Live services games domination will “end” in 2024, analyst predicts

poppabk said:
It does have some of that same feel as the MMO rush. The only problem is that AAA doesn't seem like a safer bet.
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Yea it really does feel similar.

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As you said though all it takes is one AAA flop to kill your studio like Forspoken.
 
I personally think there's a nice healthy mix atm. Something for everyone. Look at 2023, we all win IMO.
 
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I forgot to mention the other big issue with live service games and that is once the servers go offline then the game can no longer be played at all.

That is perhaps the thing that most puts me off playing them as I am someone who prefers to play lots of different games over a very long period of time, often revisiting older games for a second or third playthrough. The thought of playing a game then losing access to it, which has happened with many live service games over the years, usually those that flop badly, completely puts me off ever playing them in the first place. That isn't ever an issue with a single player game.
 
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vaibhavpisal said:
There has to be a distinction between something like Fortnite and Grounded.

One is updated over time, other offers new activities daily/weekly.
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Sure. But GaaS and Live Service games are well-understood terms that mean the same thing. They're both catch-all terms that encompass the many different types of Live Service games. You can't just invent distinctions for commonly understood terms.

If you want to distinguish between Fortnite and Grounded, use new terminology to do so.
 
There is always a new crop of kids to get money from mom and dad to keep the live services active.
 
Suddenly CEOs will realize that time isn`t unlimited and that creating a new GAAS time sink always means that you would have to wrestle that time from giants like Fortnite, CoD or GTA which have muuuuuuch more financial wiggling room and their established matured ecosystems.
It´s a game with winning chances akin to a lottery.....
 
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End the domination? I don't think so. Stop growing could be more accurate

I mean, yeah, we have too much already. Still, those that we have are solid
 
Kenpachii said:
Aint happening, live service games are here to stay.
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Yeah, but the analyst isn't saying live services are going to die. Just that they won't be "dominating". I don't think anyone wants one type of game to dominate all others going forward.
 
If this turns out true, it spells bad news for humanity. It means the 7 billion humans will be sucked off earth and replaced with alien lifeforms that live a solitary lifestyle.

IE: It ain't happening. GAAS is the present and future of gaming.
 

Live services games domination will "end" in 2024, analyst predicts


Live services will continue to be massively successful and dominate top played and grossing charts

Confused High Quality GIF
 
I think we are reaching a point now where GAAS games are established, the people who want to play gaashit are playing gaashit and they like the games they are playing and their friends are playing the same thing. It's very tough for a newcomer to break in, a la MMOs post WOW. Not impossible but very tough. Your best bet is to piggyback on an existing franchise like Diablo 4 (still a piece of shit game) or Honkai Star Rail.

Also similar to MMOs, I think devs and publishers are realizing just how much you have to invest in these things to keep them going. Epic is a Fortnite company now. Activision is a COD company (and even with that the games are shit). Bungie is a Destiny company. MS had to restructure 343 for them to be able to maintain Halo Infinite. You can't half-ass this, and even then it's a high probability of failure (Sony surely invested nine figures into Factions 2 and it got them nowhere).
 
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diffusionx said:
I think we are reaching a point now where GAAS games are established, the people who want to play gaashit are playing gaashit and they like the games they are playing and their friends are playing the same thing. It's very tough for a newcomer to break in
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The Finals and Lethal Company just broke in.

You think big publishers like PlayStation look at either of those two games and think "What majestic beauty...we could never build something so magnificent."

Or do they look at those two games and lick their lips?
 
Men_in_Boxes said:
The Finals and Lethal Company just broke in.

You think big publishers like PlayStation look at either of those two games and think "What majestic beauty...we could never build something so magnificent."

Or do they look at those two games and lick their lips?
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Let's revisit those games and where they are at in six months. It wasn't that long ago that you could plausibly say the same about Multiversus and many other games.

