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Is 2024 the year that gamers finally turn their backs on live service games?

10K View2024-01-20

If you’re a modern gamer who plays anything beyond single-player, offline-only games, you’ve probably experienced this stress before: The end of the month is approaching, and suddenly you panic as you realize there’s something you forgot. The battle pass! It’s about to expire, and you haven’t finished leveling it up! You paid for the premium track, and you haven’t even unlocked everything on it.

The game could be anything. Maybe it’s Fortnite. Or Hearthstone. Or Rainbow Six. Or Diablo IV. Or Call of Duty. Or heck, even Fall Guys. These days, almost every game with a serious online component has a battle pass. And for most of those games, battle passes are just the beginning.

The idea of a single game being a living, constantly growing and changing experience has come to be known under the name “games as a service,” or more popularly these days, “live service games.” The origin of this trend can be traced back to MMOs like World of Warcraft and early online gaming super-hits like League of Legends, both of which have now incorporated more modern live service game features. Modern live service games can be found in every genre, from battle royale titles like Apex Legends to superhero games like the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Just don’t let the developers of Suicide Squad hear you calling their game a “live service.” In an interview with Play Magazine (as reported by GamesRadar), Rocksteady studio product director Darius Sadeghian stated, “We don’t really think of our game as fitting with any particular label.”

No surprise that the studio wants to distance itself from the live service game label, given that when Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was first unveiled early last year, many gamers expressed extreme disappointment in the game’s live service elements. At the time, it drew many negative comparisons to Marvel’s Avengers, a 2020 effort by Square Enix and developer Crystal Dynamics to create a live service superhero game that flopped and was delisted from digital stores last year, just three years after its launch.

And yet in that same Play Magazine interview, Sadeghian boasted about the upcoming game’s “social features”—including unlockable taunts and leaderboards—and its long-term plan for seasonal content updates, which will include missions, cosmetics, gear, and new playable characters. In other words, exactly the sort of stuff players have come to expect from live service games.

Just in case you still had any doubt, Sadeghain confirmed the team’s objective with the game outright:

“Our goal is to build a community with this game. We want each player to feel like they’re part of Suicide Squad and, more broadly, a Suicide Squad community. This has been at the core of our development, and the game has been built from the ground up as an experience that can be shared with friends.”

I’m not trying to single Suicide Squad out here. I’m a huge fan of Rocksteady’s past work with the Batman Arkham games, and I’m seriously hoping that Suicide Squad ends up being great. Yet in some ways, Suicide Squad feels like it could end up being sacrificed to this latest trend: the push away from live service games by many hardcore gamers.

If the reactions from fans a year ago weren’t enough, the early previews of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League from critics should raise concern. IGN titled its first impressions article “We played Suicide Squad and didn’t like it.” It specifically called out the live service elements as a problem, saying, “A live service game from Rocksteady is not what I had on my Christmas list this year.” Eurogamer said the game is “perhaps trend-chasing more than sticking to what the studio does best.” And GameSpot said this title “[doesn’t] seem to be breaking the mold, especially when plenty of live open-world games now exist with a lot of the same kinds of content.”

Again, I’m not trying to pick on Suicide Squad. What I took from reading all of these previews was not that this game sucks. Quite the opposite, in fact! It sounds like it has an entertaining superhero story and a lot of the expected Rocksteady polish. No, the message I took was more that critics, like gamers in general, are getting exhausted with the push for every game to be a live service. It no longer seems to be enough for a game to come out, get played for a few months, and then be done; every other new triple-A release is meant to be some sort of “forever game” that gamers keep returning to over and over, always with fresh content, new unlockables to grind out, new battle passes to unlock, and so on.

What changed that made this approach suddenly less popular? Beyond just being tiring and burning out players, my personal theory is that many gamers have grown understandably cynical as they see more and more live service games being abandoned and shut down. Some gamers are seeing their time, money, and appreciation for specific live service games flushed down the drain, sometimes after only a year or less.

Believe it or not, Marvel’s Avengers’ three-year run is one of the less egregious examples. Last year saw dozens of game shutdowns, including: magic-based battle royale Spellbreak after just over two years; Knockout City after just over a year; Babylon’s Fall after just under a year; Apex Legends Mobile after less than a year; Rumbleverse after six months; and The Day Before after like a week.

All of these were, in some form or another, advertised to consumers as ongoing games that would get content updates and that players could keep enjoying long after launch. All of them left at least some portion of their dedicated audience feeling burned, even if that audience was small to begin with.

As pointed out in an excellent op-ed published on Game Developer late last year, it would be a mistake to look at this ongoing shift as the “death” of live service games. Games like Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Valorant, and the like are not going anywhere any time soon. But it may be a sign that developers want to heed moving forward about just how many “forever games” the market can realistically support.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz about predictions for the video game industry in 2024, analyst Piers Harding-Rolls said he believes there will be “some rebalancing of games investment between live service and single-player experiences on console platforms.” Another analyst, Newzoo’s Tom Wijman, shared his prediction that “live service games and back catalog sales will drive growth” in video games this year, but not without caveats.

“Live services will continue to be massively successful and dominate top played and grossing charts, undoubtedly,” Wijman said. “[But] not every studio will want to develop a live service game anymore. Developers and publishers will pivot back to premium game development. Oversaturation in the PC and console markets is evident, with a handful of titles monopolizing playtime; sixty percent of playtime is eaten up by nineteen games and seventy-five percent by the top thirty-three by playtime.”

We’ve perhaps already seen some of this rebalancing beginning to take place. For example, in 2022 Sony announced that it was planning to launch “more than ten live service games” by the end of the 2025 fiscal year (March 2026). By November of last year, the number of live service projects in development by Sony had been solidified to twelve, but Sony revealed during an earnings call that only six of those would make that mid-2026 launch time frame. Just last month, it was announced that one of those twelve live service games, an online multiplayer spin-off of The Last of Us, had been canceled.

If even major publishers like Sony and major IPs like The Last of Us are struggling to make the live service model work, what does it mean for the future? Well, if nothing else, it shows that making one of these games is not just a simple cash grab. Live service games—like most modern triple-A projects—are extremely expensive and complicated. The less guaranteed the chance of success, the less likely that developers and publishers will want to risk devoting resources to their development.

As with so many things in gaming, the only thing gamers can do is to continue voting with their time and money. Don’t let the FOMO of battle passes and limited-time content push you to play a game you aren’t actually enjoying, and when there’s a non-live service game you love, make sure to let other gamers know by leaving a review on TapTap.

Do you still enjoy live service games? Or would you prefer developers stop working on this type of game and stick to single-player or more small-scale multiplayer projects? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

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