Live Service Needs To Go.

the live service genre is one that requires little introduction if you've been gaming for the last 10 years it's not really a genre in a traditional sense like an RPG or an FPS it applies more to what systems the game has overall the genre relies heavily on repeatable multiplayer gameplay mostly in a PVE environment that puts you on a Gear treadmill in an attempt to grind out gear that is marginally better than what you had before or even working towards objectives in order to move your profile into higher standing to get unique titles or higher

multiplayer ranks new cont content is added in a seasonal format in an attempt to get you back every 4 months or playing every week if possible you may think this sounds very similar to another genre another genre that takes up all of your spare time and you would be right the live service genre takes a lot of inspiration from the MMO genre and the similarities aren't that far-fetched in fact the live service genre uses MMOs as inspiration for much of their underlying systems the MMO genre as we once knew it was a monolith that seemed

Untouchable what once was one of Gaming's most prestigious genres in terms of content to price ratio has now become a shadow of itself attempting to recapture the lightning in a bottle that made it so special in the first place they are what could be considered the very first live service games because they were some of the only games to require both an initial fee and a subscription in order to play on a monthly basis these were games that had seemingly endless amounts of content for the player to explore battle trade craft and raid through MMOs

are in their Essence digital third places for players to interact with others and enjoy their Leisure Time with I would go deeper into the topic of third places but that's a subject for another video altogether but needless to say this aspect plays a major part in What made MMOs so deeply appealing to many players they served as spaces where many like-minded people can gather play together and discuss what they love most gaming the subscription prices of MMOs reflected what you got out of them you buy the base game pay a subscription take months to get

to Next Level grab the best gear and do the hardest raids then purchase the expansion that comes out every other year and repeat ad nauseum or until you get bored MMOs were something that became your job away from your job they're simply not designed like they are today where the game actually begins at level cap but instead the meat of the game was the act of leveling itself you would spend months getting a character from one to cap but that was because you weren't just there to level you were there to meet others engage in

the ecosystem and explore vast worlds that seem too large for just one person to explore you were paying for the privilege of exploring digital worlds with the added benefit of getting a tight gameplay Loop attached to it where the dopamine Rush of getting that one piece of loot you wanted with plus two crit CH after grinding that one dungeon for 5 hours man it was all worth it in the end you would show off that new gear to your friends and Guild mates and that one piece of loot could be the last thing you needed

to get into that raid on Friday night but over time the MMO genre had begun feeling stale for many players and these players craved something new many studios tried to capitalize on that craving by attempting to reinvent the genre after the launch of World of Warcraft in 2004 which was by all measurements an unmitigated success in every aspect not only did it revolutionize the MMO genre but it also made it accessible in a way MMOs weren't before many studios would give their best effort to become the wow killer in an attempt to take the crown

that wow had held claim to for years and years but in the end none of the games simply had the sauce to compete in such a competitive genre a genre that required such a heavy entrance fee and a dedicated subscription fee to go along with it players were already so invested into their wow characters that dedicating time outside of the game would be considered a huge setback in terms of progress players simply didn't have time to take away from the game and so countless MOS tried to pry players away from Wow only to crumble over

their own Ambitions City of Heroes Star Wars Galaxies Wild Star APB the secret world and many many more failed MMOs simply couldn't compete with the King and now they all remain unplayable in an official capacity all of the man hours that went into crafting these worlds with Brilliant Minds behind them are now Dust in the Wind and the only way to play these games are via private servers that are kept Alive by only the most DieHard fans so when the competition just doesn't have what it takes wow has the Liberty to craft what the genre

would look like going forward many many quality of life features have been made over time gone are the long long leveling times now you just have a weekend to get to max level and then start raiding gone is the delayed gratification of getting that massive item level boost by grinding one raid boss now everyone has their own personalized Loot and if you can't get it you can do your weeklys in an attempt to get what you need gone are the long TRS to get to the raids and dungeons now you just use dungeon finder to

grab an easy leveling group but it feels like with every major update the game lost something a thing that made the original game so special many of the more in-depth systems were removed in an attempt to make the game more streamlined and the majority of the content you bought is simply no longer relevant or it has been left by the wayside to make room for newer better systems because blizzard knew what it take to make their games better unlike you the person who plays it for years and years through every iteration there's that ancient quote

