The gaming industry believes that players are into items and loot in live service games like Destiny or GTA 5 and want to emulate their success with their own games, but they are making a mistake. This is what MeinMMO author Schuhmann says:
What does the gaming industry think? The gaming industry follows a certain logic. This can be seen in the example of survival games:
First assumption: The survival genre is popular and there are many good representatives such as Rust, ARK, DayZ.
Second assumption: But there is no one big title with maximum accessibility that dominates the genre – like WoW does with MMORPGs or LoL with MOBAs.
Conclusion: There’s room for more in the survival game market, so let’s make this one super-accessible title and get rich.
This line of thinking explains the flood of survival games a few years ago, such as Conan Exiles (2018), Fallout 76 (2018), and others.
GTA Online is an extremely successful and, above all, lucrative game:
Everything you need to know about GTA Online – in 2 minutes
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Destiny and GTA make a lot of money – we want that too!
What does this mean for live service games? Since 2013/2014, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One console generation have made it possible for successful multiplayer games to appear on the console market, which are constantly expanded and supplied with content in the style of an MMO. These are called live service games.
In the past, such games were only possible on the PC, these were games like WoW, Counter-Strike or LoL.
The pioneers of this phenomenon of live service games on consoles were GTA 5 Online (2013) and Destiny (2014). Both of these are extremely successful financial projects.
It is estimated that GTA 5 grossed around $1.5 billion:
We don’t know the sales figures for Destiny, but Destiny 1 in particular must have been enormously lucrative.
This is the logic behind the many new live service games: However, fans of these games complain that they are getting bored and need new content. The standard phrase of every MMO player is “My game is dead.”
So follows:
First assumption: Live service games that are regularly expanded are enormously successful.
Second assumption: These live service games regularly get boring for players while they wait for a new DLC or a major update.
Conclusion: There is room for more in the live service game market. So let’s make a live service game and get rich.
The myth of the successful live service game
This is the consequence of this assumption: For many years, at least since 2016, studios that had previously developed single-player games have been trying to establish their own live service games under pressure from the publisher.
Sony, for example, originally wanted to launch 12 new game series of this kind by 2026. And has bought numerous studios for this purpose:
But in recent years it has become apparent that attempts to establish such games, which have been in development for years, have failed time and again, and catastrophically. Many service games are not only unsuccessful, but so unsuccessful that they drive the studios behind them into ruin, which are then dissolved.
The list of victims is long: Redfall, Crucible, Lawbreakers, Marvel’s Avengers, Suicide Squad, and just a few days ago, Concord.
Successful live service games thrive on loot
What are the games doing wrong? The studios apparently think that Destiny or GTA 5 were successful because they are being developed, growing and being supplied with content.
That’s true, but the really important element is that the games allow you to build a virtual existence, collect items and objects and thereby become more powerful – or at least become something special that has things that not everyone has.
A MeinMMO author was invited on a date in GTA 5 in 2020, where the GTA 5 player was apparently proud of his virtual possessions and what he could offer his date.
It is precisely this satisfying progress within a service game that is the decisive factor that keeps players engaged with a game.
You can see this in Destiny just by how obsessed players were with Xur in the early days and the possibility that the vendor might have the Gjallarhorn rocket launcher, a legendary weapon.
Destiny players were so addicted to loot that they used the loot cave, where they had little fun playing and just fired dully in one direction just to get loot in the fastest time possible.
In GTA 5, too, the most important question after an update is what new items will be added to the game, what new cars will be available and where you can buy them.
Live service games don’t compete with Destiny – but with LoL and Valorant
This is the mistake: When companies develop service games that are structured as PvP experiences and appear without such a satisfying equipment spiral, they are not competing with games like GTA5, Destiny or Division – for which there is a lot of demand because players are running out of content and are bored.
No, they compete with games like Valorant, LoL, Escape from Tarkov or Fortnite, which are doing well and in which players do not really build a “virtual existence through better items”, but rather invest time in the games to learn them and get better at them or to accumulate skins.
Other games don’t even give players the opportunity to find powerful items, but are purely designed for microtransactions.
It’s a completely different gaming experience whether you play a live service game with loot or one with PvP:
It makes no sense to buy Bungie and then develop a game that has nothing to do with Destiny
It doesn’t make sense to buy Bungie, say we’re going to make live service games, but then not release a live service game like Destiny – but release a live service game like Valorant or Overwatch.
Even Bungie itself is not working on a new game like Destiny, but on an extraction shooter that already looks like there is no market for it.
Games with loot systems run well – games without die quickly
If you look at the live service games that have been released over the last few years, you can see that the games that had a good loot system at least generated some initial hype and found their player base, such as Anthem or The First Descendant. Even Wolcen, a not particularly notable Diablo clone, generated considerable hype upon release.
Sony saying, “We’re now making live service games for PS5” is a mistake. The majority of people don’t want live service games – the majority of people want some form of live service game.
But while many games that didn’t offer such a loot system, like Concord recently, failed miserably and became these huge flops that had high production values but that hardly anyone wanted to play: Why did Concord fail so badly on Steam and PS5 and did Sony burn $250 million on a woke disaster?