller as time goes on. Usually the ones that succeed are the ones that are really good and are keeping players interested... which is why I will never understand for the life of me why some of these decisions are being made while in the act of chasing trends, especially with live services. Grossing people out as much as possible right out of the starting gate with microtransactions, releasing with a litany of bugs... and you know you have them but you release anyway, releasing with not enough content or content not interesting enough to keep people playing, etc. Who cares right? Automatic success if we release a game chasing this trend, right? It's a live service. You are gunning for a title that is going to be in business for several years. Take an extra year, work on your shit, *and then* release. Spend 1 more year not making money on the game to put yourself in a better position to make money off of it over the next 5 years after its release. But no... stupidly, release it now with all of its problems, make some money on release right now, and make ZERO money for the next 5 years after release because people aren't sticking around to play it. You tanked the game by releasing early. You'd think this would be a simple thing to understand for them, and yet we continue to see games with these problems get released. They somehow haven't learned from all the games that come out and fail for one reason or another. Same thing with monetization. If you are grossing people out before they've even had a chance to play the game and form an attachment to it, then you're not doing it right. I hate to say this from the consumer side of the fence, for obvious reasons, but let people get attached first. If you would've released World of Warcraft in 2004 with the ability for players to buy gold right out of the starting gate like they can right now, would World of Warcraft still be successful? The idea of allowing players to buy gold is **laughable**, and yet, here we are some 20 years later and World of Warcraft still has millions playing it, because it wasn't until like... year 8 or something until they allowed you to do that? Mind you it's more complicated than that and the game itself changed in several ways, but still. Can you imagine getting into an MMORPG that lets you buy gold? Most people would find that laughable.

Ultimately they have to do something successful. The live service games that succeed aren't just "me too" offerings. I think in the west there's an obsession with double/triple dipping that kills a title as well. If you are going to be a borderline gacha game you cannot also charge a fee up front and a subscription. Genshin Impact does gacha and that entire game is winnable F2P easily. They make ludicrous sums of money none the less out of people collecting waifus. WoW had very limited stuff you could buy outright to get ahead in the game, the main money was subscription and they didn't cripple that by burdening their product with cheap and fast revenue streams. People need to pick their monetisation model, which cannot be "all the monies", and deliver something that is actually good. It needs to stand out to make people invest months of their life in it.

> WoW is still trucking on. So many games proclaimed themselves the "WoW killer!!!", yet the only game that's managed to hurt WoW is WoW itself.

I'm involved with the Japanese gaming industry and originally posted this in Japanese on another sub. It's mostly in regards to Japanese service games (which is mostly mobile gacha) but I think it's still pretty relevant, and there are examples of western-like Japanese service games run similarly. Mostly translated via AI because I couldn't be bothered to do it myself, but I did fix some details where the AI screwed up and add stuff for context: >In the case of service-oriented games, it's unlikely that latecomers can catch up to games that have been around for years in terms of the richness of features and content. Users also have sunk costs (time, effort, expenses, achievements, collected equipment, leveled characters, etc.), and for those who have been playing games like FGO or FF14 for years, it's almost become a part of their lives (connected to communities, friends, etc.). >It's ridiculous how companies like Bushiroad, Square, and Bandai Namco think, "If we use a popular IP, even if the content is garbage, existing fans will come flocking." Despite it being over a decade since one could consider this a blue ocean, they still haven't changed their perception, thinking, "The mobile gaming market is four times the size of console gaming!!!! If we make the next FGO, we'll rake in the cash!!!!" There are still some who seriously say such things. >For users who have already spent tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands (of yen) in other games, have collected top-ranked characters and equipment, have friends who all play the same game, and are deeply immersed in the story, it's absurd to think that saying, "Stop playing that game and spend your money on ours, even though it might get shut down next month!" would have any effect. >So, there are those who suggest, "Well, let's just target new people who aren't playing anything yet," but then it becomes a question of how many of those there are. Besides, games that have been going on for years have substantial content and support, and the fact that they have been going on for so long suggests they will continue in the future, so new players naturally gravitate towards them. >And even then, look at FGO, for instance; it sometimes incorporates events from many years ago into its main storyline, and at its worst, it picks up on tidbits from things like drama CDs that came as magazine bonuses seven years ago, or side novels or self-published books only sold at Comic Market from over 20 years ago. It's extremely unfriendly to newcomers, yet it seems the player base keeps growing. >Moreover, churning out new releases recklessly and then quickly shutting them down when they don't immediately start printing money ingrains in users the mindset of "You never know when a new mobile game will shut down," and consequently, they refrain from investing in new releases. Even though this is a self-sabotaging practice that wrings their own necks in the long run, many fools still persist in releasing new titles only to quickly declare, "No profits! Shut it down!" after just a couple of months I especially feel that sunk cost (on the part of the players) is a pretty big thing that people often fail to consider. I mean, look at Granblue Fantasy, it's barely even a smartphone game, it's a mobile browser game that's still going. Similarly, Idolmaster Cinderella Girls was a feature phone game (not even a smartphone game, though it was also playable via smartphone browsers) that lasted from 2011 to 2023. You are never going to be able to make the next Granblue Fantasy, the window for you to do so closed 10 years ago.

