The Live Service Model is Dying | Extra Punctuation 

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This is legitimately the smuggest I’ve ever heard Yahtzee. He’s literally doing a victory lap on this concept. Good for him.

"Because in capitalism, infinite money is not enough, there must also be infinite growth. There must be _more_ infinite money than there was last quarter." It sounds too stupid to be real, but here we are.

"Do you have ANY idea how difficult it is to make something people actually want to buy? It's ridiculously hard!" - Kale, Hi-Fi Rush

I can remember when a company having 20% growth in a year, on average, was considered phenomenal. Then, it became the norm. Then it became the expectation.

I know it's bad from to celebrate at a funeral, but I will make an exception for live service games.

This reminds me of the time period when like a hundred MOBAs were released and shut down within a year.

You can almost write a thesis paper on the success of Hi-Fi Rush. Not only do you have everything that Yahtzee just went over, you also have the fact that it came out on the exact same day people were supposed to start playing Forespoken, a game only the most hardcore of Sony and SE fans were excited about but many people were planning to play because it came out early enough in the year that nothing else new had come out yet to play. You can even tell how many people were begrudgingly going to play it by the amount of people who immediately changed their plans on playing it that day after Hi-Fi Rush dropped. It was almost like it freed people from the shackles of something they didn’t want to do. It dropping was almost a perfect storm that allowed it to succeed as well as it did.

The funny thing about Yahtzee pointing out Suicide Squad's multi-tab menu and pointing out how common it is across live service games, is actually another point at game devs/publishers just copying trends, because half if not more of those games are just pulling their UI and gear systems from Destiny lmao (which is even funnier, considering Destiny is clearly making active efforts to move away from a gear score system, and there's already a leaked rumor that gear score may be removed entirely)

One of my friends keeps trying to get me into Genshin Impact, and I keep repeating: "I'm sure it's great and fun, but I don't have time! Playing this will require me to drop all my established hobbies and only do this!" And that is the problem with Live Services in a nutshell

This has been the first time an EP hasn't made me feel disgusted with the games industry as a whole. Let's see how long that lasts. 🤞

The Hi-Fi Rush shadow drop was a slap in the face to the current norms of the game industry by the game industry. It's ingenious, really.

2:20 timestamping this whole bit for relevance. And irony.

I feel like the "capitalism's expectations of infinite growth is dumb" point is perfectly illustrated by the shareholders of Activision-Blizzard allegedly being disappointed in Call Of Duty's performance in recent months... despite the games still selling at rates that would make an indie publisher go bananas

Always loved the surprisingly optimistic last part of the fallout 76 video, glad to see a full extra punctuation on the topic now.

When it comes to the "live service model" I've noticed an interesting trend. whenever a game features the fact that it's a live service prominently in its marketing, its almost always a bad game (see: anthem, avengers, Battlefield 2042, etc.) but when a game doesn't draw attention to its live service elements it tends to be a pretty good game (see: Deep Rock Galactic, Warframe, Payday 2, etc.) I personally think this trend is less about the actual marketing itself, and more about how much thought has been put into the base game's experience. If all the marketing around a game is just "look at all the cool stuff we'll add to the game 10 years from now" that really only means the game doesn't have enough content to be marketable right now (and, when nobody buys it because, surprise, game's bad, then the game just dies and all those promises in the "10 year plan" disappear alongside anyone's desire to play the game).

I'm standing over live service's hospice bed like "you need a pillow buddy? Your face looks like you really want a pillow"

Hi Fi Rush is also a good example of the game industry lying about their obsessive need to pretend like any and all games need to be blowing up in terms of how much they cost for the consumer. They can release a fantastic game for 30 bucks and it's clearly doing extremely well as a financial investment. The industry at large always feels like they need to make justifications for why, for example, they want 70 dollars to be the norm for games when all of the reasons they wish to do so are poorly hidden excuses for them just seeing what they can bleed out of the average consumer. They make games that have frankly out of control budgets and then act as if it's the consumers job to completely fit that bill, even if the game isn't good. Basically we need a push back to games with shorter length, good quality, and cheaper prices. You can still make your 60 dollars huge story RPG game but just do a bit of diversification, y'know?

I think part of the problem with the 'following the trend' crowd is that they think 'mine will be better and lure them all away' when in reality, they didn't make something better. Something better can and has taken over the Big Dog, but that's some serious unicorn-rainbows-wishful thinking if you think you'll automatically be the ONE

Sometimes it feels like Yahtzee's saying what we're already thinking. But he takes 8 minutes to do it and uses a lot more words and that makes me feel better about myself for confirming my bias.

