The shifting landscape of live-service games
Making it big in live-service games is one of the tallest orders in modern publishing, but when the rewards are so great, putting literally billions of dollars in the bank, you can see why everyone wants a slice of the pie. Hit on a formula that resonates and the party need never stop – just ask World Of Warcraft, whose Shadowlands expansion was released in November last year on the 16th anniversary of the core game’s release, or the even crumblier Runescape, now 20 years old – surely longer in the tooth than many of its target players today.
For new entrants – and there will be a bunch of those in 2021 – the market is particularly tough to crack because there is no single established route to success to follow. Two of the biggest players in the mainstream space, GTA Online and Fortnite (pictured), sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Rockstar’s game, for all its excesses, looks positively conservative when you compare it to Epic’s approach.
GTAO’s map has barely changed since the game arrived two entire console generations ago, while Fortnite is defined by its desire to reinvent itself completely on a regular basis, tearing the map apart and throwing it back together in a new shape, discarding fan-beloved fixtures along the way. Rockstar, meanwhile, maintains the potter’s wheel method, adding more lumps of gameplay clay over time, feeling its way towards the future, creating a work of complexity and scope that can be daunting to newcomers.
Somewhere between them lies Destiny 2, launched as a traditional game, transformed into an F2P experience in 2019, and then reworked massively with the release of Beyond Light in November last year, entire planets removed from its universe in the process. It was a bold move necessitated by bloat – and we’d very much like to see how it’s affected player numbers.
Given the scale of these games, what happens next is a big deal for the game industry as a whole. What will Fortnite become as it evolves closer towards what Epic boss Tim Sweeney envisions to be “something like the Metaverse”? What happens to GTA Online when Grand Theft Auto VI arrives? (And how much is
GTAO’s ongoing popularity holding back the arrival of a full-blown sequel? It’s worth noting that the PS5 and Xbox Series versions of
GTAV don’t even arrive until later this year.) On a selfish note, will we ever get the chance to return to some of our favourite Destiny hunting grounds? More importantly, just how many live-service games can we possibly find the time to fit into our lives in a way that feels worthwhile? We’re hoping that 2021 will provide a few answers.