Can GAAS Success be Predicted?

kungfuian

kungfuian

Member
I see a lot of comments here about how much everyone hates GAAS (I'm one of you, single player only for me thanks) but very little discussion about why some GAAS games succeed and others fail. From the outside the whole model seems so unpredictable. I know this is somewhat true of the industry as a whole, but with GAAS it seems even more so.

With Sony throwing a ton of resources toward GAAS over the last few years to only have one success, one huge flop, and to have pulled the plug on multiple unreleased games, it's hard to see the logic behind putting so much money toward something so unpredictable. The winners seem to be selected at random from the gaming audience with no real rhyme or reason. Sometimes a title takes off and becomes a massive hit, but more times then not they just don't take off.

Sometimes failure seems obvious (Concord being a DEI nightmare for example) but what makes a success? I'm just curious if folks here think there's any way to predict which GAAS games will succeed? Or is it really just like playing the lottery/random, with a few lucky winners? Very curious what folks think makes some GAAS games work while others fail? Is it style, content, starting as free to play vs starting as paid then going free to play, marketing, community management, gameplay loop, timing....your thoughts?
 
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Do a game people want to play. It might seems naive to say but I really feel like many studios and execs forget that.

Helldivers 2 was a success because it knows what it wants to be and don't take it's players for walking debit card. There is plenty of opportunities to make good GAAS.
 
nay, it's hard to predict game will be success thanks to oversaturated industry right now. if it's single player, between money and popularity are the key, until sometimes ago.
 
If it was predictable somehow everyone would've made one at least by now.

Consumers tastes change too often. It's simply a matter of making the best game you can that you're passionate about while avoiding these pit falls:
-Must have great performance even if it goes early access. The second the public touches it is now deemed either a hit of a fail. Casuals don't care if you call it a beta or alpha whatever.

-Must avoid woke propaganda bull shit both in game and on social media. Gamers sniff any of it and they'll only focus on that and over scrutinize every other part of the game to sell the narrative it's trash. It cannot overcome that so don't bother pushing an agenda in your game or design choices for characters.

-You must be free to play. If Destiny launched nowadays with a price tag it wouldn't work. It worked in the past because of bungies reputation and the market for GaaS being new.

-You must have competent micro transactions and pricing . If you're just doing color swaps for $10 then players won't buy into your economy.

-Must have a pipeline of content ready for 2 years, and it must be good content to draw players back in. A game like Diablo 4 has horrible seasons.

—

I think that's the main pitfalls. Otherwise make a fun game. Hell some games start out as a SP or co op or even normal MP experience and evolve into GaaS. That's a more natural way of getting there.
 
I dabble with quite a few GaaS titles, Destiny being my main one.
-Monetize it fairly. If youre going to have a battlepass, the game probably needs to be F2P.
-Developers need to be able to react very quick based on player feedback, and they have to communicate plans and decisions regularly with players.
-Have a solid and feasible roadmap so players know what to expect
-The game needs a meaningful progression system to keep players engaged
 
Obviously, the game has to be fun to play. it needs a hook and they need to hit the right points on marketing to get the right audience to try it. It needs to have some sort of monetization that isn't so crass it turns off people instantly but it also has to be prominent enough that people actually spend money on it. There needs to be constant drops of content and the devs need to respond to feedback quickly. If it is in an existing genre the game needs to be better than the gaas game people are already playing (e.g., Marathon needs to be so much better than Tarkov that Tarkov "people" drop the game).

So basically everything needs to go right and you have an extremely small margin of error.

