‘Live service’ games continue to drop like flies. Here are seven more examples of living games that got shut down after mere months, or weeks, or in one instance, before the game was even released.
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37 Comments
Hey, did Multiversus last too long to qualify for this list? Or was that in the last one? I forget. Either way, should've said something about it, because despite having decent gameplay, the roster was not focusing nearly enough on the iconic characters WB could've put in (seriously, how many people actually knew Black Adam? Even after his baffling made movie) and the tired old season pass mechanic plus an inability to play the main characters at launch really made it a rather hard to get into game. And that's not even counting the hostile attitude towards mods.
Splitgate did not last long but had solid gameplay
Jeez call of duty fanboys wasted all that time and money on warzone just get screwed over and they still shell out on this dried up overdone franchise
that show the weekend done then?
Considering I've only heard of one of these games(Warzone), I'm unsurprised they didn't last long.
I am in the minority where I honestly don't think live service games are bad, one of my favorite games is a live service game (Sea of Thieves)
The problem is that so many get churned out that just try to copy and paste already established ones that they have no choice but to fail.
Hey! Remember Nosgoth? Thay one game based on the legacy of Kain series?
Honestly, I had a lot of fun with Lawbreakers and even more fun with Battleborn…honestly, of the hero shooters, Overwatch was probably the least fun to me.
12:27 perfect joke, perfect delivery.
i actually really enjoyed rumbleverse, it was one of the most refreshing takes on a battle royale game and as a fan of fighting and wrestling games, it genuinely appealed to me a lot
I just want to stand an applaud Ellen for managing to remember that Babylon's Fall story. If James wasn't holding cue cards, my gast is flabbered.
The sad thing is, despite being hilariously unfinished (something that wasn't mentioned in the video is that large parts of the map weren't even textured, they were nothing but cubemaps not to mention how easy it was to clip through the ground) and an obvious attempt to chase a trend, Radical Heights was somehow the most fun I've ever had with the Battle Royale genre.
I only played it for a couple of hours but the lack of fall damage and the ability to dive in a different direction mid-air made for some surprisingly fun skirmishes (one of my favourite memories was the time I got into a firefight in an apartment building, jumped off a balcony and dove back into the building from the floor below, then ambushed the guy when he started shooting someone else)
If Boss Key hadn't needed to rush it out the door to try to stay afloat after Lawbreakers bombed so badly and had a few more months to get it in something vaguely resembling a Beta instead of a barely-started Alpha before going into Early Access, it might have actually turned into something decent. Sadly, we'll never know.
So much foul language in this video
So, it took a call of duty entry in an outsidextra video to learn that the saw puppet has a name, life is funny that way
Wait, Babylons fall used the name Nurgle? Holy copyright infringement!
"Platinum games combat, bleh?"
Yeah… have you not played Nier Automata before? Its got some aggressively mediocre combat all around.
Why do I feel like Ellen's lore dump of Babylon's fall is accurate in every detail?
Theres a part 2 to this? Damn live services arent looking too good right now
Arpgs are terrible.
The consumerist bullshit of video games has surpassed anything the writers of GTA could have thought of.
Well… The previous GTAs. I'm hoping that GTA 6 will have an in universe gacha game called something along the lines of "Bullshit Quest!!!" that's fully functional. And inevitably when the online mode comes out some people will give Rockstar stupid amounts of money just to play it, because the satire dies in online mode.
The Live Service Haters: Why isn't MMORPGs in the mix?!
Me: BECAUSE MMOS WAS NEVER A LIVE SERVICE! They was just MMOs. Not Regular Games with Live Service strapped to them! BACK IN MY DAY! in 2004-2005 because I am a 80 year old guy. We had no such thing as Live Service Games! at least the ones I played.
Rumbleverse actually sounds like a cool concept. First I've heard of it, though.
No the problem with Rumbleverse is that they didnt have franchises to ste- i mean buy from to stuff into their game and create more interest.
