Live Service Games Continue To Die 

The live service games also have the issue of desiring to monopolize the attention of a player. So the more they are, the more they canibalise each other

Making a live service game is like swinging for the fences in baseball. Sure, you can hit a homerun, but there's a much higher chance that you'll strike out.

As someone who's dunked hundreds of hours into Knockout City, it hurts seeing its name lumped in with the rest of these. Tons of love and care was put into the game by everyone who played a part in making it and it was an incredibly fun game to play and world to exist in, but the odds were really stacked against its success - its marketing campaign was poor, it was stuck under EA for a while before they went independent, and it was just made in the wrong time where people don't have to spend $20 on an online multiplayer game. Seeing it become "just another shut-down live service game" after two rocky years was painful, but we saw it coming from pretty early on. Velan Studios, Knockout City's developers, decided to close the game to move onto larger projects, but provided builds of the game so that players could continue playing on privately hosted servers. Preserving the game in this way after its sunset is an extra step that I really admire, proving that they really do love this project and wanted to give something to those who love it just as much.

Seeing that list is a big yikes because I remembered not being surprised at a few of them like Babylon's Fall. Players only have so much time on their hands and if they've already invested time in a live service game of their choice, it's gonna be so hard to pull them away even if your game is similar in genre or gameplay. You had to grab that audience in the beginning or miss out like when all the BR games were being pushed out to mimic Fortnite. Really good breakdown here.

1.59 x 500 is most certainly not 975.

I just want a game like tf2 that gets updated, isn’t scummy, has a good community, and doesn’t die out of the gates. 😞

Not surprising there! Live service is completely unsustainable when greed is usually involved! The market is over saturated and these games demand too much of your time. Too many live service games and not enough time to play them all! Some of us don’t have enough time to devote to these games because we have other more important things to do. Limited time events, gambling/loot-based gatcha mechanics galore and too much effort revolves around MTX to continually “milk” the user base by exploiting short attention spans! Lastly, this type of greedy implementation bleeds into many full-priced retail games!

Me in 2019: "I can't believe EA and Activision are holding Respawn and Bungie hostage for live service games respectively! Apex and Destiny 2 are doing so well..now we'll never get Titanfall 3 or [version of Destiny that doesn't need eververse]!" Me in 2023 after Respawn came out and publically delayed Tf3 indefinetly and Bungie doubled down on the eververse without Activision's restrictions: 😐😶‍🌫️

Sleepy unknowingly outlined why Live Service games have eclipsed traditional AAA games. The market punishes mediocrity much harder than AAA single player does. If Resident Evil 4 comes out...SP gamers play it for a month and then they're looking for their next fix. This allows a Callisto Protocol to come out and succeed despite not being as good as RE4. In Live Service, you never get that. If a company produces a Fortnite clone that's not as good as Fortnite...instant death. Live Service success requires higher quality or gameplay variation to succeed. Single player rewards mediocrity. Live Service punished mediocrity.

The game I've played most is Team Fortress 2 with 2000 hours. It's basically an anti-live service game because there's been no major updates for 6 years, but a good game can be played forever with no new content.

Even though I haven't played it in ages now I feel like the biggest reason why Fortnite was so successful with their model was because they had/have the best value in their battle passes. They're the only live service game I can think of that actually gives players v bucks back to them from the premium pass for playing the game. I think Call of Duty 2019 did that for a while but stopped. I hate battle passes now in other games that don't give you any currency back or for free and never buy anything in those. It's funny it's like they're scared giving players some of the currency back will make them lose money but that's exactly what will put players off giving them any money in the first place.

The main problem with live service is the fact that most that happen will end up experiencing death. Mostly because they forgot about the core experience

I shall do everything in my power to boost this in the algorithm. Really good video!

Holy shit I totally forgot about "tighten up the graphics."