Bitstream said:
resident GAAS expert, he was temp banned recently after huffing too much
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"expert"
 
kungfuian said:
I see a lot of comments here about how much everyone hates GAAS (I'm one of you, single player only for me thanks) but very little discussion about why some GAAS games succeed and others fail. From the outside the whole model seems so unpredictable. I know this is somewhat true of the industry as a whole, but with GAAS it seems even more so.
Click to expand...
The whole notion of gaas being overcrowded with few successful games and high rate of failures is heavily overblown.
People usually just don't know much about gaas market state and all reception is based on internet drama over particular titles.

kungfuian said:
Sometimes failure seems obvious (Concord being a DEI nightmare for example) but what makes a success? I'm just curious if folks here think there's any way to predict which GAAS games will succeed? Or is it really just like playing the lottery/random, with a few lucky winners? Very curious what folks think makes some GAAS games work while others fail? Is it style, content, starting as free to play vs starting as paid then going free to play, marketing, community management, gameplay loop, timing....your thoughts?
Click to expand...
It's quite simple and similar to SP games:
- make game interesting to play and attractive
- make game somewhat original so player have incentive to play your game and not something else
- make game have content (flow in case of gaas)
- make it reasonably prices, both b2p and f2p
- know your client players
 
Felessan said:
It's quite simple and similar to SP games:
- make game interesting to play and attractive
- make game somewhat original so player have incentive to play your game and not something else
- make game have content (flow in case of gaas)
- make it reasonably prices, both b2p and f2p
- know your client players
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Spot on. It isn't rocket science

There's lots of successful gaas games out there
 
So the power of negative first impressions is a strong thing. In many cases, almost insurmountable for GAAS.

Given that GAAS has suffered from the loot box gambling of the 2010s and ontop of it, these games attempt to nickel and dime its player base with aggressive in game marketing..... it already has a hill to climb for a not insignificant amount of the potential player base. They are by default cynical and I would argue for damn good reasons.

So then, any perceived issue or negative quality will be subconsciously reached for and amplified for a sizeable crowd. Culture War shit. Game imbalance. Gameplay issues. Graphical issues. Etc. Right, wrong, or indifferent - if there is a perception of a negative, it will be talked about and carried. You begin losing potential consumers and you need.... as many people playing this to justify the production cost.

If I am going to put on my reptilian AAA corpo hat, the best you can do is have a polished game, muzzle your staff's social media, make the narrative/world element as general audience as it can be (aka don't get into vanity politics), and finally.... stealth drop it (or the beta) so people won't have a long ass time to critically look at it.

But that's for the scumbag corpo minded. Thank god they rarely do all that.

GAAS hits have come out of relatively no where. People liked it, hyped it, and it boomed. Fabricating a long term new property is an uphill battle for the aforementioned reasons.


And lastly, the market can only substain a certain amount of GAAS at once. Helps if they play radically different but still, there is only so much of a consumer base and their sheckles to go around.
 
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A bit, yes. Create a game, not a product to print cash through mtx. But this is just too difficult for almost every developer that tries to create a GaaS title. In general, GaaS titles are so hollow that it feels to me that they 1- don't put any effort into them 2- take their demographic for a bunch of idiots 3- forget how to develop a video game as soon as they're in charge of a live service game. Weird af.
 
Plague Doctor said:
And lastly, the market can only substain a certain amount of GAAS at once. Helps if they play radically different but still, there is only so much of a consumer base and their sheckles to go around.
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There are 6 big-sized BR games, 5 hero shooters, a large number of MOBA and just uncountable amount of gacha games. And what's funny average rate of true failure (closed within an year) for live service game is around 50% or less for gaas games.
Repeating mantra of "sustain" is lying to yourself and others.
 
you can only predict it about 6 months ahead of launch I think.

GaaS as a concept is too much dependent on current trends. and if you have chased the wrong trend during the 3-5 years of development it took to bring it to the market, you're fucked.
if you have the right genre for the current trend but completely miss the mark of why the games that created the trend worked.... you're also fucked.

Marathon for example seems to be on the second category. their entire concept of a simplified extraction shooter is completely antithetical to the entire reason extraction shooter fans play the genre.
 
GAAS market is like high stakes gambling. You have a chance to win big if you're lucky, but it's more likely you're going to lose all of your money. You can make a game with the best mechanics, but the market may be full by that point or people's attention may have turned into something else during development.