by former blizzard president J alen bra where during a BlizzCon he was asked if they would entertain the idea of making servers specifically for previous expansions and he said quote no and and by the way you don't want to that to do that either you think you do but you don't remember when you had to like spam cities and say need a tank need a tank need a tank during the burning Crusade days you don't remember that because now you just push a button that says go to the dungeon you don't want to do that

remember that one bug that really pissed you off that we fixed like 2 years ago still there in the past end quote classic stuff with hindsight we can see why Jay Allen Brack answered the question this way wow was much more obuse and frustrating than it was at that time the game when it was released was imperfect there were numerous frustration points with it from a developer perspective it makes sense but from a player perspective it's incredibly toned deaf here's this guy telling you that the game you remember playing and loving and spending a large

chunk of your life on was bad that it was imperfect that you think you want to play it but you don't he knows better than you and I think for many that was a turning point for Wow subscriptions plummeted as the game failed to keep players engaged and they stopped caring but blizzard knows better than the players what they want right right well no they didn't and the game suffered as a result what players love about wow was gone because the sub fee wasn't going towards a world that you would want to live in anymore

it was going towards a gameplay Loop that you either loved or hated based on the systems that were alive during the time and you had little to no input on the game as a whole the wow you loved was gone and you couldn't play it anymore because that is the nature of the live service game clearly this isn't the case with Wow anymore since they haded classic servers and it seems like wow is in a better place than it was 5 years ago but it's still Burns to think about the story about wow is just

one of many such examples of live service games failing to keep players engaged and having to walk back many of their changes they made along the way in order to rebuild players sentiment and to keep them invested but wow has the leverage to stay alive for this long because it is such a monolith it has the funding to somehow stay relevant and to keep people staying for longer and I think a majority of that comes down to the gameplay Loop the loot grind that is what keeps people playing and coming back for every expansion blizzard

has somehow perfected the loot game and you can see this idea leaking out into other live service games however away from wow the MMO genre has been slowly bleeding itself dry in an attempt to stay relevant in this current ERA while there are still a subset of people paying for a subscription fee for a select few games that subscription fee is often a detractor for many people with rent skyrocketing wages remaining stagnant in the form of inflation and people barely able to make ends meet the MMO subscription is just one more way to drain your

bank account in these trying times what once was a unique gaming experience that you could only get by paying a sub fee is now something you can find elsewhere and cheaper while MMOs are slowly dying Publishers and developers started to ask themselves how can we make MMO money without having to make an MMO how can we condense down that addictive gameplay Loop of grinding marginally better gear pieces while also keeping keeping players engaged enough to spend a lot of money and so the live service as we know it today was born so let's dig deeper

into what makes a live service what it is but real quick if you like what you've heard so far please leave a like And subscribe below for more videos like this it would mean the world to me now let's dive in the core concept of a live service game is quite dense but I'll do my best to summarize what makes it so unique these games are an anomaly in terms of game development because games traditionally are products that have a defined start and end State then are released never to be touch again outside of bug

patches live service games are something that are released and updated and expanded upon over time with the underlying gameplay systems usually being loot driven because loot Loops are one of the easiest systems to iterate upon the basic gameplay Loop copies what made that gear grind so successful in wow and condenses it into a much more timef friendly format so instead of grinding for months and months to hit max level usually you can do it over the course of a week or two so these are games that are still hobby grade but require less of an

overall time investment so you can still have responsibilities outside of it Li services are generally released with barebone systems that are meant to be added upon over time or if systems don't work they can be replaced wholesale or removed entirely this has happened more than a few times because most of the time when a live service game launches its systems are kind of they're kind of dog [ __ ] okay but it makes for some pretty good Underdog stories you've probably heard about the success story of Final Fantasy 14 a personal favorite of mine when

the game was released initially it was so so bad that they completely rebooted it from the ground up and now it's legit one of the best modern MMOs you can play today with a pretty extensive free trial to boot and I bet you didn't know that fortnite was a wave based Tower Defense type game before they added the Battle Royale part to it did you that's right fortnite launched in 2017 with the save the world mode to pretty much middling reception but as a last Stitch effort to capitalize on the success of pubg they introduced

