Why Live Service Doesn’t Excite Anymore

As I’ve been writing my book on RPG design, one of the more interesting stories to break are the number of live service games that have failed or are dying as we speak. The latest game from Rocksteady: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League which showed a lot of interest with its first reveal, was met with the opposite following the news of its RPG and live service elements. As the follow up post regarding RPG design that I released, I want to talk about how studios have tried to force-feed live service design, and why those games continue to fail compared to mobile and dedicated live service games. <h1>The Never-ending Search for Fancy Pants</h1> I’m not going to talk about RPG design as a whole in this post; <a href="https://game-wisdom.com/critical/everything-become-rpg" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">that’s the point of the other post</a>. The live service model and engagement was a trend that blew up in the mid 2010’s, as developers and publishers saw the money that mobile games were bringing in. The live service model adopted by AAA studios in the 2010s went in two different directions. The first, and far more popular, take is using it to leverage continued support of multiplayer systems. Titles like Dead by Daylight, Call of Duty, Battlefield, and many more fit. In these games, the live service itself is used to add in more maps and more purchases, and the goal is to keep the multiplayer experience stable… usually until the next game in the series comes out if that’s the route the developers are going. <a href="https://medium.com/@GWBycer/why-live-service-doesnt-excite-anymore-e6b3b2ed4af8">Learn More</a>