Singleplayer titles have also become risky business and they can sell way below expectations, but it's still easier to predict how the game will be received and how popular it's going to become, especially if it's an established IP.
 
You know, there are these old men in suits sitting on the boards of directors who no longer understand gaming. They've lost touch with reality thanks to their multi-million dollar bonuses and are completely disconnected from their customers and the actual work. These men spot individual phenomena that blow up and go viral – and of course, they want a slice of the pie. At the same time, their company is so massive and therefore so slow that it takes years to implement anything. On top of that, way too many people are trying to assert themselves or make their role seem important, which means that a developer who relies on this company's funding no longer has the chance to realize their own vision.

In short: too many cooks spoil the broth, and everything takes far too long. By the time – after X years – they finally have a playable version of this supposed all-in-one miracle product, the industry has already moved on, and they're left behind.

Besides that, Sony in particular seems to be steering the asshole train again – they're showing little competence and even less connection to their customers. And at the same time – though I honestly can't explain it – they're somehow seeing financial success. Sure, the fact that Xbox is currently in such a weak position is definitely working in Sony's favor. At the same time, the gaming community feels like it's getting dumber by the day – just a mass of consumer zombies. I honestly can't think of any other explanation for why these ridiculous Call of Duty titles and generic, functioning Games-as-a-Service products keep doing so well.

Fortunately, there are still enough outliers and newcomers who prove in impressive ways that massive AAA(A) giants can go screw themselves with a cactus.
 
People are morons. Make a game people want to play is mostly chasing trends. Make games the studio is passion about. At least that worked for recent GOTY winners.
 
I don't know if it can be predictable, but you can usually see from the trailers if it seems interesting or not. When I saw Helldivers 2, I was like "this game looks fun". When I saw say Avengers, I was like "ugh, awful"
 
Loomy said:
There isn't. If there was every publisher would be releasing hit after hit.
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Tell it Mihoyo
Just because some are incapable doesn't mean no one knows proper formulas

kevboard said:
you can only predict it about 6 months ahead of launch I think.
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If you can make a good predictiction 6 months, you are probably are good for forever. FF11 runs for 20+ years already and it was good for like and year and half till WoW dropped. If these games can build a loyal core fanbase, they can run for nearly eternity.

kevboard said:
GaaS as a concept is too much dependent on current trends. and if you have chased the wrong trend during the 3-5 years of development it took to bring it to the market, you're fucked.
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No they are not.
It looks like for external viewers as live service heavily experience gold rush mentality (SP has it too but on much smaller scale), when something new appears - there are spike of copycats, many of which fail. Outside of gold rush window there is no real trend chasing.
Like big successes (Marvel Rivals and Deadlock) and failure (Concord) of 2024 are all hero shooters, genre from 2016.
Did PoE2 chased trends and was unsuccessful in overcrowded market (of like 3 games in total)?
And what exactly "current trend" Infinity Nikki chasing? It's otome game and they are evergreen.

People just too focused on drama when in real world many gaas just launched outside of "popular trends" and found reasonable success if they are well made. And as there is no drama and no interest in these games from SP players, they are hardly known and remembered, leading to stupid claims of "99% failure"

kevboard said:
if you have the right genre for the current trend but completely miss the mark of why the games that created the trend worked.... you're also fucked.
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And what exactly current trend?
Hero shooters, MMO/MMOLite, Moba, BR, diablo-clones, otome, gacha?

xrnzaaas said:
GAAS market is like high stakes gambling. You have a chance to win big if you're lucky, but it's more likely you're going to lose all of your money.
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Gaas has probably higher rate of success than SP games does.

xrnzaaas said:
You can make a game with the best mechanics, but the market may be full by that point or people's attention may have turned into something else during development.
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This is very popular delusion
Which exactly "game with the best mechanics" failed?
 
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Well, isn't it obvious how some gaas games succeed?

Like single player games, if they are fun they succeed. If they suck, they fail.
 
