this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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There's something sad about all these games just essentially disappearing off the face of the planet after a tiny blip of existence: 4 years from early access to dead. Lots of old games stick around and can be something people experience years later, but these are at best going to be memories and stories. What was the point of making it when it's not going to last?
I accept that the design of this game made it difficult to keep in existence without centralized funding, but that's also a decision the developers made when they made the game.
DayZ, PUBG and Tarkov gave a lot of devs the illusion they could compete in a live service multiplayer market if their games was just good enough. But these examples aren’t really that economically viable to support in the long run (DayZ hasn’t ever pulled their highs of twitch viewership in the actual game) or have been outstandingly innovative. Even established publishers and studios struggle getting a live service game off the ground and supporting it long time. The truth is: only very few have time for more than one of theses games and that market is highly saturated. While a singleplayer-first game has a long tail and can be bought, promoted and updated as demand and popularity cycles (No Man‘s Sky, Skyrim, Hitman 3, etc.) live service games need to capture all of their audiences attention all the time to stay economically viable. I don’t know how so many devs and even established publishers could jump on that band waggon. Suddenly you aren’t just competing with another similar game, but with every game all the time and additionally every other medium that takes time to consume away from your game.
I think it's the same reason so many people want to become streamers, or actors,
Live service is a winner-take-all market, where if you hit it big you get SUPER big, and because the biggest names dominate the landscape you see them more and it's easy to forget that for every Fortnite there are hundreds of The Cycle: Frontier.
But when you're starting out it's easy to convince yourself you're going to be the next Fortnite, so you rush down that road rather than more reliable-but-boring ones like "I'm going to make the next Baba is You".