The last few levels of Hi-Fi Rush are... beautiful. They clearly put in a lot of effort to make sure it stuck the landing, and they did a great job.

Live service games: You've killed me! Consumers: Good!

Every time I hear about Hi-Fi Rush or Disco Elyisium I start to cry because I remember how awesome the experience was playing those games.

If the success of Hi-Fi Rush and the upcoming death of live service games are signs that things are going to change for the better, then I highly welcome it.

it's good to be reminded that if Hi-Fi Rush isn't at least nominated for GOTY I can be assured that it will definitely make in to Yahtzee's top 5

2:20 - I was having this EXACT conversation with a friend yesterday. You can track the rise, decline, and fall of damn near every empire or other global power in human history down to this phenomenon. Merely having the means to do whatever you want, for some bizarre fucking reason, just isn't enough to a lot of humans. There's always a need for MOOOORRRREEEE, but so many of the wealthiest and most powerful people don't seem to grasp that GROWTH IS NOT INFINITELY SUSTAINABLE. At some point, you run out of resources to extract, or land to conquer, or people to exploit. Then, because all your infrastructure has grown so big and bulky and slow to respond in the course of pursuing those things, it becomes impossible for you to pivot quickly to the new paradigm. Then you fall. So it goes for big corporations in the modern day. Remember Circuit City? Remember Sears? Remember K-Mart? All kings in their respective sectors of the market at their peak. All of them started to prioritize making their shareholders MORE MORE MORE just before they began their downward slope. And now they're all just memories.

This is why indie and small dev teams are what to actually pay attention to if you want solid games. The biggest AAA contenders will shoot themselves in the foot for another buck but thankfully there are still plenty of smaller teams putting out really great stuff consistently. Also the thing with that suicide squad game is that the gameplay looks kinda fun but of course the monetisation is going to drag it down. But the thing it reminds me of is Saints Row 4, so maybe I'll just go back and play that again.

Pizza tower I feel falls into this as well. Small amount of hype for the diehards that followed it but is now slowly taking over the internet in a Undertale/FNAF -y kind of sense. But is still a rather tightly designed original game that will keep people coming back for more than "kill 8 people named Jaundice with the Broken Grappling Hook while doing a handstand"

That hype paradox thing, it's exactly like when someone says "trust me". If they have to tell you about those attributes, then it means they're not happening naturally.

This is one of the best Extra Punctuations so far. It's extremely insightful and highlights a ton about the issue with the current games industry and live service model games. People will always enjoy a well-rounded and well designed 10 hour experience more than a 100 hour grinding experience where 40 of those hours were spent grinding for a blue hat with +2 numbers.

It's like staying up for a road trip to see everything. Good at the start with so much to see and stop to make some memories, but then need some energy drinks and don't stop as much, and then just hoping you don't crash the car while the road starts making strange swerves and more people are honking for you to wake up and get some sleep.

I think it's less that the model is dying and more that it's finally stabilizing. Studios are realizing that only a few live service games can exist at a time and pretty much every niche has already been filled. Apex, Destiny 2, FFXIV, Fortnite, OW 2, etc. These games are massive and they each take up a particular niche, and no other game of that same niche is gonna thrive and sustain itself while those other games exist.

The video game industry is actually a rapidly growing one, with significant tailwinds provided by increasing global market penetration (decreasing prices of mobile devices, increasing size of the middle-class, gaming replacing other forms of entertainment, etc.) and ample price escalation headroom (since gaming is one of the cheapest sources of entertainment in terms of $ spending per entertainment hour). Also, the mobile gaming industry is the primary driver of this sector (not PC/Console). The live service and freemium model has proved to be hyper-effective in terms of access provision, revenue generation, and enhancing player count. Hence, objectively speaking, the chances of a gaming crash like the 1980s is close to none. The worst-case scenario is flat to low single-digit topline expansion for the industry over the next decade.

Funny how the only major competitor to WoW at the moment, FFXIV, is a game that boasts really good single player content, and the heavy grinding aspects of the game are almost entirely for cosmetic purposes, not for incremental increases on your stats, so you can put the game down for long periods of time, and it won't take long to get caught up.

God, I hope you are right. I am old enough to know that a fresh hell awaits to replace it, but I am so done with live service bullshit.

