Which is strange, because the most-played and most-loved games in the world are live games. Fortnite. League. Minecraft. RuneScape. The category is not broken. The execution of it, in a lot of places, very much is.
I've spent the last fifteen months watching this play out from the other side of the world. Studios closing. Teams shut down. Some of it was unavoidable. A lot of it wasn't.
Most of these closures weren't really the fault of the people in the room. It happened long before the team got near it, and they had no real ability to readjust once the wind changed.
The COVID hangover
The impact didn't end when lockdowns did. Distributed teams. Unsettled working patterns. Bloated, miscosted development budgets built when the money was easy and the multiples were pumped. A spiral of bad decisions made under pressure, by people doing their best in circumstances no one had trained them for.
VCs and PE houses paid multiples based on growth that was always going to revert. The budgets ballooned, the teams ballooned, the plans ballooned. A lot of well-intentioned developers spent years chasing their own tail on games that would never see the light of day.
The retreat
Now a wave of newer teams is emerging. Smarter, more cautious, derisking what they can.
A lot of them are retreating from free-to-play. Slapping a twenty dollar price tag on the front of a game they'd have launched as a service three years ago. The mediocre ones wash their face on launch revenue and quietly disappear inside twelve months. The good ones treat that twenty dollars as a validation step. Proof a community will pay, before they build the service around it.
Either way, the retreat is rarely from live-service itself. It's from the model that funded it. That's understandable. It's also the wrong long-term lesson to take.
The problem was never live-service. The problem was that we got lazy about what makes it actually work.
A generation of studios are now wary of the format instead of relearning the discipline.
The path forward
There is one, and the penny seems to be dropping.
- Smaller teams. Longer runways.
- Games built around a real player need, not a designer's pet idea.
- The willingness to pivot when the data and the community line up.
- Communities brought into the build earlier.
- Market fit baked in, not bolted on.
- Honest, ongoing conversations about what's working and what isn't. Inside the team and outside it.
None of this is new. The best live games have been doing versions of it for two decades. What's different now is that the industry no longer has the luxury of forgetting it.
The discipline of running a game players love for ten, fifteen, twenty years is not the same as the discipline of launching one. We forgot that for a while. Some of us are remembering.
The interesting question isn't whether live-service is over. It's whether the people building the next generation of these games know what the last generation actually got right, before it all got loud.