Games are getting bigger than ever, more expensive to make than ever, and becoming bigger flops as a result:
- Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was in development for nine years, and its player count is currently (two weeks after release) lower than Batman: Arkham Knight, a game nine years old.
- Marvel's Avengers, the live service game from the makers of Tomb Raider, was shut down two and a half years after release. The game was in development for five years.
- Live service pirate game Skull and Bones is coming out this week after a 10+ year development cycle, and critical reception so far is "Skull and Bones’ open beta hasn’t sold me on this game being worth the long wait"
Everyone wants to be Destiny, the money-printing live service game. But even Destiny players don't like playing Destiny all that much anymore.
This was already a trend, but became horrifyingly inescapable as soon as games like Genshin Impact made like a billion dollars in a few months. Venture capital funding, which at the time this all started was cheap as hell to raise, doesn’t want slow and steady growth — it works entirely on absurd promises of Cambrian explosion levels of empire making.
Doesn’t matter that most CEOs (because this is pretty much never due to devs) made the video game equivalent of a tech startup promising to become the next Apple, to the people holding the purse all that matters is the promise, not how realistic it is to achieve. They want to get the next Genshin Impact or golden age Destiny because the numbers are just so ridiculously high. But you can’t invent the iPhone again, it’s just not gonna happen -- people already have an iPhone. The market is completely solidified by now, save for a Palworld level of cosmic coincidences you’re not going not only to dethrone the people at the top, you’re not even going to be making enough money to sustain yourself without those precious investments. Especially now that interest in them in general seems to be starting to slow down.
But that’s what was being funded back then and still somewhat is. Because a single player or normally multiplayer game can promise decent returns, but a live service can promise stratospherically high number to people who treat companies like lottery tickets. If a studio fails and shut down, the next one might become Genshin Impact and make us even more rich, they don’t care how many people lose their job. And if not the next one, then the one after that. Or the next. And so on.