The live-service model, while capable of producing enduringly popular games, has inadvertently created an intensely competitive landscape where developers constantly chase the elusive top spot, a phenomenon that began with the rise of battle royale titles. This pursuit of perpetual revenue has led to a saturated market, making it exceedingly difficult for new entrants to gain traction, even for established studios.
The battle royale genre, which exploded in popularity with games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Fortnite, generated billions of dollars and reshaped the industry. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, developed by South Korean studio Bluehole with Brendan Greene, launched in 2017 and quickly amassed millions of concurrent players. Epic Games, observing this success, pivoted its struggling tower defense game Fortnite to incorporate a battle royale mode, crucially offering it as free-to-play. This decision propelled Fortnite to massive popularity, transforming it into a cultural platform beyond just a game.
The success of PUBG and Fortnite sparked an industry-wide arms race, with nearly 2,000 games tagged as battle royale on Steam alone. This mirrors earlier genre booms, such as the MOBA craze that followed the success of League of Legends and Dota 2. Many of these imitators, including Ubisoft's Hyper Scape and Square Enix's Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier, ultimately failed to capture significant market share, suggesting that oversaturation, rather than a lack of innovation on core concepts, was the primary reason for their demise.
Mark Darrah, a former producer at BioWare, emphasizes that entering such a competitive genre requires a belief that one can dethrone the existing leaders. He noted that his studio's looter shooter Anthem struggled against Destiny, a game that had benefited from years of development and a sequel. This highlights a significant challenge in the modern live-service space: developers are not competing against an older version of a game but its continuously updated, current iteration.
Jeff Kaplan, former lead director of Overwatch, shared insights into the development of his highly successful hero shooter. Initially a last-minute idea, Overwatch benefited from creative freedom and improvisation, quickly attracting millions of players. However, the sustained success of live-service games presents unique pressures. Kaplan described how management pushed for aggressive monetization and a one-size-fits-all approach, leading to creative clashes. He eventually left Blizzard due to disagreements over the direction of Overwatch 2's monetization strategy.
The Perils of Second Place
In the hero shooter genre, dominated by Overwatch, many attempts to replicate its success, such as Amazon Games' Crucible and Boss Key's LawBreakers, failed due to a lack of innovation and arriving too late to the market. Darrah posited that in highly competitive markets, the top position garners so much attention that being number two is often not a viable position. Kaplan added that marketing budgets can often overshadow development costs, creating an illusion of innovation.
The case of Sony's Concord, a hero shooter with a reported $400 million budget, exemplifies these issues. Its protracted development meant it arrived eight years after Overwatch's debut, facing a significantly evolved market and a genre that had largely moved on. Similarly, Anthem, despite a six-year development cycle and initial strong sales, failed to retain players due to fundamental design flaws and the pressure to conform to EA's aggressive profit-margin targets. The shift toward live-service design at BioWare, driven by EA's pursuit of billion-dollar franchises, ultimately compromised the studio's traditional strengths in narrative and player choice, impacting subsequent titles like Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Darrah reflected on the industry's shift, noting that the potential for massive payouts from live-service games has fundamentally altered game development, often leading to restructuring and layoffs. While live-service games are not inherently flawed, a significant friction exists between creative development and profit-driven management. Kaplan's analogy of a pyramid—with art at the base, followed by entertainment, and business at the apex—suggests that inverting this structure by prioritizing business goals can lead to failure. The legacy of pioneering live-service titles like Destiny, Fortnite, and Overwatch is often undermined by developers chasing their financial success without learning from the hard-won lessons that underpinned their innovation and longevity.