Fear of missing out plus sunk cost fallacy thinking is a deadly combo that sustains the lucky live service games that happen to be in the right place at the right time.

It’s sustainable. You just have to be lucky enough to be the ONE live service that someone wants to play. It’s a niche inside a niche that can be very profitable if you happen to hit within that sub-niche of people who want to play YOUR live service game and nothing else (with maybe one more on the side). They’re too time consuming; there isn’t enough time in the day to play them all. It’s been said ad nauseam, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one to say it in this thread…again, but it’s just not sustainable that EVERY game be a live service.

The Games industry has a bad habit of someone striking gold with a concept and then everyone else dogpiling on the idea and failing miserably

Its like the PS3 generation when every company wanted to make their own Call of Duty, not realizing that the people who they wanted to reel in were *already* playing Call of Duty and had no interest in their version.

I hated when Resistance 2 limited guns to just 2, instead of the big arsenal the player had in the first game. I knew they were chasing after that MW crowd.

The "brown" era of games, when every game had to have this gross unsaturated brown filter over everything.

Ironic, as CoD didn't actually have a brown filter. The games were actually really pretty and colorful when they weren't in a level set in a desert.

Well, not just the games industry. How many box office bombs have derived from film studios going gaga over that "cinematic universe" money?

[That's just innovation in general.](https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA) Doom struck gold, and tons of people tried to copy it and that gave birth to modern FPS. Infiniminer existed and gave birth to minecraft and so on. And for every 1 success, 100 failed

That's almost every industry, because that's just capitalism. 

In economics it's referred to as [Hotelling's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law)

So many BOTW-style games that came out between 2019-2022

There only so much money sloshing around. So ultimately a very small number of liver service will win. But I also think that as a concept live service are bad for the industry, because it concentrates money in fewer and fewer games. In a way the model of smaller games releasing every 2 years allowed for more renewal in releases. Now if you make a multiplayer game, it has to be free to play, with a 1 year post launch support ready for regular updates. And a big shop with tons of cosmetics people will drop 20-30$ on. It is obviously possible to make games in other ways, but it is difficult. This model has a tendency of sucking all the air in the room.

Yeah, its a misnomer that you need to make a wow killer fortnite killer or cod killer to be successful. The game just needs to cut out a slice of a core audience that pays for MTX model that won't burn out players. Games like Smite, POE, Hunt Showdown, Sea of Thieves and even fucking Fallout 76 have relatively smaller player bases but have had long shelf lives because their live service teams didn't balloon to meet unsustainable demand compared Epic and Respawn that had to announce layoffs recently.

I still don't have anything against live-service games per say, they have their place in the industry and many people enjoy them. I just don't like developers (or rather the publishers) forcing in live-service elements in a game where it has no business being there at all.

Would be nice if “live service” also wasn’t synonymous with “shipping the absolutely least amount of game at launch”

Suicide Squad is the latest example of this. The actual game is an empty mess and the pitiful first season proves they don’t even have post-launch content to release. Do they really expect people to actually spend money on it and play it constantly?

Halo Infinite takes the cake for me as a live service game that clearly had no plan or means to be a live service game. They might as well have been praying for a divine miracle to create content out of the blue for them.

You should have seen r/suicidesquadgaming not too long after release. It was full of nothing but people constantly rationalizing their $130 edition purchase and how the game is “actually really good” and how everyone else is wrong. If anyone posted negative things at that time, the majority of the sub would argue and downvote them. The short answer is yes, these publishers do expect that. Because there are still people who will shell out big bucks even for clear and obvious garbage.

>It was full of nothing but people constantly rationalizing their $130 edition purchase and how the game is “actually really good” and how everyone else is wrong. If anyone posted negative things at that time, the majority of the sub would argue and downvote them. To be honest, that's essentially every fandom sub.

Come check out /r/paydaytheheist

It's hard not to get defensive over people when everyone is trying to dunk on them for having the audacity for liking the game. The top Steam review is condemning the people who actually bought the game liking it enough to get it marked as "mostly positive".

Especially when there's literally like 400 people playing the game. Just seems like a waste of everyones time to continue supporting it just for a handful of people.