a battle royale mode and the rest is history hell divers 2 released to an ocean of positive press a few months ago and was son's first major success in the live service space because of the unique concept of a persistent Storyteller who dictates The Narrative of the game with new content being added over time and let's not forget no man's sky this to me is probably the most impressive glow up in gaming history no man's sky was a game that was set up to fail by Sony after a presentation in front of millions of people

that set Ambitions far too high they claimed it would be a procedurally generated solar system with multiplayer crafting trade ship combat the works and all supposedly coming from a small Indie Studio whose prior experience was a sidescroller with funny physics the game released to a massive amount of criticism but to no fault of of the developers if you ask me but they kept their heads down and worked and worked and worked because they knew they could make something special and every few months a new update would drop that would substantially change the game Base building

was added then a story overhaul then the multiplayer Tech trees biomes and so so much more the game that was released in 2016 is unrecognizable in 2024 each update adds more and more elements that make it more appealing for people to jump in these are just a few of the success stories I could talk about I could talk about others but I think you get the picture there are definitive Pros to live service games what's good can be iterated upon and what works can stay the developers Behind these games can alter them in major ways

to keep you playing and keep giving you new great stuff over time there is truly nothing else like it in the gaming space and these are only things that can be achieved with the live service method of development but for every live service success it feels as though there are two failures before it and with every passing day another gravestone is inscribed with the name of a live service game that just couldn't get up the stuff I could go on and on about failed live service games but let me list out a few notable ones

Anthem was a game behind the much revered Studio BioWare makers of brilliant RPGs with intricate lore Anthem released to a mighty thud after being stuck in development hell they promised a beautiful open world with so much to do and a captivating story that kept you locked in from start to finish but the game failed in every aspect it set out to do the story sucked the gameplay was terrible the server issues made it unable to regain its footing so now the game as it is today is on life support and bioair is now a shell

of its former self attempting to recapture the magic that made the studio a success in the first place another massive failure was evolve a game that had an amazing concept and a symmetrical PVP game where one player was a monster and four more players were Hunters trying to take it down it clearly had the workings of an amazing game but the gameplay model was ultimately what killed it in the long run because everyone wanted to play the Monster no one wanted to play the human Hunters the monster was so much more interesting because it could

grow and evolve over the course of the match but the humans were stagnant and were constantly playing a game of cat and mouse now imagine doing that for every single match hunting after a player who plays his own game while everyone else has to cope because they wanted to play something else and not for nothing all of the characters in Monsters outside of the launch were locked behind a pay wall and as a result the player base tumbled and tumbled until the game eventually became unplayable and finally Suicide Squad is the most recent failure by

another forly renowned Studio Rock Steady was most wellknown for their work on the Batman Arkham series what many considered to be one of the best superhero adaptations of all time these games were tight experiences with brilliant riding and combat with each game in the series adding upon what came before so what did Rock Steady want to do next well certainly not anything that they know how to do well how about making a multiplayer live service game with unfunny writing vomit inducing gameplay and an abysmal endgame Loop that can't even keep the Die Hard fans happy

yeah that seems to be working out really well for them as of now the game is sitting at player counts of sub 400 players and has been considered a massive Financial flop by Warner Brothers but apparently that's what Rocksteady wanted to do so who am I to judge really these are only a few examples of live service games who have failed massively so what do all of these failures have in common well they failed to be a good game first and foremost so apathy took over they failed to understand that these games needed to be

something that you enjoy spending a lot of time in and wanted to play more of the world's needed to be engaging and fun to inhabit with others and that monetization needs to come second because in order to compete with the likes of fortnite and Destiny you have to be as good as them release as much content as them and if you can't how can you justify maintaining development as time goes on it also feels like more and more games these days are attempting to become live Services just last year Sony made a huge push to

make over 12 live service games in an attempt to earn as much revenue as possible because it's cheaper to make one game that you can develop over time instead of making several new games that could all be potential flops but all of these games are getting cancelled most notably The Last of Us live service game that was in development for a long time over at naughty dog I think they're starting to see the writing on the wall that live services are inherently more risky development prospects because they need to be maintained by a talented team

