It’s not an industry secret that live service games are divisive. All you have to do is look back to 2017 with Star Wars Battlefront II, where gamers successfully bullied EA out of keeping loot boxes in the game. And that wouldn’t be the only incident involving live service that didn’t end well for the studio behind it.
Even as recent as this year, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League flopped so hard that within a month the player count on Steam dropped to a mere one thousand, and now seven months on the game is lucky to see more than a couple hundred players.
That leads to Concord, a game that felt fated to fail before release. And oh, it really was. Sony’s first party leap into live service was so badly received that less than two weeks after its August 23 release, it was taken down from all stores and buyers were even offered full refunds.
Down but not out
The PlayStation Blog that addressed the situation said that the game would make a return after some changes, but as of right now it is unknown how long the wait will be, or how drastic the changes. Either way, Firewalk Studios have some heavy lifting to do. It’s not the first live service fail, but Concord is a particularly excruciating experience for those involved, since it had a reported eight years of development time.
It’s a historic fail in the field of video games, with not much like it seen before. What can even lead to such drastic measures? Mostly a lack of player-count, which has been blamed on Sony’s marketing team. Though there’s a trend that shows gamers are mostly just tired of live service games and all the baggage that comes with that. There’s this notion of ‘The trailer peaked my interest, until I realised it was a live service game’ which was quite prevalent with both the reveal of Concord and the aforementioned Suicide Squad.
A shifting landscape
Though it’s not quite that simple for large companies to notice a trend and not make a live service game. Eight years ago when Concord entered production, Destiny was in its peak and Overwatch was dominating Esports. No wonder Sony wanted a piece of the pie. That eight years is the problem, with game development cycles being longer than ever it’s really hard to hop on trends before they’re gone with the wind.
That’s what puts live service games in such a peculiar position at the moment. Gamers are rejecting the notion of new live service games, but things like Fortnite are still dominating after seven years. The market is in a strange place and gamers are fickle.
Personally, a game being live service in itself isn’t going to turn me away. If it looks like a genuine fun time, I’ll always give it a go. The problem is corporate greed turning these games into nothing but a way to empty your wallet which is sadly an ever increasing practice in today’s market.
Third year Journalism student passionate about video-games.