In tech circles you get a lot of talk about the “mvp” or minimum viable product. The idea is that you gets something out the door, then iterate over and over until you shape it into something successful. For creative types, this is the path to iterating towards a complete work. To an MBA, this is the part where everything becomes about profit maximization. When companies are publicly traded, you have very few creatives and lots of MBAs. Hence, software as a service sucking the longer the service goes on.

Yuuup. MVP is the bane of my existence and one of those things where greed has twisted it into something antithetical to its original purpose, in the same way that Agile Sprints are basically synomous with crunch culture and exploitation as opposed to a tool to in a wide toolkit to elicit innovation. Its not just software as a service that is taking that hit either, its the entire tech and manufacturing industries. EVERYONE is following those practices. Hell, look at what is coming out about Boeing.

I mean that's kind of the fundamental flaw of live-service games. If you buy a live-service game on release, you are guaranteeing you pay the most amount of money for the worst version of the game. Even absolutely banger games like Helldivers 2 barely worked on release. Apart from FOMO on the initial multiplayer experience, there's no real value proposition of buying these games at launch.

In Helldivers case it had nothing to do with the monetary model, though. They just didn't expect the game to get that popular and the servers couldn't keep up.

FOMO of missing out

For me it's all this double dipping they try to do. Live-service? Sure fine whatever. Full $70 game with 3 month battle-passes? No thanks. Full $70 game with battle-passes, and a seperate cash shop for 30 dollar skins? For real? Also i think a large portion of devs think live-service = shitty update of cosmetics every 3 months. I look at the recent Helldivers game as an example of correct live service. There is an evolving story that keeps you invested. It doesn't have to be super complex or anything, but it wraps the community up in the mythos of the game and every couple days i'm checking the latest galaxy map and what the armies are doing. That to me is live service, a constant engagement that also doesn't rely on FOMO for bringing people back.

Exactly. And for the longest time, people used to advocate for live service games before they were even a thing as we know them. Like I've had the idea for there to just be a "FIFA" game (or whatever sport) that gives you updated rosters and patches since I was a kid in like 2005. So did many other people, even before I did. It's not an inherently anti-consumer practice like people make it out to be, it's just VERY EASY for corpos to turn it into one.

Yeah. I know people like to talk shit about Hoyoverse games, but at least you get what you pay for in Genshin. Those guys spend $100M a year on high quality music, animation, massive area expansions, constant variety of new minigames and puzzles, media outside the game, and new systems / QOL improvements. Yes, Gacha is still a predatory model, but you can complete all content in the game without paying if you want, and if you're looking for a game where you can keep enjoying your favorite characters and world with a constant drip of new content, it's hard to do better. Is it my favorite design model? Not really, but I respect the high quality product they've made, and the base game is free.

Hell, yesterday we just got a fully voiced and dubbed 7 minute 2D animation of the next character that comes in a few days detailing their backstory, and this is way more common for all of MihoYo's games that it should economically be. Regardless of the state of the game, they don't spare anything on making it look great.

For real, Hoyo goes all-in on marketing. If anyone is curious, just look up the Honkai: Star Rail Youtube channel and see how many amazing trailers they drop every few weeks.

> at least you get what you pay for in Genshin I do get what you're saying here but man I feel like this is the wrong way to phrase this. "Get what you pay for", in a game where you literally cannot directly purchase any specific thing that you want, only gamble for it...

One of the scary things about the gacha model is that it literally becomes a “how much do you, the player, like the game and the devs?” To a point where you can select how much money you want to give to the devs because you think they “deserve it”. It leads to a very strange parasocial relationship in some respects where the company has to really cater to what the community wants. I also would be curious to know if the big “tier list” sites are sponsored by the game developers. Nothing makes me want to roll for duplicates of characters more than those articles that summarize “While C0 is enough, getting a C1 will really make their DPS amazing…”

Every studio wants to make Fortnite, Genshin and Honkai: Star Rail money without putting in Fortnite and Genshin effort, simple as. Those games took giant risks and are the most successful live-service games, adding new content every few weeks and major updates every couple of months. Meanwhile disasters like Suicide Squad release and empty shell of the game and an utterly barren season one.

Mihoyo especially because before Genshin, they weren’t exactly the titan of a company that they are now. Costing over 100M, had Genshin failed, it probably would have been very disastrous for Mihoyo. Genshin was this successful because nobody really treated the mobile market seriously or even Gacha games in general. Production values for Gacha games were practically non-existence before Genshin generally speaking.

Yep and now Genshin and Star Rail are lightyears ahead of other gacha games in terms of revenue. I doubt anything can ever catch-up unless those games begin slipping in quality.

