this is a genuinely really interesting post in that it's a rare acknowledgement that modern AAA live-game dev is totally unsustainable if you ever want to make anything else, ever again
to expand on this slightly; I think it's become pretty clear that the Fortnites and Genshin Impacts of the world have reached a pace of gigantic updates and self-remakes that is unsustainable without a dev team literally thousands strong, and that has now Set the Standard for pretty much everyone else who's competing in that space. AAA genres have always been dangerous to try and compete in, but the live service shooter/rpg is now basically a flaming money hole for anyone who isn't the sole winner. I feel like this is going to manifest as an acceleration on the crash-n-burn speed of new live games until people figure out a way to pull back on player demands, assuming that can even happen anymore.
The game business is traditionally one where you ship a product and sell units, and if you pick your spots correctly your product gets to almost stand alone on its own merit.
In live games, however, you are perpetually competing with every other live game in the same genre. The only way to succeed is to be not merely good but best in class. There’s room for only one looter shooter and it’s Destiny. There’s room for only one mmo and it’s wow.
Multiply that by ballooning budgets that require games to be succesful for years to recoup the initial investment and you have a recipe for a lot of bad risk and a lot of disappointment.
Things seem only slightly more sustainable on mobile because most mobile games that aren't Genshin Impact have lower overhead than a AAA console/PC release, and, crucially, are deliberately designed to maintain a relatively small footprint in most players' lives. Not so with any PC/console-native service game I've yet seen, which shows me that no one in the space learned from the MOBA frenzy of the previous age (i.e. that the saturation threshold for live games that eat your whole day is extremely low)
by comparison, lots of players can play multiple mobile games at a time, dipping in and out regularly just to do dailies or catch up with an event and ducking out. Even mihoyo seems cognizant of these limits: Both of their newer f2ps, honkai star rail and zenless zone zero, are noticeably smaller in scale and somewhat less demanding on time than genshin impact - so much so that avid players have noticed and are beginning to resent genshin for being slow to back-port their "quality-of-life" mechanisms
anyway, it also "helps' that mobile games do not take half a decade to just to develop and, if they hit, punch well above their weight (due to being casinos)
But even with that in mind mobile service games are becoming even more competitive and cutthroat. A new gacha has more chance of dying out once the content runway expires (say a year?) than keeping it up unless the publisher has deep enough pockets to back it while it builds an audience of whales with sunk costs. Otherwise most players who do play these things have their own limits, and have had, by now, years to pick their "main", which they'll support till the lights are shut off.
don't really have a solution here (if I did i'd be a highly paid consultant), but i feel like AAA devs still out to make a service game not aiming to become players' second or third jobs would be a start towards having something more sustainable.