These corporate developers are so disassociated from the gaming world it’s honestly crazy we still call them game developers. They have no interest in what we as the players want. But at the same time it does leave a big gap for games like Battlebit for example to drop something fresh and with the players in mind and benefit massively

live service as a concept is great, but the problem is that the time it demands means you can really only play maybe 3 of them at once - if that - which means that people are gonna pick a few early on and kinda ignore everything else. seems a few others have said it already, but it's something i noticed when this trend towards live-service started. adding it to single-player games also worsens it imo. You can't just finish the campaign, maybe check out the multiplayer and DLCs, then be done with the game. Perhaps 100% it if you want to. now, you're expected to log on constantly to get your dailies and check out the new live-service content drop thing, explore the store, grind for a bit, etc. It's the antithesis of what a singleplayer game should be, and as with everyone else i'm damn near praying companies stop doing it.

from what i understand, genshin impact is a live service game (mostly) because the devs want to make it one of the biggest games of all time. the game was HUGE at launch and its almost tripled/quadrupled in content these past 3 years. and the game isnt even half way finished. while other factors were probably at play, one of the major reasons they decided to make it live service is probably because developing a game for 10+ years without it generating any revenue is just not worth it. yea, some of the ways they squeeze out money from the playerbase is a little predatory, but it definitely feels like you need to go out of your way to pay money, as opposed to how in-your-face lots of other predatory games are about it. and thats excluding the fact the ingame premium rewards are actually quite generous for this type of model. personally, id say it definitely payed off. for both the devs AND the players. because the game is great. its beautiful and magical and mostly entertaining. some people might not like the anime-style its going for (including visuals, writing, voice acting etc) but i found it quite enjoyable. and most people might be turned off by the gacha mechanics, but its definitely a side mechanic. and not the face of the game.

I was hyped for the Sui cide Squad game when it was first announced but as soon as they said it was a live service game and that basically the 4 characters all play the same (everyone has guns), I basically lost all the hype. It is disappointing to see that THIS was the game Rocksteady was working on for years after Arkham Knight.

Destiny 2 was undoubtedly in a better place before adopting the battle pass and seasons thing. Now it's plagued by rampant cheating, immense server instability, content droughts, FOMO, and greed. Now it's all coming back to bite Bungie in the ass since player numbers are dropping again. I had hope when Bungie said they learned from Season of the Plunder (where player numbers were at their lowest) but alas, we were lied to and the game is now suffering for it. People just want to see Destiny 2 conclude now so they can finally stop playing it. Yes, Destiny 2 has officially become a game that feels like a full time job with all of the FOMO tactics they employ. Destiny 2 has become a game that depends on FOMO to keep players around and it's starting to fail

Live service means the developer will keep working on it, as long as people keep paying for it. They will never actually admit that though, so they can't admit they gave up on it when it stopped making money...

Will never buy product that requires you to rely on a service to use until they get bored and decide to close servers leaving me with nothing

Despite it's issues Warframe will always be the only good example of what a live service game should be. Fair monetization, no paywalls, frequent content drops, listening to player feedback etc...

This makes afraid and anxious for Fallout 76 and its future. Yes, I know 76 is still alive and kicking since the Wastelanders update and ironically it narrowly escaped the fate of other live service games such as Anthem and Marvel’s Avengers. But no one can predict the future. That’s just the facts.

Companies thinking this will make them more money, but not factoring the costs that cause them huge losses

When games were on disks: finished game for a finished price. When games became downloadable: unfinished game for a finished price, buy the rest of the game in the form of dlc. When games are fully online: unfinished game for an unfinished price, eventually the game will finish but the price never will.

Shame what happened with echo vr, some management guy shutting it down even though it still had an active community

IMO if I game requires me to connect to the internet, it is bad, no if, and, or but. I will not sink time and money into a game that can be shut down anytime a company feels like it!

They just want a reliable source of income to keep in the long term because they dont see any other way to monetize games.

Seeing townscaper at the end really surprised me

Andrew Wilson should change his last name into "Bateman". It would fit like a glove.