Gaashit games have a ludicrously low barrier to entry, so those early hyped player numbers really are completely meaningless. it is super easy to try one of these games, play it for a bit, then go back to what you know. You don't spend a dime and the studio goes broke. there is a strong incentive to go back after all as publishers invest billions to keep you playing their game.
 
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Bernoulli said:
The only Good GAAS is Fortnite, nothing else comes close and never will
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^Numbers don't lie, this might be true.

But I don't believe the live service games will end because they make too much for studios to not at least try. It's a high risk, high reward pursuit. Publishers will continue to gamble on getting a hit.
 
diffusionx said:
Let's revisit those games and where they are at in six months. It wasn't that long ago that you could plausibly say the same about Multiversus and many other games.

Gaashit games have a ludicrously low barrier to entry, so those early hyped player numbers really are completely meaningless. it is super easy to try one of these games, play it for a bit, then go back to what you know. there is a strong incentive to go back after all as publishers invest billions to keep you playing their game.
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Multiverses had a player drop off that was ludicrously bad. You could tell it was a bomb after the first week. The Finals and Lethal Company already have legs for days.

People don't want to admit it, but multiplayer is just leaving its infancy.
 
If it is anything like the MMO space and its gold rush, eventually the market becomes saturated and matures. And new projects have trouble competing with incumbents who have 5-10 years and a ton of cash into their product which translates to way more refinement, features, content, eyeballs ... than anything new launching.

And the new stuff has trouble doing something new and novel enough to make up for this deficit.
 
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Crew511A said:
I think you're correct, in theory. Like communism, GAAS sounds good on paper, but it doesn't work in the real world very often. For every game that did it well, you've got dozens of games like Exo-Primal and Halo Infinite that either forgot the "Service" part or were ruined by greed.
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I think it has more to do with the studio and development pipeline structure required to be successful in Live Service is wholly dissimilar to what's needed for traditional premium games.

You need multiple dev teams working in concert to deploy frequent content updates and many studios have tried to do with while also having separate teams working on more traditional games, e.g. ND. It's much too much to manage for most.
 
Yeah sorry not gonna happen... there would have to be a huge amount of incredible AA-AAA games releasing next year for free or super cheap to sway current trends away from f2p live service offerings. Wishful thinking.
 
Men_in_Boxes said:
Multiverses had a player drop off that was ludicrously bad. You could tell it was a bomb after the first week. The Finals and Lethal Company already have legs for days.

People don't want to admit it, but multiplayer is just leaving its infancy.
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Isn't The Finals down to less than half its initial playerbase? And you can't really classify Lethal Company as GAAS as it doesn't have any form of recurrent spending, its a buy once play forever type of game that just happens to have good co-op mode. Might as well put Baldurs Gate 3 into the GAAS category by those terms.
 
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I hope so, but i doubt it. Parents need to lockup the keys to downloads on console.
Kids, tweens, teens and some so called adults, gobble this bs up because its "free to play" or because "their friends are there".

Many of the younger generations didn't grow up watching games grow and evolve. They don't know what good games are and just know gaas and always online bs.
It will take an effort from parents, but also an the popularity of the twitter and twitch/streaming crowd to stop it as well.
 
Guilty_AI said:
Isn't The Finals down to less than half its initial playerbase? And you can't really classify Lethal Company as GAAS as it doesn't have any form of recurrent spending, its a buy once play forever type of game that just happens to have good co-op mode. Might as well put Baldurs Gate 3 into the GAAS category by those terms.
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Nah, it has always been about multiplayer, social gaming vs traditional single player gaming. Lethal Company is being studied by GAAS studios, not single player studios.

The Finals is still regularly featured in the top 10 on Steam so it's decline is soft. It will settle north of healthy in 3 months time.

Many in the anti-GAAS crowd will never consider evidence that goes against the narrative of their preference.
 
Bernoulli said:
The only Good GAAS is Fortnite, nothing else comes close and never will
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I dunno about that. Counterstrike 2 is super-popular, same with League of Legends. VALORANT and Apex Legends have very dedicated communities, too. Fortnite might be the face of GaaS but it's hardly the only super-popular or good one. Can't forget about Geshin Impact, or MMOs like FF XIV, either.