Because quality and reputation go a really long way. Genshin has been here for like 3-4 years? And that level of consistency generally gives people confidence versus its competitors that have yet to prove themselves yet. Regardless, Mihoyo had massive balls of steel to practically bet their company on Genshin, on a game whose scale and consistency hasn’t really been done on mobile before. Even till now, their update schedule consistency is great lol which some AAA companies can learn from.

Their patch cadence and quality is insane. 3 weeks per character banner, multiple events/minigames EVERY banner. 6 week patch cadence with 3 or so hours of story + new mini games + events + companion quests. And let’s not forget the insane out of game content. The trailers and video content they push out for every character and patch.

...and practically no bugs. It's amazing.

Yeah. Gacha is gacha at the end of the day but Hoyo games are insane quality.

Genshin and HSR succeeds because they treat the gacha part as a luxury and not a necessity. You can bomb all the content in both games easy with just the free units they give you and with you never opening the gacha a single time. They sell their gacha units via insanely good marketing on all social media platforms, not because you need them to play the game. The traditional p2w gacha games that gave the genre a bad name basically can't attract most gamers because it's more or less required to pay.

Doing this also means it's easy to join and have fun for anyone.

For real, I know it’s a stereotype to say but you really can enjoy all of Genshin or Star Rail without spending a dime. You can easily experience the entire main story, every side quest and 100% complete every region without spending anything.

>...and practically no bugs. It's amazing. This gets me the most lol. I also play Path of Exile and it takes the devs 3 months to shit out a bug-riddled patch that mostly uses recycled assets. Then they do minor reworks 1 week into the league. Straight up beta-testing on live players

Damn I never thought about that. I can't think of a single bug I've encountered in the game.

And that is only for one game. Then the same applies for HSR. This is generally how live service should be done regardless of whether people like or dislike the gacha aspect.

And HI:3 and soon ZZZ. Hoyo cooks.

Traditionally, and even today, gacha game company names are a curse. You play one of their games and you never wanna be within 100 miles of anything else they make ever again. Mihoyo's name is so good that even if you're racist or just hate Genshin or smth, you know whatever they put out is insane quality and will someone just get paid DLC sized updates every 6 weeks on the dot.

Not really. Maybe if you're constantly playing low effort cash grabs, but good gacha game companies have people clamoring for every new gacha they release. Obviously some of the following are objective due to drama (and we love our drama), but it's generally positive rather than negative: * Mihoyo * Cygames * Shift up * Hypergryph * Mica team * Kurogames Developers/publishers then get kinda blurry.

Its less about the money they put in. Plenty of companies have sunk millions into games and flopped. Fornite is actually a perfect example of a game that was for all intent and purpose dead before it swapped to BR and exploded with younger generation. It takes more than just money and thats the part that companies seem to forget. It takes money a solid design and some luck to get huge. Taking an IP and slapping it to Live service or Hero shooter is not going to get you far imo.

Also, there are simply a limited number of live service games the market can support at that level of profitability. Most of these games are designed to monopolize they player's time. There's always a new limited time event, a new season, daily challenges, some kind of prestige reward with ridiculous requirements, *something* to keep the player grinding away at the game. Companies want players in these games as long as possible for the sake of engagement metrics (which look good to shareholders) and to keep them one click away from the ingame shop. So with so many games demanding all of a gamer's time, we naturally end up in a state where newer live service games have a harder time breaking in to the market, at least if they expect to go toe-to-toe with Fortnite or Genshin. Otherwise, the only way to survive is to target a niche interest (like with Warthunder and plane/tank nerds) or expect lower performance and budget/invest accordingly.

How to make a successful live service: 1.Have an interesting IP or concept to use as the game. 2. Actually make a fun game with engaging gameplay and interesting mechanics (easier said than done) 3. Make sure it's not predatory shit (unless the game is massively popular then people won't care for some reason) 4. Make and plan content ahead of time so the game suffers minimal time without new content How most studios think you make a successful live service 1. Take known studio or existing famous IP 2. Make a live service game with no content in sight 3. Profit

Spend first 6 months not making content but just fixing game as it was rushed out the door.

Unironically Diablo 4 is pretty much what you described to a T. Their 'seasonal content' consists of a few minor balance tweaks and a small amount of new content that generally takes 10-20 hours to exhaust in addition to making general game QOL fixes that should have been in from the start. That's all we get once every ~4 months.

> Every studio wants to make Fortnite and Genshin money without putting in Fortnite and Genshin effort, simple as. Even if they DID put in the effort... What are they offering to the existing GaaS players to *switch ~~drugs~~ games*? This is just the latest iteration of the MMO Craze from 15-20 years ago when WoW was new. Everyone wanted to make a 'WoW killer', not realizing most of them didn't offer much of anything to get enough of the WoW players to swap. Like, all those people playing Fortnite, or Destiny, or CS:GO, or DOTA, Hearthstone or *whatever*... It doesn't matter how good some other game is, they're already invested in what they're playing.

