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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Live Service Games Are Dropping Like Flies

Avengers, Babylon's Fall, Knockout City, Rumbleverse, Back4Blood, etc, etc.

I'm sure most of us are glad to hear this, but are there any that you'll miss? Any parting or insightful words for the recently (or soon to be) deceased?

While it's sad to see an otherwise decent game fail for certain upper level decisions, as a larger trend I think this is a good thing. As an adult my time is finite and I like games that respect that instead of trying to string me along every day.
Do you think publishers are starting to think twice about Live Servicing All The Things or will they keep trying to ram them down our throats no matter how many fail?


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If they can get away with failing (multiple times) they'll go ahead and keep trying. There is way too much profit to be made if they find that sweet spot. Which would then allow them to pretty much do whatever else they want afterwards if they choose.



market is oversaturated, people (myself included) are sick of every game trying to use FOMO to get you to log on every day like it's a job.



Good. Explained many times why I'm not for them nor should give money to them. I doubt it but maybe AAA devs will learn to focus more on finished products that you don't need roadmaps for.



Bite my shiny metal cockpit!

Almost as if most people don't have the time to dedicate their whole gaming lives to one game, and the ones who do just pick one of the handful of games that are already popular and have an established playerbase. Every publisher wants their own cash cow game that would perpetually generate profit to the company, but there's room for only so many live service games on the market. I'd hope this would be a sign for those companies, but unfortunately this industry has never been very good at learning from past mistakes. This trend chasing will continue until the bubble bursts completely, leaving just a few of the biggest games behind while all the others are forgotten. It's happened many times before, and this time won't be any different.



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Not at all surprising. It's not a bad concept, it's just it's only going to appeal to certain types of people, and it also encourages people to play just that 1 game. So sharing customers with other games isn't really possible, it's kind of all or nothing.

Making a bunch of new ones to compete with the well established ones (and generally being pretty low quality) was never going to work. You're not going to steal customers from better games, and people who aren't fans of live service games aren't magically going to start liking them.



Games need an end goal I feel, something to work towards. Something destiny has done really well, create a narrative and consistently provide some of form of story and gameplay mechanics and updates.

There is only so much you can rinse and repeat the same thing. This is why I think Sony bought Destiny. Bungie are the only ones who have been successfully been able to create a live service game and have proven they can keep the game evolving and fresh to bring players back over and over.

My only thing with Destiny is the cost involved of buying the updates. It's a big price to pay compared to the ones mentioned above and the likes of Fortnight.

Not everyone can afford that especially if you are like me who by Jan has already bought and played 4 games.



I've long been tired of the overall trend of businesses trying to push an entire subscription-based economy upon us. I don't feel like companies need to be pushing us to open ongoing automatic income streams to them. It's infecting everything.



Great news, Live Service is overall not a good model for most gamers, it stands to reward developers more for less work and dedication, while it requires more dedication from the gamer. Many console and PC titles are teetering dangerously close to the edge of full-on mobile game monetization and consumer retention strategies. I want to see Live Service as a concept getting its ass beat even more - it brings nothing good to the table and can't be allowed to set the premise for the entire industry.



Ideally this'll quickly lead to a shift of there still being some games like this but far less so there's less failures and the people who like these type of games have them supported for a good while.