or Why Do You All Keep Making Live Service Games?
A Fritz Rant
Imagine that I come to you with an incredible idea for a business: buying lottery tickets. You are skeptical at first, but I make the following argument. We’ll only do it for a little bit. If it doesn’t turn out to be profitable, we’ll stop doing it, after a few months.
Oh, except instead of just going to a convenience store and buying Mega-Millions, I’m going to need you to get me a team of artists, programmers, a full QA team, and a publisher, because we’re not going to be buying lottery tickets, we’re going to be making live service games. So I guess in this metaphor, our lottery tickets take likely several hundred thousand dollars, and maybe a year or two to buy.
Let’s look at a few of those tickets shall we?
GUNDAM EVOLUTION just announced its end of service. Also, a bit ago, MultiVersus ended its beta, with a promise to return in 2024. These aren’t the only games, but they’re recent examples. CrimeSight was a paid game, and it was a brilliant deduction game with incredibly clever mechanics that never found a playerbase, and it shut its servers down. Oh, and The Cycle: Frontier, while it sucked, was a good example of this thing we’re talking about, so I guess I’ll include anyway.
As an outside observer, I don’t have perfect insight into what’s going on here, but I can make a guess. If I was in games purely for the money, I get why everyone would want a League of Legends, or an FGO, or a Genshin Impact. It’s tempting! And perhaps even the math makes sense. Maybe if you buy enough tickets, this all works out in the end.
But I can’t help but look at all of this and be mildly depressed. Thousands of man-hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and tons of effort is being spent on creating games that sometimes don’t even last a year.
And many of these games are good, when you peel back the endless daily quests, in app purchases, and optional addons that cost $30 a piece. They have their own communities and player base, but because they don’t become a massive hit, they get shut down.
It’s depressing to me that video games feel like they’re switching from something like a book, where you can have a cult classic that gets discovered years later, to something more akin to software as a service, where when it’s gone, it’s just gone.
Anyway, rant over. More games to come.