The unfortunate thing for many other companies are...I just named most of the noteworthy ones and the ones that have more or less taken full hold of that market. The only way for a new mega-GaaS to come about is if one of the old guard has a massive decline. I think the only one at risk of that potentially happening anytime soon is COD, but we'll have to see how things play out a little first.
 
thicc_girls_are_teh_best said:
The only way for a new mega-GaaS to come about is if one of the old guard has a massive decline.
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This will only be true when GAAS has spread to every conceivable player type. That obviously hasn't happened yet.

Look at Palia. There's a GAAS going for a completely untapped market which will do very little to harm other GAAS game populations.
 
Shubh_C63 said:
They will move to a hybrid model like GTA5

Epic Single player experience, Another meaty expansion and then pivot into GaaS within the same game with microtransactions.
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That would be fine by me, if the single player wasn't locked by online only. Thats the problem. You know they would do that. I am someone who plays games months and years late as I have limited time and a huge backlog. I replay old games all the time too. Can't do that with gaas /live games.
 
Men_in_Boxes said:
This will only be true when GAAS has spread to every conceivable player type. That obviously hasn't happened yet.

Look at Palia. There's a GAAS going for a completely untapped market which will do very little to harm other GAAS game populations.
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Actually that's a good point. Most of the popular GaaS titles are in a limited variety of genre types. When we were finding out more about Sony's GaaS titles (well, before stuff like Factions 2 got cancelled), I was stressing that if they are going to push into that space they need to have a bigger variety of genre types in unsaturated parts of that market. Try and set a standard in a "blue ocean", so to speak.

A lot of stuff between Factions 2, Deviation's game, Concord, Fairgame$ etc. were seemingly FPS or military/shooter-based games, which is a heavily saturated genre in the GaaS market with a lot of strong competitors already. For example I didn't see a reason for Deviation's game being a military sci-fi FPS shooter, when Destiny 2 is already that type of game. Honestly, I'd love if one of Sony's GaaS titles were a rhythm-based game; after all they set the standard for that genre with Parappa the Rapper, I absolutely wouldn't mind a live-service Parappa GaaS type game in that universe. It would be pretty cheap to make (can't see initial budget being above $25-$30 million), and relatively cheap to maintain with updates over a period of time of a few years like a Smash Bros.

Like I bet whoever makes a live service-based Wallpaper Simulator is probably going to make some bank.
 
poppabk said:
It does have some of that same feel as the MMO rush. The only problem is that AAA doesn't seem like a safer bet.
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Oh it is safer. But also what about what Remedy is doing with their costs? Maybe some AAA games can go that route.
 
Money talks, bullshit walks. Unless the government regulates this or something...devs gonna continue to be greedy.

Sorry I don't believe this for one second.
 
Jigsaah said:
Money talks, bullshit walks. Unless the government regulates this or something...devs gonna continue to be greedy.

Sorry I don't believe this for one second.
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It's worth noting that he doesn't mean that GaaS games won't be the biggest revenue generators and most played games, just that the pipeline of games will shift away as opportunities to break into that market dry up and failures mount up.
 
thicc_girls_are_teh_best said:
A lot of stuff between Factions 2, Deviation's game, Concord, Fairgame$ etc. were seemingly FPS or military/shooter-based games, which is a heavily saturated genre in the GaaS market with a lot of strong competitors already. For example I didn't see a reason for Deviation's game being a military sci-fi FPS shooter, when Destiny 2 is already that type of game.
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I generally don't think it works this way.

In the same way that Overwatch and Fortnite are "Cartoony PvP shooters" that were both incredibly successful and both kinda filling the same aesthetic genre.

People don't play multiplayer games for the aesthetic genre (SP gamers do this more often), they play it for the gameplay loop.

"Sci fi military FPS" can vary substantially in terms of gameplay.
 
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