Last November, Sony president Hiroki Totoki called single-player games “our strengths” and said they “have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP.” As for live-service projects, which Totoki said “pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk,” van Dreunen continues, “They’re cutting scope, not quitting. Half the slate is gone, Marathon is delayed, and leadership now talks about ‘failing fast.’ Think less of a [live-service] flood, more of a trickle.”
Ethan Gach, a senior reporter at Kotaku, opts for another metaphor to describe the current state of Sony’s online strategy. “It’s like a plane that left the tarmac and immediately one of the engines caught fire, and then it’s just circling the airport,” he says. “There’s both the wreck analogy, but also the failure-to-launch analogy.”
Richmond stresses “it’s not just Sony” that’s flailing. One of the projects dropped in Microsoft’s recent round of cuts was a new MMO being created by ZeniMax. Ubisoft launched the free-to-play FPS XDefiant, only to shut it down within six months. Electronic Arts pivoted Dragon Age: The Veilguard away from live service into a single-player game mid-development. Capcom also reportedly started work on Resident Evil Requiem as an open-world, live service–style title before shifting its focus back to single player.
“The highway is littered with people wanting to take on Fortnite, with people trying to do Overwatch with different skins,” says Layden. These blunders make a mockery of the notion that live service is a Band-Aid for the unsustainable costs of blockbuster game development—that recurring revenues offset the risk of increasingly expensive productions. Rather than stanching the economic bleeding of commercial game production, these titles have become yet another outlet of bloodshed for both the companies themselves and the individual developers laid off as a result of these risky gambits failing.
“If you’re trying to go into that space because you have this illusion in your mind of big sacks of money coming every day for the rest of your life, for most it doesn’t happen,” says Layden.