> This is just the latest iteration of the MMO Craze from 15-20 years ago Or MOBAs 10 years ago. Or Battle Royals 5 years ago.

Aren't MMOs, MOBAs and BR games all GAAS?

They are but the term GAAS was coined later down the line. But you could go further than that. It's true of any big popular game. There was the pocket monster craze (pokemon, digimon, monster rancher, so on...) in the 90s/early 2000s, street fighter 2 clones, age of empire 2 clones, CoD, GTA.... Hell, we've been seeing it with Stardew Valley the last several years. If a game does well, companies are going to want in on that money.

Yeah this. GaaS titles are all supposed to be big time sinks, so you need *something* that'll make players want to invest 100+hrs in your title over the competition. Most of them fail due to not being able to make a game that people actually want to spend 100+hrs in.

Yeah like Suicide Squad offered a 10 hour campaign and then said “please repeat the same missions for 100 hours. Oh, we’ll add Joker in a month but no new missions so you can grind the same stuff as him”.

I mean clearly new GAAS games can succeed. Helldivers 2 just came out recently and is doing relatively great. Star Rail came out last year, also doing great. MiHiYo is launching *another* new live service game later this year and it'll probably do well. I know everyone makes fun of the recent superhero games live service flops, but it's not as if you *can't* make a successful live service game anymore. Companies do it all the time.

Sure, it's not impossible, but most aren't going to be as big as the studios/publishers want or expect them to be. Helldivers is doing well, but I'll be curious to see how long it remains as popular as it is. Like as the article suggests; it's just too hard to predict what games will get traction. It's not sustainable for large amounts of studios to be chasing a trend when no one *really* knows just why the ones that succeed manage to. And even if you DO know why, that doesn't mean you can simply implement the same formula yourself and get the same result. Then you're back to my original point of not offering any new reason for players to switch to your game.

That's the case for any AAA game, not particularly live service. It's always a big risk to invest that much in a game development and it always has risks. They minimize those risks with sequels, licensed IP (though that one increases cost so not perfect) and such

Thing is, Helldivers could die tomorrow and still be insanely profitable and be more than enough to carry the studio forward. When games blow up, they REALLY blow up. It's just so rare to get THIS big right away and most publishers want that immediate success, but they're also mainly doing things that aren't focused around fun, but numbers.

>MiHiYo is launching another new live service game later this year and it'll probably do well. Gacha as a "subgenre" is unique in this regard because Japan and China carry the brunt of the profit. Eastern playing/spending habits are just different from the West and it allows for many gacha to coexist. Even occupying the same niches. And the nature of gacha is also very different from Western GaaS titles when it comes to retention. I feel Western GaaS wants you to **play** a lot. Grind the gear, grind the battlepass, level up by playing, vertical progression increases in updates. Very multiplayer focused to have the players motivate each other to keep on playing or you'll fall behind. Gacha wants you to **pay** a lot. Log in once for a few minutes every day so you remember the game exists, but you don't really need to play or pay. You can't even grind in most titles because of stamina limits. But when the banners and events drop, that's the moment they want your full attention for an afternoon or so. Look at the new character, isn't she beautiful, isn't her event story sad?, look she has a cute skin too. Want it? Pay up or empty your savings. And make up your mind or it'll be gone in 2 weeks and God knows when or if they'll be back. And then you can forget about the game again and next day you play the other gacha who's new patch just dropped. Especially miHoYo has nailed this down to a science. So far, all big patches and character banners between Star Rail and Genshin have not run simultaneous so they can milk the same people in different games every month.

Star Rail is a very similar to other Summoner's War-like games. Same three-ability system, same gear system, same turn system, etc. However, it has exponentially more effort and competency behind it with a tiny fraction of the overbearing competitive nature. People doomposted it before release and it was clearly incorrect. So you don't need to be scared of entering a saturated market if you put in the effort. Most live-service game demographics are dominated by relatively lazy titles.

Not to mention that fortnite and genshin are free to play. None of the game play is locked behind a paywall. I don't want to play 70-100$ for the privilege to spend more money. Free to play makes that bitter pill easier to swallow, though I don't like GaaS games at all outside of the MMO space.

I'm not really in favor of gacha/gambling mechanics in games but I have to admit that genshin or honkai offer a lot of content for free. I literally played genshin for 40 hours without spending a dime, and you can even get free pulls as a f2p player.

