With the recent (puzzling) announcement that WB games is going to lean even more into producing live service games and pushing further away from the more traditional AAA single player experience I cant help but wonder what is going to happen to this industry long term.

Last year WB had the biggest game of the year, Hogwarts Legacy, selling a staggering 22 million copies as of the end of 2023, a single player AAA experience. They even went as far to boast how amazingly well it did for them(as they should). What has WB done since then you may ask? They released the live service game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League to middling reviews and just barely a month into its release have already declared it has “fallen short of sales expectations”.

And its not just WB that is having these failures and still pushing for more GAAS. Ubisoft recently launched Skull & Bones and it appears to be an anchor for them more than a sailing ship. Playstation’s bread & butter single player experiences have seemingly taken a bit of a backseat to a new found push for live service games. They have a massive hit in Helldivers 2 because of it,but also cancelled games like The Last Of Us Factions and a Twisted Metal live service game. Not quite as recent Xbox had Halo Infinite fail to live up to its lofty expectations and is struggling to regain its former glory. These are just a few high profile examples,but the list is long.

Part of me understands why seemingly every big publisher is pushing the live service model. IF, and its a massive if, you do manage to make a hit live service game, it is essentially a license to print money. The aforementioned Helldivers 2 as I pointed out yesterday has been a massive success for Playstation and Arrowhead studios and will likely be receiving updates for years to come because of it. Games like Fortnite, Apex Legends & Counter Strike make money hand over first, year over year. The problem is in order to MAYBE get that license to print you may very well go bankrupt trying. You are for more likely to set fire to your money than you are win the live service lottery.

Which brings me to my ultimate point. Everyone wants to chase the lottery balls that is live service. Rather than maybe take home a nice pay out by betting red they instead put all their chips on 0 and hope to get lucky. And if they do hit it becomes their main focus for the foreseeable future. I love Rare and Sea Of Thieves, but i cant help but wonder if we might have already received a game like Everwild by now if they didn’t spend so much time on updating Sea of Thieves every few months. It’s great for fans of these games, but as fan of games I can’t help but want their next game and its killing the creativity of the industry.

Hopefully the industry goes back to seeing the value of the non live service game. I’m not saying live service needs to completely die off, there is a space for them just as any other type of game, but sometimes less is more and when it comes to live service, its my opinion that we definitely need less.