The problem I've found is that gamers as a whole are tired of games being a service and want some form of permanence. Hi Fi rush is a perfect example of that. It's not stinging us for more money or DLC baiting. And it feels like a finished product

This is such a perfect summarization of my feelings about video games rn. I’ve had many an exhausted discussion around battle passes as being cancer. That it rewards the players who can play for hours a day every day and punishes the larger community of consumers, the people who come home from work to play a couple hours and go to bed and the occasional day where we get to spend a few more hours playing. It used to be excitement coming home and playing that game I really was enjoying only now it’s the feeling of a gun to my head saying “if you don’t play this game today you’re under utilizing your time and are a failure” Like I enjoy the esthetic of destiny 2, the lore is interesting, gameplay is simplistic and fun. But fuck me if I don’t play EVERYDAY. God help me if it just feel like playing god damn Spiderman or something with more substance. Because if I don’t play those games, cool I pick it back up where I left off. But when I don’t play a god damn live service game one day you lose so much precious time. Jesus, this channel doesn’t miss

Funny you should say confusing casino layout. There’s a line in a James Bond novel, don’t remember which one, where casino layouts are termed “The Gilded Mousetrap School of Architecture.” I don’t know if that’s original to Ian Fleming or if that’s even a real architectural term, but is there anyway ZP of the rest of you lovely chaps at the Escapist can make that a video game term?

“Infinite money is not enough”

Wow, one of these that actually makes me feel genuine hope for the medium, I feel like I'm fifteen again discovering the first years of Extra Credits and the then-recent backlogs of the 2007-2011 ZP episodes

Such a cool analysis about trends. Love videos like this!

This is why private industry has its place but also things where it fundamentally doesn't make sense. In the US we struggle to understand that. Private hospitals, schools, police, EMS and firefighting just can never work because private industry requires growth, but the demand for those things is well defined and finite. You can't keep increasing profits unless you start cutting costs and quality of service, and that's just not what we want in those things. As a paramedic who's worked in the private sector for ten years, it's just the rule. There are no exceptions.

The tragic thing is that you just *know* that some of these Live Service games didn't start that way, and then the suits in the financial offices came down with edicts to shoehorn it in at the expense of developing the single-player game. Avengers and Suicide Squad both have that kind of feel to them, which is tragic because I ADORED the story trailer for Suicide Squad. I was genuinely excited for the game, only to have it turn to ash on seeing that it was going to be YET ANOTHER live service game.

City of Heroes still made revenue when it was shut down. And it still would today. Obviously pityful amounts in comparison but the CoH shutdown was primarily an ownership / publisher problem. Private servers are still going strong, it's different enough to attract a different crowd and as such doesn't have to compete.

Watching the Live Service trend die is almost like watching a train wreck in really slow motion as one by one these hackneyed, grindfest forever gains are getting sniped one by one by publishers who found out the hard way that maintaining a live service game when it doesn't have an audience to sustain it is really fucking hard, thus they pull the plug on the game, causing people to revaluate how much they are willing to throw their time and energy at a game so fewer people hop on the latest live service game to come out. This cycle repeats until the next big thing comes along so the games industry shows they will have learned absolutely nothing and hop on that trend.

I'm looking forward to more AAA games that aren't pawing at microtransactions and live service models. The problem is what it'll be replaced with.

Yahtzee is legit the freshest voice in video gaming - which is a feat given that he's something of an institution at this point in his review career. Keep up the critical analysis Yahtz!

This is my favorite Extra Punctuation to date. Great points on everything mentioned.

7:06 Let's not get simplistic: History of full of examples of great and original products that didn't get enough attention to make even. In the current saturated games market, this only becomes easier and easier to happen. But indeed, I believe it would be safer for AAA companies today to regularly invest in a couple of small, original games like Hi-Fi Rush than to keep focusing solely on super expensive or large-scale games. Even if some of them flop, they have more than enough money to sustain it, and the successes would turn them into valuable IPs that can keep using to earn guaranteed money in the long term.

Think that might have been the best EP so far. Lots of strong arguments backed up by evidence, still funny and also had a refreshing positive(ish) message

Like that memorable scene in that memorable Zelda CD-i game: "You've killed me!" "Good."

I was worried that video gaming might die out, or at very least the medium would be much smaller then it used to be due to the burn out from live service and loot box games, but now I see this isn't a new problem. This video gives me the confidence and reassurance that video gaming won't go away, and hopefully the age of loot boxes and live service will fade.

My man described the entire "once in a life-time crisis" capitalism crisis cycle thru games. Loved it

Amazing Extra Punctuation video, as usual. Maybe even better than usual!

The same trend is going everywhere. Streaming services are the same issue. Everyone was happy paying for Netflix when it had most of the content they wanted, but then every company wanted a slice of that pie for themselves, pulled their content off Netflix and made a platform that cost as much or more than Netflix with a fraction of the amount or variety of content.