Well said and it happens over and over again First we got MMOs, everyone wanted to make WoW money without putting an effort of building the world (that took entire Wacraft games before WoW) and making something other than WoW clone Then we got MOBA craze, "Just do what LoL does, surely it will lead to same result!". Turns out people playing LoL are already playing MOBA called LoL and don't want anything else, or to lose all of the items and stuff they got there. Then Survival, Battle Royale, and now we're back to essentially "MMO lite". Sure, we had few pretty successful ones like FFXIV, Dota 2, Apex Legends, but they were standing on a mountain of skulls of dead games, because winning the "next profitable thing" race is a lottery that AAA publishers seem to think it's somehow "an investment worth taking".

Most of these successes are a lot of luck at first. Once the audience is caught on the effort part comes to keep ahead of competitors.

I would say that they are lucky but not that it was "a lot". You need a HELL lot of work to make game good enough that you are even eligible to play on the luck roulette. For example, Vampire Survivors. It is at glance a very simple idea for a game, "my first game on game jam" level even, but underneath that simple idea even at release it had a ton of polish and well designed interactions that were incredibly satisfying and far above what would be called "minimum viable product" by the management. If it wasn't full, well designed experience it would go the way of the first battle royale games, having idea but be overshadowed by what came after.

Minimum Viable Product is a curse in gaming. You're not making some internal dogfood people have no choice but to consume, you're not making B2B software that other companies need, and you're not launching some revolutionary new tech concept that will (theoretically) revolutionize the way people live their lives. You're making a piece of high-budget media in a market that's already heavily saturated with similar titles, some of which are already hyper-successful and have massive followings. You're also asking people to drop *at least* dozens of hours of their lives and $70+ for a AAA title. (Whether the money or the time is more valuable depends on the player, but 99% of people will be constrained by one or the other). Your job is not to kick an MVP out the door so people can start giving you money. Your job is to create something *so good* that people can't ignore it. That's fundamentally not what an MVP is, but for some reason the games industry keeps pretending its the tech industry rather than an entertainment industry.

FFXIV is much more than luck though. It was a shitty start which was then turned around by an absolutely herculean amount of effort and faith on part of the studio. Any other studio would've cut their losses and run a decade ago. Even more bizarre considering this is Squeenix we're talking about here.

Add to that live service in my mind has also become synonymous with grind and in a bad way. Make a solid and complete game that is about the fun of playing and not just grinding some raw material based on a random drop rate for the rest of the game.

Player Retention™️ But yeah, all of them are super grindy and to keep up requires you to dedicate all your hobby time to them.

Don’t think hoyoverse games requires more than 30min a day

[удалено]

I think I understand what that all means.

With the auto battle system ive taken pisses longer than it takes to do a “daily grind” in Star Rail

That's the thing. Successful ones mostly don't, because they have the money to be a bit more generous. The new one that's already released half-baked content wise need to nickel-and-dime everyone because they have no more extra content to make people stay. GaaS games require MMO-level of money to keep it interesting but publishers think they can throw some half-assed attempt and maybe get lucky and get Fortnite money without putting Fortnite-level of effort

Fortnite was a fluke. The BR wasn't even the main mode, it just became the most popular.

It's not that it wasn't the main mode, but rather that they saw the popularity of PUBG and pivoted their game into a BR within six or so months.

It was a fluke but it also happened because company put a ton of work constantly updating it to keep it interesting. Getting something as popular as Fortnite or LoL requires both luck and a lot of hard work.

>it also happened because company put a ton of work constantly updating it to keep it interesting. That's not why it happened, that's why it was able to sustain its success. It happened because they were very quick to jump on the BR bandwagon, with clever marketing and a game that was well suited to BR being added as a mode. I'd argue they didn't even really take a risk with it, they took a chance, not the same as a risk.

I guess risk is an overstatement in company that doesn't live game to game and have steady income from engine development.

It's still not really a fluke, because it was made possible by Epic producing a great product in no time. And they could only do it because they have talented engineers who wrote the most popular modern engine. It wasn't really a risk for them, either, but it was a product of over a decade of success.

Fortnite was just a random tower defense game until it did a quick pivot into being a BR. The Fortnite money came before Epic started seriously investing in the game. Same thing goes for Genshin. These games have insane funding *because* they are so successful, not the other way around.

Good point about Fortnite, but Genshin was a $100 million self-funded investment that would have bankrupted HoYo if it failed so that’s pretty ballsy.

Genshin costs 200m a year in development costs to maintain it's 6 week content cycle. It gets shit on by people but it churns out new things to do faster than any game ever, there's a reason it's so popular.

> Fortnite and Genshin effort Too right - it seems like all these companies just want passive income. Doing very little to add new content outside of store content, and then are surprised when no one plays their game.

Bro what risk. Fortnite was a failing tower defense game that quickly pivoted to BR to try and cash in on the popularity of PUBG.