What the triple A games could take from live service ones is more content for example: SONIC FRONTIERS was relased in 2022, the game had problems and people were complaing about the content that wasn't there but then in 2023, they released more content for the game like new chalenges, cut content the spindash which is the move they always wanted and a New ending for the game with playable characters coming with completely new abilties and this without any micro-transactions

The problem is quantity over quality people would spend 1000 hours in a game if it's got good quality but every month there atleast 3 new live services that all wanna last years it ain't gonna happen

The live service genre was created specifically with shareholders in mind, it benefits them, it exists for them. It was never for the players. The CEOs who pushed it were trying to make players fall for THEIR stock holder centric dream reality. It's just yet more way to squeeze more money out of players, or should I say 'payers' because that's how share holders look at people who play live service games.

Live service models are games you pay for and still have microtransactions while still being online only. Rumbleverse and knockout city is free to play therefore makes sense it's going to have microtransations

Live Service Games are not bad, the bad thing is how they are trying to get money out of them by inventing new ways to monetize

live service games turn this medium into a disposable product

$80 million for an AAA game! It would need around 2 million sales at the minimum to break even at a guess. Games are simply too expensive to make with too many ancillary staff not actually “making” the game.

I wish that the company who own this live service games just make the game into offline like how Capcom did with Mega Man X Dive or the community/playerbase who plays this games do something about it like the community of the Club Penguin, no matter how times the fanmade game got shutdown, someone in the community will revive it again. Other example is Sonic runners, the official game got shutdown but some fans revive the game and turn it into offline. Or if the company thinks that their game has a small playerbase just make the server small and if the playerbase is big then make the server also big, no need to shutdown.

i wish we would get companies willing to make full on games. no live services. just a full game with its full story and everything ready the moment we boot up a game.

All these games will slowly die unlike tf2 it's funny to see how hard companies try and valve rarely if ever releases content for that game

In a year, you can play many, many single player games. In a year, you can play 1-2 live service games. it's not possible for more than a few of these games to exist. In order to reach profit levels that companies want out of these games, they either need extremely large playerbases, or they need the few players they do have to spend an insane amount of money. Most players just are not willing to become whales, and they have jobs. They don't have the time to play all of these games religiously. There can only be a few successful ones until the market has reached complete saturation. You cannot sell more to a completely saturated market. Even if you do create a live service game that lasts, it's over the corpses of 10 other live service games. All of the biggest live service games are just the oldest ones, because they were around before the market was saturated. These companies saw the dollar signs, but didn't realize that making every other game a live service is like releasing 50 different movies on one theatre weekend. Nobody has the time or money to see all of those movies, so most of them have to die.

Dual Universe is another GAAS sub based game that seems to be on its last legs. Started off well enough but just seemed to run out of steam.

I don’t think keep it alive is very expansive compare to making a new game. If only sports game are life service instead of making new release every year.

Player time is a currency and there’s not enough supply to keep up with demand. Too many companies try to make these games and compete, but don’t realize that trying to over saturate the live service game industry is only going to waste their money.

I think the craziest things are that people *still* buy into the free to play live service system when time after time they're burned by overpriced micro-transactions, lack of content, plentiful bugs making the games nigh unplayable, and AWFUL responses to criticism and feedback. The fact that so many big streamers, content creators, etc. constantly go “gaming is dying” when they exclusively play live service games and/or similar constant releases like COD. You see it time and time again: Games hit record player counts only to drop 99.9% of those within 3 months. It's insane just how much they continue to happen despite the outcry, disgust and negative reactions every time an anticipated game is revealed to be live service, and how it's a continuous circle of games making the SAME MISTAKES time after time. My favourite example: Promising big features and never releasing them has seemingly become a new trend. Halo Infinite AND Overwatch 2's major cancellations of anticipated features both happened within a year of each other. There is no learning with Live Service releases, there is only doing the same thing over and over and hoping for Fortnite money to roll in.

Personally, i hate most live service games because they are filled with annoying, rude, obnoxious kids that do nothing but scream and yell slurs. I'd rather enjoy my own game without other players bothering me.

More game keep dying. The more game keep showing up. I miss those days when they were full games for fully priced along with expansion sets.