I really hope you're right Yahtzee, and that there's a quality renaissance on the horizon. But I can't ignore the fact that the remnants of the moneymaker mindset will doubtless still be there, like Peter Parker tearing off the symbiote. We're free for now, but it's just looking for a new host to latch onto.

This is the best Extra Punctuation yet, truer words have never been spoken.

My logical brain wants to avoid ever touching a live service game, but my reptile brain saw the gameplay at 2:15 and thought "I MUST BUY BABYLON'S FALL!!" Turns out that was a state-of-play trailer from 2019, which was about as representative of the finished product as the Overstrike trailer was of Fuse.

Great takes in this video! Keep the good content coming!

It is really nice to hear out loud what I have felt for a while. Oh, how have I missed you catharsis.

Another good example of the industry chasing trends without understanding how they were just saturating the market with mediocrity was the early 90s fighting game boom. For every Capcom, SNK or Mortal Kombat game that was successful and popular you had like 15 "Fist Masters" or whatever clogging the dank unpopular corners of arcades

As someone once said, “Let’s all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, tee hee hee.”

There have been a lot of trends (and trend chasers in gaming). There was the fighting game trend of the 90s. The music game craze of the late 2000s. The open world craze of the 2010s. Also there are currently a bunch of soulslikes flooding the market.

Excellent writing, short and sweet and to the point.

Speaking of the concept of the hype paradox, I been using the term of the hype line for a while when talking about upcoming games. What I meant about it is that cause for a while, the idea of shadowdropping a game has been an unconcibeable idea for a while, trailers and the creation of hype felt like a necesity (Thank god that Hi Fi Rush now serve as an example that hype is not mandatory for success). Because of that, I always mentioned that there's an invisible line in publicity that I called the hype line, in which when the trailers and announcements start to distract from the game itself and just try to sell you the idea of what the game is suppose to be. It basically boils down to "The more hype they try to make, the less faith they have in the game being able to sell well on it's own merits" which I think that could be the hype paradox on itself and I think I will also use the term too.

Doesn't even have to be original look at jedi fallen order. Just have it be well made and a fair price

Bravo sir! Beautiful put as always!

"Hard to go wrong with an infinite money generator, except of course that it did for the usual reason. Because in capitalism, infinite money is not enough. There must also be infinite growth. There must be more infinite money than there was last quarter." This is, without exaggeration, the best quote that I've heard in years. I'm taking this quote, and I plan to use it constantly.

That opening hits home, too. It's wild hearing younger people talk about games because I was literally born the same year as the NES, and had both it and an Atari 2600 when I was little. I was "the same age" as games in a lot of ways. Seeing its development has been crazy./

Oh, so is this another case of let’s all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee

every single one of these videos just get better and better

Well said, well put. Can't wait for part 2 down the line.

It's why the people most hyped about AI are the suits. Press a button and get art. No more having to deal with creatives. The AI doesn't tell them their ideas are stupid and creatively bankrupt. The AI doesn't complain about crunch. The AI doesn't demand to be paid with dollars that rightfully belong in the executive's pocket. It's everything they've ever wanted.

I've never been a "I'm gonna go complain about games on the internet" person, I don't even have Twitter, but even I rolled my eyes at the suicide-squad-wet-gloop gameplay trailer.

This was really well written segment. Good shit.

This is one of those videos for the ages, thank-you for your words Ben Yahtzee ^_^

*So many* of your points are things I've been calling out for years now. It's always a breath of fresh air to see another Extra Punctuation about the industry - gives me hope that the 'soul' of gaming isn't lost to time. Thank you, Mr. Croshaw.

The Money Machine that manage our 401Ks: We should shortsell those game companies into bankruptcy, for not showing enough growth last quarter. All these squares make a circle.

This was probably the best essay I've heard and definitely one of my favorite things from Yahtzee

There's more than just what you listed. In the early 90's, there was the rush to make mascot platformers, late 90's had the shooter boom. Early 00's had the MMO rush, and after came the rush to 'modern' military shooters, the forced multiplayer mode, the attempted denial of single player games, and the original mobile games gold rush. Live services are just another trend tossed onto the pile. Hell, if we want to go even further back, do you remember when every company, regardless of their actual product, was randomly trying to force out a Pong machine? It's disheartening to know that these companies will never learn from mistakes they themselves had made because they're so insistent that when a new hit comes around, this time will finally be the moment where following the leader and copying the work that every other company is copying at that moment will allow them to stand out because they're the super special one this time.