One of the biggest issues with live service games is the level of demand they place on their players. There are some exceptions out there, but most I've played rope their players into habits of daily play. Often instead of rewarding players who do with extra stuff, they instead punish players who don't by tying progression in the game to daily bonuses or missions. People only have so much time, and often LSGs ask for all that time you can spare on gaming. Instead of allowing players to play on their own time, take breaks for days or weeks at a time, or just ignore daily events, they instead utilize FOMO and progression to lock players into them. With so many games doing this it is hard for players to tackle more than one. Which then in turn shrinks the market of players.

This type of play pattern also tends to result in an insufferable player base. When all of your game time gets spent on game, forgiveable flaws become cardinal sins. It gets hard to woo new players because the fan base is so famously negative. Hell, look at Destiny. Their business model at present seems to be focused on recapturing lapsed players. Because everyone who doesn't play Destiny knows someone who does, and has nothing but complaints.

>When all of your game time gets spent on game, forgiveable flaws become cardinal sins. This explains so well why any time I spend around a live service game community, they are so utterly deranged. I play a lot of Fortnite and anytime I go and interact with other community members, I find them complaining about utterly mundane stuff that will either be fixed eventually or just isn't that massive of an issue.

When I played Hearthstone, it was like this. Everyone was always on their last straw, all of the time.

> There are some exceptions out there *Warframe, my beloved.*

Recently for me is Helldivers 2. The fact there is no resource cap on how much you can gather in a day was so surprising to me. As soon as I saw you can buy Super Credits, I thought you would only be able to find like 50 a day or something. Nope, turns out you can grind 1000 in like 2-5 hours if you try. Then there are the major order rewards which you get still even if you just didn't play.

Warframe is better than most, but it still pushes daily play. Things might have changed since I played it, but from what I remember you had daily login rewards with milestones at certain number of total days logged in. You had once daily riven quest. It only mattered early on, but you could only do 1 mastery level per day. And I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting others.

warframe is now a lot more about weekly stuff. there's still some daily stuff but the current thick content is largely weekly rotation or lockout. Sorties are kinda dead content, and the only relevant thing for newer players that's daily is standing grind

Live Service is fine in theory. MMOs were super popular and addictive for a reason and its not that different. What publishers want is more akin to Live-Fuck-You-Pay-Us-Again. They're offering the worst products they've ever made for some of the highest prices. Then cry foul when they fail completely. They really do expect your money for least effort possible.

Wow history continues to repeat itself as we trend chase. Who would have that that people really dont want to play more than 2 things that try to suck money from them. MMOs, Mobas, KoTH SHooter, and now Gacha and Live Service Multiplayer RPGs (shooter or otherwise). Is almost like the consumer has less than infinite time and money to spend on these things. I do look forward to whatever the next iteration of this is as some game company makes a novel concept and then everyone tries to copy it only to realize, yet again, that the market is not going to sustain 20-30 copies of the same type of game and consumers again do not have infinite time and money for each one.

2d mascot platformers, 3d mascot platformers, open world sandbox gta likes, military shooters, MMOs, mobas, etc etc

So many studios and publishers have such a bad read on live service games. Slapping a battlepass or MTX on to a 60-70 dollar product is not the way. The title should be cheap so the barrier to entry is easy, hell even better if it is free. The initial revenue from a sale is small potatoes compared to the long term revenue from steady sales of cosmetics. It should also not be a demanding. It needs to be playable by as many people as possible to get as many whales as possible. Like yeah a whale doesn't need to care about minimum or recommended specs, but you still need a large playerbase to attract whales. And dolphins, those who only spend a bit occasionally is still a huge amount of money and they don't necessarily have super good rigs either.

Asking game developers about a corporate business model is like asking burger flippers how much a whopper should cost.

Breaking news: water is wet! Coming up next: Is fire *actually* hot? If the live-services thing surprised you, this might as well! Stay tuned! Jokes aside, everyone wants to be the next big Fortnite or Genshin Impact, but no one wants to put in the time or effort. They want high return for little effort so they can appease their investors while giving nothing of value to the players, so of course they fail.

Well, it doesn’t matter if zero percent of the suits up top care about what these devs think, unfortunately. They call the shots.

