Question Of The Week [July 31st 2024]

Live Service games, for those who don’t know, are games that are Online in nature, constantly updated to provide the player with new content and keep the player locked in and playing the same game continually and paying for MicroTransactions.

Live Service Games have become the bane of the industry (along with several other things), and has generally been seens as a bad thing in all cases. While I do not like Live Service games, I think there are exceptions to them. Most notably the 2016-2021 Hitman series. Hitman 2016 started off as episodic content, where each level was published around every month and a half or so in 2016 from March to October. This gave players the chance to learn the level before moving on to a new one and completing the game. The clockwork nature of the game, and memorization of events (or at least following story beats with the objectives menu) allows the player to learn the ins and outs of the environment, where guards were and more.

With the ultimate goal of introducing special events that only lasted for a weekend, and the player was given a single chance to fulfill a special Hit contract to assassinate a specific character with their own unique backstory. It was honestly really cool and gave the events special meaning and in turn created excitement every time one of these special timed events happened. However, Hitman is the big crazy cool exception in my mind.

Most of the time, Live Service Games are seen as a means to get the player to open up their wallets more even after paying full price for the game. It preys on the Fear Of Missing Out, or FOMO as it is more commonly referred to. Making players feel like if they don’t jump on this “special deal MicroTransaction” they will miss out on some great item or just miss out on “saving money” for something that is mostly unnecessary and cosmetic and doesn’t bear weight to the actual game in any way.

It also keeps players from having to be connected to the internet in order to play the game at all. And while most of us are always connected to the internet, via cell phones or Computers/Laptops or even tablets, it’s usually not necessary for the game NEEDING that connection. Every game has multiplayer shoehorned in, just so it can be required to have an internet connection. And if we want to dive a bit deeper, it probably is harvesting some data to sell off (let’s be honest, pretty much every piece of software is selling our data at this point). And Live Service Games also keeps the player locked into playing that single game continuously and never branching out to something new and exciting. I know plenty of people who only play this game, or that game instead of paying multiple different types of games…. Because they have the fear of missing out, or missing a good deal on an item, or just losing that muscle memory and skill and falling behind in competitive online play.

There has been a recent uptick in both AAA publishers converting regular games into Live Service Games and a backlash of customers who don’t want anything to do with it. The most current one is Sony’s reveal of the game called Concord. An Overwatch clone mashed up with Square-Enix’s Guardians Of The Galaxy game. The game was shown off (and pretty poorly might I add with a excruciatingly long and boring trailer) and it got an immediate backlash of people calling it out as a live service game and that’s all anyone talks about. “Live Service” has become a lethal term in the industry. The mere utterance of it will cause most to disregard the game completely without hesitation. It’s something you don’t want to be associated with your game at this point, but companies are still either unaware of dumping too much money and time into the product for it to change.

So while I think Live Service Games can be great in certain circumstances, I do think ultimately they are bad for the industry. For every once good Live Service Game, there are 25 bad ones.