I mean, you put your money into something and then they close the game meaning you can’t use it anymore so

The problem is they make a paid live service game, where live service game only works for free games

I am a bit late to the conversation on this, but personally I will never play a live service game. I played MMORPGS a ton from 2006-2013 and that has shaped how I view games massively. I put 4k+ hrs into Runescape during that time and after breaking free from the addiction that was that game, I never want to fall back into that pit. That is the problem of live service games for me, they want me to dedicate all my time to it and to do so they implement a ton of time limited content and the like to instill a fear of missing out. They want to be the only game you play and will do anything to make that happen. I play games for enjoyment and to de stress and the last thing I want is to feel like I have to play a game. When you combine my above point with the fact that live services games typically launch barren of content and riddled with predatory micro/macro transactions and it becomes a cesspit of all the worst aspects of modern gaming.

0:2:55 Dragon Quest adventure of Dai still haven't launch, how did it fail or get shut down when it's coming this year?(planning ?)

What's the last game you showed at the end of the video it looks great. Awesome video.

Some love service games don’t even make sense being live service

its kinda ad nauseating seeing so many get announced like bros i can only play like 2 tops why is there 40 service games coming out

Knockout city was simple but had great mechanics. I played for months and was sad to see it go.

Single Player is and always be King. Buy your games, don’t dream and hope for a service game or a subscription service to satisfy your gaming needs. They will keep hanging the carrot in front of you, just out of reach

Overall I agree with most of your points, but you suggested there might be such a thing as "good" Live Services. No, they DO NOT exist.

I feel that another reason live service games die is once the game actually gets good they pull the plug. Let me elaborate. So we all know EA's Star Wars Battlefront 2 right? How that was a shitshow with pay to win lootboxes, and shitty optimised servers, and how it had less content then the SWB2 that came out 12 years earlier, in other words your average EA game. Well around late 2019 early 2020 the game began to get a lot of traction, it had a lot more content, most of the things it was criticised for were either removed or fixed, and there was a lot of hype around the SW fandom. Because you had the final sequel trilogy movie, Mandelorian, and the final season of the Clone Wars. And after that you had stuff like the Bad Batch, a sort of sequel to Clone Wars, Boba Fett show, and the Obi Wan show. Not to mention it was covid season, so everybody was sitting inside and playing online games with their friends. So you have all of this, game's getting more players because everybody is stuck inside, content being added themed around the new movie and shows, hype for future content that could be added like a playable Ashoka thanks again to Clone Wars season 7 and Mandolorian and other fan favs from Clone Wars. All of this, and EA decided to pull support for the game. They could've made bank from all the new players picking up the game during covid season, and all the old players buying new skins and heroes if they were to lazy to play for them. The game was at its peak, and they pulled the plug. Now the game is full of cheaters and has like a quarter of the people playing, I think, because we can't see the exact numbers. Like at first when you didn't feel like playing a certain map you could requeue and about 10 seconds later you've found another game, now if you don't feel like playing a certain map you have to wait like 5 minutes in the queue just to be put back in the game you just left. It had so much potential, it had an entire redemption arc, and EA threw it all away.

rumbleverse died at launch with those unappealing character designs.

If live service games are the only thing major publishers make, they’ll likely be successful. But it doesn’t mean that people won’t buy single player games. You just won’t make them as often as you used to.

underrated video, nice job

Dragon quest the adventure of Dai was an anime adaptation? Was a game made based on it or is this just a mistake to include?

You’re gonna blow up on yt one day

"Live Service Games Continue To Die" Good...

echo vr is not dying, meta is just a bad company

I want to go back to the days of buying a game and then getting a Map Pack or Expansion pack later that gave us new content instead of this constant nickel and diming us every new season of another game with another battle pass. I love Fortnite. I have been playing it since it came out. but I hate that every other game is trying to copy them. I like Halo Infinite but hate how it's trying to be fortnite in the way it structures battle passes. I wouldn't mind just buying a Map Pack.

Echo vr shutdown for no reason and it made me sad that you lumped it in with those other games

and nothing of value was lost

Games as goods >>> Games as services/live services/cloud streaming/online only Own your games. Keep playing not keep paying.

There isnt enough room for every game to be a live service. Most are built in a way that isnt even sustainable. So im not shocked

Attention monopolization is definitely the killing blow to these live services, most of the time. They need to be profitable and, to be profitable, need to keep players coming back... while every other live service game is already trying or doing that.