of developers and what do you know after I wrote and record literally all of this Sony just announced Concord which it looks like a it looks like a terrible mix between Destiny and OverWatch and I cannot believe this got Greenly it looks so bad um what the hell are they doing anyway to be frank there can only be so many that can occupy the public Consciousness because live service games are ones that require a time and financial investment from the player over a set period of time people have only so much time in a day

so having to split that time over a select few games is already hard enough now imagine throwing an unproven potentially broken unfun game into the mix do you think people are going to take their time away from a game they know they already enjoy to be able to test the waters on the new hotness of course they won't they're going to stick with what works and that's really the rub with live service it's making a bet on a house of cards that could topple at any moment a game launches with faulty servers that aren't corrected

for over a month like payday 3 your game is basically dead push out a series of bad updates with gameplay that people don't enjoy that's a chunk of the player base that isn't coming back back remove content that people previously paid for because the games are just getting too big you're going to be paying for that in Goodwill for years upon years because once trust is broken it's hard to make back this means only the best of the best Will Survive and even then it seems like even the best are hard to maintain Destiny is

a game that I think can be used as a case study for what makes live service both great and terrible at the same time Bungie were incredibly ambitious with the development of Destiny they set out to convert the MMO experience that they loved from Wow and make it enjoyable to the masses with the great Gunplay and World building that they as a studio were known for but 10 years of development comes with it many ups and many Downs Destiny 1 released to a lot of flak because the writing was atrocious and the main story was

abysmal but the game itself felt amazing to play and that's What mattered so people stuck around Bungie kept making amazing content for people to play they stuck around for the raids until they eventually rebooted the franchise with Destiny 2 and it feels like all the lessons Bungie learned with D1 were gone here was a game with more issues that also did everything wrong that D1 did so they had to rebuild player trust from the ground up and for every positive step they took forward they took two steps back with another screw up that the players

hated not enough multiplayer maps content that people paid for was being removed so that the game would be smaller in file size the expansions were terribly written and short and the seasonal story Model made the game inaccessible for many people because of the fomo associated with it it felt like being in an abusive relationship Bungie kept spitting on the player base because they always knew they would come back because the game play was just so so good and yet Destiny continues to be the gold standard of what live service can be despite its shortcomings after

the release of lightfall in 2023 Bungie was acquired by Sony in an attempt to push their live service methods but Bungie was consistently underd delivering with their financials so Stony management would have to take over and to be honest none of it truly makes any sense Sony spends all this money to acquire Bungie in the first place and yet still be underperforming it's like they knew what they were buying into how are they just stupid or greedy How could a game like Destiny constantly flounder for such a prolonged period of time and yet still have

such a large player base is beyond understanding why would Sony pay so much money to keep this studio if if clearly they're not hitting their financials and well they bought them because they knew how to develop live service games it's as simple as that in a GDC talk discussing the development of Destiny 2 game manager at the time Justin Truman discussed the differences between a box product mindset and a service mindset this guy knows a lot about live service games he really understands them and how they tick I really don't want to misinterpret what he

has to say so I'll try to break it down as concisely as possible his talk boils down to one thing managing expectations expectations for the team expectations for the publisher and most importantly managing expectations for the players because when players expect more they're bound to either over or underd deliver so it's best to never promise anything over the bare minimum of what players expect so no extra raids no extra multiplayer maps no extra missions NADA because that will be the expectation going forward to make a comparison it's hard to follow up something like smash ultimate

because not players will expect 89 playable characters in the next game but it's just not very feasible is it live service is not about making a good product it's about making a reliable fast service about delivering content consistently and to a consistent standard and that at the end of the day is what makes live service so bad for the gaming industry because this teaches publishing that live service doesn't need to be good it just needs to be okay for long enough for people to want to spend money life service doesn't do anything new or push

any boundaries they're about delivering editable content in a consistent fashion whether it be good or bad as long as it just isn't boring the service mindset requires that players be thinking about the game all the time so better to make them pissed off with bad content or happy with good content rather than releasing boring content so the these games thrive on any type of publicity because publicity brings attention and attention brings money any attention is good attention this is the market that live service inhabits and when you look at it overall it's um it's really