Fortnite would have been long and dead if every update didnt include some already popular fictional characters and celebrities.
12:27 Ellen, this is a family friendly show!
I'm sure Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League being a disaster big enough to ruin all the goodwill a beloved studio built up over 15 years had nothing to do with this video's creation.
Live service games are like movie streaming. There's only enough players to support a handful of games so trying to make one is a gamble at best.
These games have got to be absolutely depressing to work on. Every boots-on-the-ground developer actively making them knows that they're going to tank. That they're being asked to make a nakedly predatory product at the whim of their publisher that thinks somehow they're going to be the company that gets aboard the already moving train of live service titles and not just plant face first and join the dozens of others littering the tracks. Knowing the brutal reality of the workload forced upon these developers in service of a product destined to fail makes it all the worse. This is a real dark time for this industry.
I miss battleborn
In version three of this we'll be able to add Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones. Rather remarkably Redfall is still going and the three people still playing keep saying it's actually good now. If only they'd not lost 99% of the playerbase a week after launch.
My new favourite Outside outro!
I remember the reaction in the Vtuber space to the love live game being so hilarious. As a space where people roleplay anime characters, clearly many of them are fans of series like Love Live and were pretty thrilled to see the Global release, and then immediately heartbroken in the next blink because of it being both announced to be launching and then closing IN THE SAME TWEET.
I know the answer is "so they can try to get money from that short time frame they have", but truly what is the point of keeping it open for that short a time frame otherwise?
Having played live service games since Asheron's Call, there are a few things to consider when it comes to monetization:
Subscription games like WOW and FF14 started as, and stayed subscription, with free to play trials because they are developed IPs with existing followings when they came out. They are also updated with a fairly consistent roadmap so people are ok investing their time in to them. Many games of the subscription era failed to keep up and were forced to seek alternate monetization. There is only a finite amount of time any player has given that $15 dollar a month period to play the game, if they don't perceive getting 15 bucks of entertainment out of it, they're likely to leave.
Old multiplayer games used to be player-hosted with services that would connect players. I'm not an expert but I would imagine matchmaking servers are cheaper than actual servers where the players connect to. It seems like they shifted games that could be player-hosted to game servers just so cheating is not as rampant. This incurs costs that need to be paid, and eventually those costs are no longer covered, if they ever were, by the purchase price of the game. It is ridiculous to even think it is viable to do this for a free to play game without a mountain of ads or expensive microtransactions.
Modern live service games tend be one of these three: be enjoyable with reasonable microtransactions that keep the servers running and the devs paid while they work on future games, studio cash grabs where its monetization hell for not much content, or decent games with high level play locked behind microtransaction paywalls. You can choose which you want to participate in but at the end of the day, bills need to be paid.
I feel like maybe its time to come full circle again and start having subscription games with 14 day trials since gaming is quite a bit more mainstream and the market is more accepting of subscriptions for things that people enjoy on a regular basis. It is not as much money for microtransaction money sucking franchises that play on FOMO, but if we could all just collectively vote with our wallets, i'm hopeful we can get out of this monetization nightmare we call modern day gaming.
The Culling 2, Dead Star, and The Day Before were dead on arrival.
Rumbleverse sounds like it's actually a very cool idea. How I never heard of it before, especially when it was out during a time we basically did nothing but sit online all day, is a testament to how bad their promoting of the game was.
Ellen going hard on the oxbox brands
I Realised we can just make a list video of only failed Battle Royales. I was waiting for Ellen to list Hyper scape as the final game
Some of these definitely feel like a marketing failure more than anything. I'd never even heard of a couple of the games on this list, and Lawbreakers I only heard about briefly through a Penny Arcade strip.
As for the Love Live game, I remember us talking about that in a gacha discord server I'm in, and we all had a good laugh at it. I suppose since they'd already put in work to translate it and promised it to the global audience, they felt the need to release it at least briefly so fans who were looking forward to it could play, but it's such a weird move, lol.