Fatigue is real. You can only lose to so many third parties in a row on Apex before you just want to slam your head in the door.

People look at live service games like Fortnite and want in on that cash, but they don't seem to realize there's only ONE live service game per gamer. All of them want all of your time, always. This harshly limits the market. Making a live-service game is like buying a lottery ticket. You're hoping that you will be the one to get and keep the attention of your entire market demographic so you can milk them for easy money ad infinitum. Chances are, you'll be one of the hundreds that fail to be the one, just scraping by or, more likely, getting shuttered when the million dollar execs realize that their projected revenue stream won't materialize and pull support. Live service games depend on steady, high quality gameplay content updates to keep players engaged and willing to shell out for battlepasses, "conveniences" and cosmetic items. Without a hefty investment, you're unlikely to succeed, but even WITH a heavy investment, you might not be able to pull people away from their current live service due to what the PLAYER invested into that game and the community and friends they made there. It's a gamble in the same way as trying to be the next WoW-killer was. You either win big or you go home with nothing, because none of those career execs are willing to accept just *some* of the pie. They want it all or they'll axe the project to invest into something that will.

Smaller studios making a live service game is just the new version of when every studio tried to make an MMO years ago.

I'm really sad about knockout city, that game was so unique and fun

Make a video about why Lazy Town fell off

I remember back in the days, games like Unreal Tournament or CS1.6 would provide patches over the internet, and servers were mostly community servers, so companies didn't have to spend such a massive amount of money in servers, all while working in a new title to release one or two years later. And people didn't complain about lack of content or anything like that, people kept playing those games for decades and even still today, even after Epyc closed the official master servers for Unreal, there are many players still playing them and even releasing unofficial patches to maintain these games. It's not a problem of not having enough money or human resources or anything, it's just that these companies are now corporations and corporations don't make games, they make money. You will never hear of any of these companies allowing community servers ever again, in any of their new releases. And when games like BG3 are released, they will argue that "this can't be the norm" because they know they are going to cut their profit if they go back to the old philosophy.

Yeah the problem with alot of these games is they need the players to treat the game like a second job and that is not viable in the long run especially with the amount of games coming out, i've even done this myself and it's simply not worth it.

I'm glad the money men and investors are jumping in on Web3 and crypto. Now gaming can finally start to heal.

I really can't share your optimism cause a “bad game” for us players isn't the same as a “bad game” for the company behind it. As long as it makes money, regardless of how players react, things like diablo immortal will keep being made.

is "Fragalia lost ends" supposted to be dragalia lost? typos aside i do find it interesting whenever somebody brings up dragalia in a video about live services, with it being a gacha game and all. alongside only getting publicity since it was published by nintendo (with nintendo's meddling actually being a major contributor to its eos). meanwhile theres an endless torrent of new gacha games that shut down after only a year or so (if its published by nexon america dont expect it to last). and while gacha games are still a type of live service, ultimately they are form of it that pre-dates the modern trend that most people are referring to when they say "live service". (in a similar vein to how mmos are live service games but gennerally are not what people discuss when it comes to live services)

Growing up in the PS2 era, so many games that were sold as complete products with the developers delivering a complete experience to gamers. The idea of “always-online, constantly-updating” live service games always came across to me as pushing incomplete products to fans on the hopes of what they envisioned the full game would be based on the potential they saw in it. I believe this model was made to take advantage of newer generation gamers that simply weren’t around for those days and wouldn’t know any better. I’m just glad with time more people’s eyes have begun to open to this crap.

I really wish more live service games got turned into offline games or, they use the assets to create a singleplayer game. Revived witch was absolutely gorgeous, with great ost but the gameplay was pretty terrible and, it was gacha, really wish it got turned into a singleplayer turn based rpg or something. It hurts seeing all those games in that list with so much hard work put into them go to waste.