Not really, for a simple reason, there is a finite amount of playing time per user.
Gaas aim at basically monopolize the entirety of a player time so that he/she becomes a recurrent spender, but a player is investing their time on one Gaas, they can't do it on another.
It's a zero sum game where a few winners rack all the success in any permanent way, a couple see temporary success and then lose all their player base, and the majority just never finds an audience and crashes hard.

Such model would not be a problem for the environment the business model was created for, cheap mobile games. There if your attempt crashes and burn you lose very little money and can just try again... But then big Studios got to it, and all they now is focus test and throw more money at issues hoping for success, that's how you get Concorde.
 
Though there is no fix formula of success, there's definitely a formula of failure. It's funny how random people can predict a huge bomb but devs and execs can't. That speaks of a state of disconnection between creators and players.

I FULLY disagree with the trend chasing argument. It's quite the opposite. The biggest success stories are never trend chasers.

Fortnite - the first of its kind.

Overwatch - great lore and characters

Genshin Impact - the first AAA gacha to become mainstream, the one to set the rules for the next gacha generation.

Rocket League - revolutionary concept

Helldivers 2 - outstanding as a sci-fi shooter. Great community management.

Etc.

These games are all genuine.

So, deliver an unique experience, polished experience, listen HUMBLY to your customers and people will respond positively. Corporate toxicity is a no-go.
 
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Angry_Megalodon said:
.I FULLY disagree with the trend chasing argument. It's quite the opposite. The biggest success stories are never trend chasers.
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Actually I checked live service games of 2024 and out of 16 more or less big ones I found, 5 were failure (Concord, exDefiant, Foamstars, Skull&Bones, Suicide Squad) - they all have something in common - it's a games from devs who doesn't have much portfolio of MP/gaas games backed by big publisher.

So essentially it is trend chasing, but not chasing actual gaming trends in gaas market but rather "we too want gaas game" trend of some publishers. Games were not done out of carefully consideration, planning and seeking quality and value, they were simply part of gold rush and they fail as a result.
 
I would say the scope of the success can hardly be predicted, but if it is good and should have some success that should be possible to say. Similar to the music industry where most artists, even the great ones, probably always thought that all or most of their songs were just hits, their producers probably went in and said this is gonna be a single and this and that needs an expensive music video, and all the others...not. Many game producers seem to have no idea what they are doing and try to make the average game a hit and bump money into the wrong games, want to force success. Rocket League needed that predeccesor no one remembers to evolve into what it is now. Helldivers 2 success certainly also needed the work done by the first one, finding its identity on a budget and changing the viewpoint to something that is probably more expensive but more liked in the second iteration. Fortnite took forever until it found it's formula, afair, stealing PUBG'S Battle Royal in the last minute and only due to that change it grew afterwards. Otherwise it might have ended like Unreal Tournament being okay or even kinda big, but not massive. I am not sure what or if Sony does anything with the Concord material, but giving up entirely is the dumbest approach. Even APB, Hellgate London or Foamstars did some money, I guess. Probably all new/ reworked characters might have been already enough to relaunch it into a f2p modell.
 
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I'm literally sick of hearing about gaas.

I remember mid ps4 xbone cycle Phil said they were going to focus on gaas because that's what their customers want. He only said this as Xbox at this time was failing to produce single player games or just any exclusive.

Of course they never delivered any gaas games either.

Fast forward 10 years and same crap. Leave the gaas to the big 3rd parties.
 
No. And people seem to misunderstand expectations. These companies often expect most GAAS to fail. That's why they fund several. If three fail and one hits huge, it's a major success overall.

People seemed to believe that Sony thought each project they had would turn into the next Fortnite. They didn't. Concord was a disappointment, but they knew many GaaS would be. That's the nature. Helldivers 2, on the other hand, completely exceeded even Sony's expectations.
 
A overwatch/valorant clone with actual good looking anime characters with a good budget and a non intrusive gaas component is a market where no other game exists in that style, i think it would do okay-ish.
 
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