depressing I think live service games are just not feasible in any sense because there are too many things that can go wrong with them a series of bad updates can be enough to kill what was an amazing experience and like I said earlier when player trust is eroded it's hard to get back apathy is the game killer and without people caring about something it gets more difficult shove microtransactions into their face every 5 Seconds invasive monetization is a massive part of what makes live service so valuable to Publishers these games are constantly in your face

with the hot new cosmetics and items asking you to spend money on something you don't need and offers no value which is funny when you consider where we came from when you spent money on a game subscription you were getting money's worth because there was so much content that came along with it but the subscription fee we once knew has evolved into something more Sinister predatory and it's called the season pass the monthly subscription has taken the form of a quarterly payment however these quarterly payments are very different from a subscription these seasonal investments into

the season passes offered ways for you to get ahead of the game by providing in-game currency unique Cosmetics that others don't have XP boosts that let you stay on top of the competition and overall these season passes just give you a better experience than everyone else and what's even better they were all time limited meaning that if you don't grind up enough XP to unlock everything in the 3 to four months the pass was available everything you didn't unlock in the P was gone for good but hey you could always pay up a few extra

dollars to unlock everything all at once pretty sweet huh the way these season passes work is highly dependent on fomo or the fear of missing out the National Library of Medicine describes fomo as such quote fear of missing out is a unique term introduced in 2004 to describe a phenomenon observed on social networking sites fomo includes two processes firstly perception of missing out followed up with a compulsive Behavior to maintain these social connections end quote basically it uses manufactured internal pressure as a way to manipulate yourself into finishing something because of madeup obligations either to

yourself or to your friends fomo is incredibly important to the business model of live service games and this is where the majority of money is generated after launch or if the game is free to play this is where all of the money comes from outside of in-game currency the idea of a season pass is to make you invest financially into the game and a sunk cost fallacy your way to finishing the pass you already spent the money you can't just stop playing and let's see so this season pass gives you enough credits to buy the

next one so may as well tune in next season to play and maybe get some more stuff right the season passes also away for publish ERS and by extension developers to give players what are for all intents and purposes worthless Cosmetics these are things that offer no gameplay benefit at all all they do is change a model or give you new animations my guy that's it I cannot stress this enough they are completely worthless they are of little to no value whatsoever unless you're Counter-Strike for some reason and I hate to be the one that

breaks it to you no one is going to be paying for your League of Legends account no one cares if you own the $500 Ari skin it's time to move on however I'm not alone in speaking out against this even League of Legends gooners have their limits and it looks like $500 is too much so you know props to that season passes are an incredibly predatory business model that Banks much of its own success on the promise that the game will be good in the future that there will be more to come of what you

enjoy but let's look back at what wow did many many years ago they made a bad game that no one wants to play so people stop playing this concept very much applies to live service games as well let me be clear I don't want to in any way dissuade you from playing live service games I play them myself because I find a decent majority of them to be fun and enjoyable I mean who doesn't love shooting the [ __ ] with your buddies over a game of no build even I am not immune to the

Allure of fortnite I just want people to realize that there is a cost that these games have not on just their players but their developers as well at the end of the day games live and die by the hands of those that make them and these live service games are effectively designed by boardrooms in an attempt to get you to spend as much as possible when games are designed with this mentality it has a direct effect on the people that make them developers need to be constantly delivering content no matter how good or bad it

is and crunch is an essential part of the live service development model because when you're never crunching you're always crunching there are no brakes on the live service train because when you pull the brakes you stop making money so these devs keep working and working making mediocre content in an attempt to keep people playing they are beholden to the whims of the publisher and are obligated to fulfill their demands because if you don't your game is as good as dead it's very much a damned if you do damned if you don't approach the game is

dying either way burnout is inevitable for these developers and I don't think this is healthy in the long run and with live service becoming more and more ubiquitous and successful companies have been re searching different ways to drain their player bases fortnite as an example has both season passes and a subscription service ah the subscription jump scare you remember the subscription service like from while well it's back now surprise and it's not just for free games mind you they're starting to leak into paid games as well just recently Ubisoft announced that Rainbow Six Siege will