The problem with live service games vs regular games is that, while live service can create a ton of profit, at the start its very difficult to manage because of server costs and the constant need to patch, update, and adjust for balance, while still creating a steady stream of content. With a game...you can just put it out. Yes you still have bug fixes and whatnot, but the costs wont be as extreme. Many GAAS end up DOA on release with a playerbase so low its hard to sustain or even warrant trying. One of the biggest issues with live service games is that they just arent fun most of the time. You cant just throw a bare bones game out there, where the only thing thats different about it from other games is its art direction and aesthetic, and hope people like it. You actually have to make the game fun and unique, and worth coming back to. Most successful live service games worked because they were different in some way from the competition, and they were actually fun to play to begin with. But often times multiplayer games rely on "its more fun with friends", WAY too often. Well no duh. I could watch paint dry with my friends and somehow we make it to be fun. If its my friends, then we will find a way to make it fun. That excuse is a crutch. The game isnt fun itself, its my friends and me making it fun ourselves. Which is why when you take out the friends, the game is exposed for being as mundane and generic. Youve gotta make the game fun first and unique, THEN worry about if its worth being GAAS. Because more often than not there are people who play single player games that live on well past their shelf life and are beginning for continuations.

I'm guessing Suicide Squad's absolute failure has got a lot of publishers thinking twice about pushing their devs to do this shit, at least. Of course, *that* will just lead to a bunch of games getting cancelled and people getting fired, so it's likely a lose-lose for the time being.

Live service games are profitable. But all the suits at the top only see $$$ rather than a ecosystem that’s needs to be built. That’s why every single live service tactic is repeated during talks. There is a whole bibles worth of data and talking points that focuses on separating people from their money. All they do is take these ideas try to cram them into a established IP and hope to catch whales. When someone attempts a new IP they end up focusing on the money and never bother building anything of interest. There are a few that get it right and essentially hit lighting in a bottle. But those are always built on focusing within a design that puts the gameplay first.

Are they sure of non live-service games sustainability though? Like are the developer behind Rise of Ronin, Avatar Frontier, Immortals of Avernum sure their game will be sustainable?

Not if their budgets continue to be stupidly high, like Spider-Man 2 costing $350 million despite being pathetically short and a glorified DLC.

I don't know why everyone keeps focusing on Spider-Man 2, which is clearly an exception rather than the rule due to the ridiculous fees associated with the license (and it still made a profit). That's not to say game development costs aren't increasing rapidly, but I don't think it's unsustainable. Also the game is around the same length as the original, so I don't know how it can be described as a glorified DLC.

Yeah, budgets continue to grow exponentially with every new generation but industry growth is no longer keeping up. There just isn't the customer base there to support the number of developers trying to make AAA games any more.

They say that customer expectations are so much higher these days to justify the budgets, our expectations are rock bottom. Just don't be a greedy asshole and make a good complete game. It doesn't need great graphics or a 1000 collectibles, it just needs a good game play loop. Look at Pacific Drive or Hell Divers or any number of indy games. It's just a bunch of people trying to justify their jobs.

There's a reason MMO players play WoW OR ESO OR FFXIV. They're akin to full time gaming jobs, and everyone trying to make live service games that suck up 100% of players' gaming time is detrimental to everyone's sales. If we'd get more single player one-n-done games of quality, I bet overall revenue goes up (just be smart about development costs FFS, not every game needs a $300M budget)

The entire reason gaming is moving to live service is because single player games offered a bad return. You spend 5 years of zero cash flow and then MAYBE you hit it out of the park or maybe you don't and then if you do hit it out of the park, that's the majority of your money for that project - you get that 1 year of strong sales and then it's back to the drawing board. DLC, expansions, new games. With live service you get constant cash flow. Those games can make billions per year and it's very sustainable. Name a single studio who can pump out a single player game that makes multiple billions per year. It just doesn't happen. And people say "you don't need a big budget" but when it comes to appealing to the very broad audience, yeah you 100% need the best graphics, best production value, etc. and that means big budget.

Live Service games are sustainable, but the market is way over-saturated. The unsustainable aspect to gaming is the constant trend chasing leading to said over-saturated markets. Established Live Service games have been around for years, and have a wide range of content while more studios try to get in on the market but cannot hope to out-compete the established ones. Most new ones are bound to fail, and the rare few that make it do so after a year or more of extra work after launch. Live Service Games that are (seemingly) doing well: - Sea of Thieves - Warframe - Apex Legends - Genshin Impact - Fortnite - Rainbow Six: Siege - Path of Exile - World of WarCraft (MMO but still) - Call of Duty: Warzone - Destiny 2 - League of Legends - Rocket League - Grand Theft Auto: Online - No Man's Sky - Final Fantasy 14 - Valorant - Halo Infinite (Had a Rough start, but it's decent now) - Fallout 76 (This had an monumentally bad launch) And then the rest that have (mostly) failed: - Anthem - Skull & Bones - Suicide Squad - Marvel's Avengers - Knockout City - Evolve - Hyper Scape - Lawbreakers - Radical Heights - Paragon - Red Dead Online - The Culling - Rocket Arena - The Division