Streaming services have fallen into the same trap. Studios saw Netflix explode in popularity, and they wanted in on the action. Yet most people aren’t going to go beyond 2 or 3 services that give them the best value.

As a massive pedant... SWG was released before WOW. SOE killed SWG trying to make it more like WOW though and I'm still fucking bitter about it.

"The current state of triple-A, as well as the MMO wave and the 90’s multiplayer shootersploitation, were all part of the same pattern: the money men eternally searching for a guaranteed formula for success. And they will never find one. Or rather, never realise that the formula already exists. You know how you guarantee success? You produce an original product that’s well made and reasonably priced. It’s as simple as that. But they’ll never take that to heart, because coming up with good ideas requires creativity, and investing in them requires a willingness to take a risk. And the money machine is capable of neither." Are you turning into jim sterling? Because that was absolutely awesome.

God damn. This is just oozing with insight. Best EP yet.

It's funny that one of the longest running MMOs compared to the ones you listed off is fucking Runescape, a browser MMO that used to run on Javascript of all things 💀

You also forgot the explosion (and subsequent failures) of various MOBAs in the early 2010s in attempt to copy League of Legends and Dota 2 success.

I remember the exact same story from the Netherlands. Except that the deal wasn't with games, but with tulips.

I really appreciate the honest and rather grounded perspective that this video gives ragarding the games industry and its recent idea in need of ripping off for easy money. And I felt inspired hearing the quote regarding the 'hype paradox' that really let me realize, that hype is nothing more than artificial word of mouth based excitement. A way for corporations to create excitement without trying to actually say anything about their game that is worthwhile.

let's not forget pizza tower which has a massive playerbase for being a relatively short single player platformer with 2D cartoony art which is unheard of in this day and age

Best EP yet! Extremely salient points, even for your high standards!

Nicely summaries my thoughts past n years

It's an interesting game theory problem we study a lot in economics. To oversimplify, an online multiplayer game is what we call "coordination games" where the utility derived hinges on coordination. It can be spontaneous or ordered, but it needs to be present. You don't get value out of logging on to a multiplayer game like WoW or CoD if no one else does. Then you have to add in the next layer up which depending on mode of analysis can get different findings but all point in a similar direction. These live service games probably fall under what we call "monopolistic competition" which is where you sell similar yet distinct products. It's not two firms both selling wheat it's one person selling Coke and another selling Pepsi. Taste and preference influence demand curves for each firm. Monopolistic competition is defined by a few things, but two of which are particularly relevant to this discussion. First is there in the long run will be many firms. Not as many as competitive markets, but it's not an oligopoly and typically that means "too many for them to collude and form cartels." Second, is that economic rents/profits can be attained in the short run but crucially *do not exist in the long run*. That doesn't mean you don't get accounting profits, you still make money, but you don't maintain the status as "best thing to do" or "higher rate of return than competitors" in the long run. If I had to guess, we're in that phase as the entrance of firms lowers those accounting profits as the market segments itself further and no one can capture an oversized share. This is a much more nerdy analysis, but it does agree crucially with a key point that Yahtzee made: this was entirely predictable.

This was a chef's kiss rant/eulogy for the shrinking format, and solidifies why Yahtzee is actually underrated despite how popular he is.

Live Services, I think, will end up the way MMOs really did. Like you said, one big one will stay around as a niche, for MMOs it was WoW, for live services, it'll be probably a Destiny game. And then occasionally when one does something interesting and new, like Final Fantasy 14 for MMOs, it'll hit mainstream popularity for awhile before people move onto the next thing. Just another niche genre in a sea of niche genres.

Bloody awesome video!

Love the Firefall shout out o7

“Good things don’t require hype”. I wouldn’t take that advice. Not to be overly pedantic, but I’d say the success of hifirush has as much to do with picking the prime golden hour to be released as much as it’s quality. It’s was released the same time as some massively unliked aaa games so it got its publicity from being the antithesis of that. If it was released at the same time as more well received games it still might of done well but it could just as easily slipped through the cracks. The public doesn’t automatically flock to something because it’s good. All of social media proves that imo.

**Slow, Geniune Clap** Exactly this, all of this, thank you. Someone needs to sit down every single executive and money man, and make them watch this thing, on loop, until they freakin' GET IT.

I've been pondering lately the problem with long-term engagement in live service, and it dawned on me as soon as the new D2 expansion started getting blasted that one of the hardest parts of a continuous world is narrative, that thing that all writers know is what gets players invested in an IP, and yet is so often dismissed by higher-ups who swear they know what they're doing.

I feel like this is one the most enjoyable and insightful videos yahtzee ever put out