be getting a subscription service as an alternative to their season pass system and needless to say people were uh really pleased with it oh I lied they weren't happy at all with news of subscription Services becoming prevalent again nothing is truly off the table anymore and people will happily cough up $80 a year to play their favorite game I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of subscriptions and games because they allow the people who love the games to get the most out of them but the way this is executed is just abysmal Siege already has

a mandatory entrance fee of $20 this $20 doesn't even get you all the content the game has released thus far it only gets you access to all the maps and game modes all of the playable characters are an additional purchase through the in-game shop but hey if you pay $80 you get everything $80 for a game released 10 years ago that to me feels like a crime and now a subscription fee on top of that absolutely insane at least when you buy an MMO expansion you get all of the previous ones included Ubisoft is just

being greedy for no reason these games are designed to nickel and dime you at every opportunity and people are starting to get wise and at the end of the day these Subs only give you so much value Cosmetics don't convert into account value so they're basically worthless once they're unlocked the similarities we're seeing in Live service games as they replicate What MMOs have done and failed to do years and years ago is somewhat funny to me we have tried and true evidence of how games developed in certain methods launched and failed so many times and

yet companies will still continue to try and get their B the hubris is it's so telling and I think what I feel most upset about is that these live service games are fleeting these games will cease to exist at some point no matter how you slice it because that is the nature of a service the idea of a live service is that they are Perpetual pieces of software that are updated until either they are given a sort of narrative sendoff or the developers cease development and to me it feels antithetical to what a game should

be to me a game needs to have a definitive beginning middle and end it needs to be a finished product because a finished product you can go back and enjoy without having to connect to any online servers or potentially miss any content that will only be in the game for a few months I also not super fond of the idea that games I spend massive amounts of time in can be turned off any day so I fail to even get invested in the first place which like why why why why on God's green earth are

we viewing games as an invest why are we buying Half Baked games with the promise that they will be good in the future why are we putting so much money into something unfinished and broken when these things should be playable now we as a Gaming Community need to normalize games being content rich and playable upon release if Publishers think they can begin charging More For Less all while slipping in a paid cosmetic shop and season pass things are only going to get worse the only reason these Publishers do this is because they know it works

Works people are still buying these half-baked goods and cosmetics despite them offering no substantial value to the players they only have value because these Publishers say they have value and I just don't care anymore catch my ass playing default skin in fortnite man see if I care well I totally agree that developers need to get paid for their hard work at the end of the day the work they do isn't going towards funding their livelihoods it isn't even going towards a product that can be enjoyed in perpetuity instead it's going towards a timed fomo based

system and lining the pockets of Publishers who don't care about the people who make these games they will happily and constantly beat these developers with deadlines performance reviews missed metrics bad kpis and even more negative buzzwords until there is nothing left the golden pinata is starting to crack and once it's broken you can't rebuild that live service needs to go and time will only be the winner in this Arrangement services are fleeting but art is Everlasting games shouldn't be Services they need to be Everlasting pieces that have heart because games are art and art outlives

all of us not everyone will be around to experience Destiny but people will sure as hell be around to experience games like Boulders gate and skym for years and years and years to come box products need your support now more than ever so go out and play a finished featur riched game by skilled developers be it AAA or Indie I'm no stranger to live service games myself but I criticize because I just don't think they're sustainable the benefits they offer are far far outweighed by the negatives in terms of gameplay and monetization if you play

these life service games like OverWatch or Siege or Hell divers I urge you to think twice about buying that big booty skin that you see on the homepage or the latest Destiny emote of a JoJo pose that money could be better spent on something that can give you much more enjoyment especially with how expensive these so-called microtransactions are these days [ __ ] go out and buy a juicy burger one that tastes really really good it'll give you more value than that mull skin trust me you'll thank me [Music] later oh man oh what a

video holy God this one took a long time to WR but I'm super happy with how it came out thank you so much for sticking around to the end of the video it means a lot that someone would listen to my thoughts for such a long period of time please let me know what you thought about the video by commenting below and while you're down there click the like button and subscribe for more gaming editorials and critiques I've already seen such immense support since I've started my channel and it's so encouraging to see so many

people resonate with my thoughts my next video will actually be on a live service game in particular and it'll hopefully be a bit more positive than this one so please look forward to it and as always this has been testing triangles thanks for watching