Wow what a great show man the edit the script the idea everything is perfect

I used to play a lot of MMOs in the past, and at first I thought that these games would grow alongside me, because as I grew up from being a kid so too were the games being updated, but then I noticed that those games from being a paid subscription type, started becoming F2P and focused on microtransactions for their revenues, that's when I started seeing the downfall of the games that I played, most of the people that played the games started leaving, and thats when you started seeing the games trying to take shortcuts and lowering the quality/experience they used to have, when a game that I played for more than 10 years went down thats when I realized that these companies don't care about their playerbase, they act like they care or listen to the playerbase but no matter how much feedback you provide to the devs, you see that that they do whatever they feel like with the games and its why great games end up falling, many of the games that I used to play could have been saved, but that would have required for these companies to take risk which they never do as they only play it safe and do things that only guarantee profits, I understand that companies have their shareholders and investors on their back because nobody wants to lose money, but people get tired quickly of companies trying to make a quick buck out of them, and not making any worthwhile content for what they pay for in return, and this is the reason why the gacha industry has gone out of control, all gacha games basically have a couple of years at most before they close down, and its all because of these bad business practices that for trying to just make a quick buck people catch on and jump ship while they can, the players that truly suffer are those that are loyal to the games that they love and stay aboard a sinking ship, because all the time and money they invest are things that they can never get back, and for the most part once one of these games goes down it basically becomes lost media, and thats another hard pill to swallow for those that enjoyed many of the games that have become end of service. The most frustrating part out of all of this though, is that these companies that are basically making a quick buck for making these gacha games with a shelf life, are basically killing all other games with a live service because people have stopped becoming interested in those types of games, and thats why MMOs in recent years have become unpopular and its why the situation has become worse than ever, but those companies once they close down their gacha games, they usually have another gacha game ready so that they can basically repeat the process infinitely, and this loop will never end because this new era of gamers just play whats popular out there, and then they just move on to the next game no matter how much money or time they had wasted on the previous game, and for the most part they don't care if the games become lost media.

Very well put together video! Hope this sparks your RU-vid career. Only thing I would change is the audio is a bit low but that's a easy fix for future uploads

This was a great video. You hit the nail on the head at the end of the video. There are bad companies, but there are also great ones. That’s why I really like investing my time and money into single player games with no micro transactions. If I pay $60 for a game and get the entire game, I am more than happy. (If the game is good of course)

It’s just not a profitable model simple. You pointing out Server cost is huge. I don’t think people understand how much it costs to „rent“ a server for these companies. As much as we hate it, this is why they push bundles so much.

Every time a live service game dies the world of gaming gets a little bit better.

Wow you're so underrated! The script, the editing, everything is top notch!

I've played warframe and destiny 2 and I understand the criticism, but I don't understand why he uses destiny as an example when criticizing the grinding, even though warframe is much worse. In addition, it is super easy to progress in destiny 2 at the beginning without a grind, and in warframe the grind is either always the same or even gets more and more.

What I find funny in some of these GaaS games is that what they need to thrive is a community, a playerbase, yet for some stupid reason great games go and become exclusive to Epic, which basically kills their playerbase before the game even releases, it boggles my mind. Spellbreak will be missed :(

at this point i cheer and encourage the death of live service games. I want to get the games of the 00ts back. All this 2010s bullshit drives me to play games less and less..

Something interesting about live service games for me, is that whenever the game is released on day 1, the game felt "unfinished". A really good example of this is probably Sea of Thieves where, even SoT players says that the game only felt "finished" after around 3 years after release and updates. Usually I'll give live service games some time and see if it'll survive. If it DOES survive long enough the the game will probably stick around for a while. I think most live service games that dies, usually is not even 2 years old

alternative title: squidward talks about games

That old commercial of "tighten up the graphics a little bit" is so bad and cringe lmao. Graphics aren't that important at the end of it all.

What’s annoying is how. Old game shut down sever force u to buy Xbox one

Very informative 😄 Live Service Games can be good but they keep trend chasing, nickel and diming players, oversaturation, etc etc etc etc. They need to know that there are just too many Live Service Games out there right now, and the gaming space just doesn't have room for another Live Service Title at the moment.

You forgot to add Overwatch 2 in there.

try boosting your volume. quite a bit lower than other channels.