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Monday, September 09, 2024
Predicting the death of live service games
There has been a trend in these past years of large game companies making live service games and failing miserably with them. The latest entry, Concord from Sony, probably broke all records by shutting down already two weeks after release. Game companies are lured by successful competitors that make huge piles of money into asking their development teams to "make me a game like Fortnite!". By which they mean "make me a game that makes as much money as Fortnite", without really understanding the reasons behind that success, neither from gameplay nor business aspects.
As an old MMORPG blogger, that all sounds eerily familiar. Sometimes the same large game companies two decades ago asked their development teams to "make me a game like World of Warcraft". With the same desire for big bucks, and the same incomprehension of what made WoW tick. If you think that Sony did badly with Concord, please note that Everquest Next (aka EQ3 / Landmark) died even before release. And while the gameplay of Fortnite and World of Warcraft is obviously different, on an accounting spreadsheet a MMORPG is nearly indistinguishable from a modern live service game.
The fundamental truth is that there is not an infinite number of possible customers for a "lifestyle" online video game that eats up much of your time and money every month. Network effects result in a handful of those games succeeding big, and everybody else failing. And because we lived through the death of the MMORPG genre, it is easy to predict how this story ends for the live service game trend.
One has to realize that every computer game from a large company started as a project, with some project manager having to persuade upper management to finance some idea for a game. It would take a project manager at Sony an unbelievable level of courage to go today to Sony's upper management and propose a live service game to them. And even if somebody dared, he would probably get laughed out or shouted out of the board room. Concord took 6-8 years to develop, cost about $100 million, and made about $1 million, which Sony is now refunding. This isn't something you try twice.
The long development time means that we will still see a bunch of live service games releasing and most of them failing, before every company that can make such a game has understood the message, and jumps on the next big trend instead. But as we still haven't got "a game like World of Warcraft" in terms of player numbers and financial success (although we got some with at least a reasonable level of success), we probably won't get "a game like Fortnite" either. Fortnite will live on, like WoW still lives on, but the hype will end, and game companies will try to make their mega-bucks with something else they don't really understand.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:45 PM Permanent Link
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Live service games are going through pretty much exactly what MMOs went through. And like you said with game development routinely take 6-8 years now we are going to get more delayed failures like Concord.
I predict the next casualty of chasing trends 6 years late will be Bungies extraction shooter Marathon.
Players time is finite. Not ever game is going to have millions of players, especially if the genre already has large established games with years of content. Why Sony thought players would pay $40 to play Concord when direct competitors like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals are free is mind boggling to me.
I predict the next casualty of chasing trends 6 years late will be Bungies extraction shooter Marathon.
Players time is finite. Not ever game is going to have millions of players, especially if the genre already has large established games with years of content. Why Sony thought players would pay $40 to play Concord when direct competitors like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals are free is mind boggling to me.
Sony didn't develop Concord in-house. They announced cooperation with Firewalk Studios about three years ago, and bought them about a year ago.
From what I've read Firewalk was an offshoot of a group called ProbablyMonsters, whose skills would seem to be concentrated more on hyping games than making them...
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From what I've read Firewalk was an offshoot of a group called ProbablyMonsters, whose skills would seem to be concentrated more on hyping games than making them...
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