Game news Towards the end of the domination of service games? 2024 will be a decisive year for the genre

Game news Towards the end of the domination of service games? 2024 will be a decisive year for the genre

Scheduled for February 2, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is one of the major releases at the start of 2024. It must be said that the title is the latest from Rocksteady, a British studio which delighted players in the 2010s with the Batman Arkham trilogy. If these were real references in terms of single-player narrative action games, the developers went in another direction with their new project. If they stay in the superhero universe, the teams worked for seven years on a service game, that is to say an experience designed over the long term to regularly welcome new content so that players continue to play it, and therefore spend money. money. A first for the studio.

Unfortunately, since its announcement, the project has not generated enthusiasm among players, it’s even the opposite. It must be said that this formula is no longer unanimous these days following numerous failures like Anthem, Babylon’s Fall and especially Marvel’s Avengers to remain in the superhero genre. Is the service game format condemned to live its last days in 2024? In truth, the answer is much more complicated when you look at the problem from different aspects.

See Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League on Amazon

Service games, a market with many called for few elected

In the small world of service games, not all experiences are in the same boat. In reality, a handful of stocks completely dominate the market and leave the others in the shadows. This is what figures from GamesIndustry dedicated to the predictions of their analyzes for 2024. Inside, we learn that on PC and consoles, 60% of the game time is dedicated to just 19 games, or even 75% of the game time held by just 33 titles when we broaden the spectrum. Suffice to say that the game supply is disproportionate to the demand which is much lower since players prefer to stay with the titles they know rather than investing in a new one.

From this first observation, it is clear that all the service games that land on the market face tough competition to monopolize the free time of players. And beyond other games, they also compete with social networks and streaming platforms, for example, which seek to appropriate our available brain time. In addition to all this, we must also take into account that the market is no longer subject to peaks in engagement as was the case in 2020 and 2021 following the coronavirus pandemic who forced people to stay at home. And yet, this does not prevent many publishers from wanting to try their luck, because in case of success, if the game takes off, it is a guaranteed jackpot for them.

So how do the service games already installed maintain their hegemony in this ultra-competitive environment? In the GamesIndustry predictions paper that we told you about earlier, we find an interesting answer to this question. If we place ourselves in a recent context, we can notice that certain popular and already well-established service games have capitalized on nostalgia, which has resulted in great successes. We clearly think of World of Warcraft Classic or Fortnite which brought back many players happy to rediscover these games as they remember them. By calling on the past, this makes it easy to meet the primary need of service games, namely to constantly produce content. And the problem is that this is not always enough to survive, as the example of Destiny recently showed us.

“Even the best game service on the market cannot grow indefinitely”

Destiny is the ultimate service game. For a long time, Bungie’s title has been a reference for games of the genre and a model to follow as its success is indisputable.. It must be said that the studio greatly participated in shaping the codes of this format as we know it today. After the release of the first of the game in 2014, Destiny continued its momentum with the launch of the second episode in 2017. Over the years, the title is regularly updated with new seasons and expansions which are constantly added content. Although this model has proven itself, it has started to decline in recent years.. After the excellent The Witch Queen, the Eclipse expansion disappointed many players and the game seems to be struggling to recover.

Recently, the studio had to lay off around a hundred employees because of its poor results, while postponing the release of the next expansion The Final Form. The weight on the shoulders of this new adventure is particularly heavy, because in the event of failure, Bungie could say goodbye to its independence. I explain to you. In 2022, Sony bought Bungie for its expertise in games services. If until now the studio enjoyed a certain freedom, eminent members of the Japanese manufacturer now sit on its board of directors. And as summarized in an article IGN which evokes the atmosphere within the company: “if Bungie fails to meet certain financial thresholds by too much, Sony is allowed to dissolve the existing board of directors and take full control of the company“.

Enough to put crazy pressure on the developers who know that the next extension will be decisive for the future of the company. As summed up so well Jason Schreier in response to this article, “one of the themes underlying this year’s layoffs is that even the most successful live-service games can’t continue growing indefinitely“. Even the perfect student of the service game finds it difficult to constantly create new content and satisfy their players, which demonstrates the limits of this model. However, if Sony bought Bungie initially, it was for their expertise in terms of service games which should help them develop their own experiences. Unfortunately, even on this point, things are not so simple.

A model unsuitable for studios already installed

In May 2022, we remember that Jim Ryan, then CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, announced with great fanfare that more than ten game services were in development on PlayStation’s side.. Obviously, for the manufacturer, the goal is to launch as many different experiments to hope that at least one of them becomes profitable, or even generates profits. Since then, water has flowed under the bridge, and the Japanese company seems to have backtracked on this statement. Just recently, we remember that Naughty Dog, the creators of Uncharted, announced that their service game The Last of Us was finally canceled for several reasons.

First of all, we know from external sources that the project did not meet the quality standards set by Sony. Members of Bungie were consulted for their expertise in terms of game services and judged that the title did not live up to what was expected. Then, for the sake of transparency, Naughty Dog have openly stated that they cannot keep a service game afloat while continuing to develop the narrative single-player games that have made them famous. because it is too time-consuming. So, a choice had to be made, and it was this multiplayer experience that paid the price.

Obviously, if we have had so many service games in recent years, it is because they can generate a lot of money if successful and they do not cost that much in development costs once launched. However, This does not mean that everyone is capable of maintaining this kind of experience and Naughty Dog understood this well in the face of what Crystal Dynamics experienced with Marvel’s Avengers. While the studio specializes in narrative single-player games, the teams found themselves having to manage a constantly updated service game, which was not within their remit. As a result, the game was a dismal failure which has since closed its doors.

Today, Sony seems to be turning around its ambitions in terms of service games, as the example of Naughty Dog proves. And according to GamesIndustry experts, they are counting on the end of market domination by these long-term experiences for this year 2024. If the titles already installed will not move, we should see fewer and fewer games appear. service since publishers no longer want it to focus on the development of premium games. And that should please many players.