Apex Legends Mobile, Avengers, and Why Live-Service Games Aren’t Going Away

Amid a whirlwind of announcements from developers that they would be discontinuing support for their live-service games, some analysts online have begun to assert that the Games as a Service (or GaaS) model has run its course. As someone who spends an embarrassing amount of time playing, and reviewing, many games that make use of the GaaS model, I’m here to tell you that reports of the death of the live-service model have been greatly exaggerated.

I can’t blame people for thinking the season pass-filled sky is falling — it’s been an absolutely horrific start to the year for live-services. Whether you were disappointed by the news that Back 4 Blood developers would be moving on after only 15 months since its debut, or that Rumbleverse was giving up after only 2 seasons, it’s been a brutal couple of weeks filled with live-service developers waving the white flag.

But for anyone with a familiarity with the games in question, these foreclosures likely didn’t come as a surprise. For example, many players saw the end drawing near well before Square Enix called it quits for Marvel’s Avengers, which suffered from content pipeline issues, odd choices concerning in-game cosmetic items, and an underwhelming initial reception.

Knockout City, a game I personally adored and which IGN gave high marks, made the critical mistake of launching as a $30 game, which created an unnecessary barrier of entry that similar GaaS games don’t have as free-to-play titles. In the blog post announcing that their ninth season would be their last, they cited challenges in meeting the content demands of players with their small team, which certainly isn’t news for anyone who played in recent seasons and found themselves starved for new content.

Other failures have even less mystery surrounding them, like CrossfireX, which is a woefully terrible game I spent two weeks of my life reviewing. With practically nothing to recommend it, the only explanation I can come up with for how it lasted as long as it did is that it had access to tens of millions of Game Pass subscribers.

So what do all of these failed live-service games have in common? They all had their own problems that had nothing to do with the live-service model. GaaS is hard enough to pull off when you’ve got a success on your hands. Doing it while putting out fires and watching player counts diminish? That’s a recipe for disaster.

The challenge of successfully pulling off a live-service game isn’t new, even if you’ve got a huge studio and a roster of talented developers — just ask Bioware. But in that same period since Anthem failed, Babylon’s Fall crashed and burned, and Halo Infinite succumbed to its abysmal live-service plans for its campaign, we’ve also seen a number of notable successes from studios both big and small.

Marvel Snap has had many glued to their phones, Naraka: Bladepoint is some of the most fun I’ve had with the battle royale genre in a long time, and Fall Guys continues to be an amazing success story since it came to Xbox and Switch last year. Other newcomers like Evil Dead: The Game, and Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed also seem to have found a foothold so far, despite each of those having their own unique challenges.

That’s all in addition to existing games that continue to be some of the most played games in the world, like Fortnite and Apex Legends (even if their mobile version is going away). Others have launched successors to their live-service games to great effect, like Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 and Overwatch 2.

If the live-service model itself is failing, then why do we see so many notable successes in the same period we’re seeing others crash and burn? The answer is clear: the problem lies with the games themselves. Whether it’s fundamental game design, a lack of interest from players, a struggle to deliver content in a timely manner, or some other issue, every GaaS game that’s gone the way of the dodo has suffered from issues with execution of that model, rather than due to it.

Arguing that the model itself is to blame going by the failures that used that model holds no more merit than saying traditional $60 games are failing as a model because Nerf Legends was a travesty and Gotham Knights was a high-profile disappointment.

Still, the question remains: why do so many live-service games fail? I’ve spent the past decade of my life talking to developers of live-service games, and as any veteran of GaaS development is likely to tell you: it’s because succeeding in the long term is incredibly difficult.

For one, setting up a team to support a live-service game is ludicrously expensive — in addition to the core team of game developers, special teams need to be established to build seasonal content and keep the hype train chugging along. For example, Bungie has a core development team working on Destiny’s mainline expansions, as well as two other development teams (called Alpha and Omega) who work on seasonal content and stagger their releases between them. Each of these teams require their own writers, sandbox devs, QA testers, project leads, and more — almost like creating mini versions of your entire game studio, all of whom have to be able to communicate well enough to not step on one another’s toes.

If you’re launching a live-service game, all of this has to be in place before the game launches its first season too, which means studios have to make an enormous commitment before they know if their game will even resonate with fans. If they don’t, the developers have to fight like hell to make a comeback like we’ve seen with Fallout 76, or die out entirely. That’s a bet that lots of developers aren’t willing to make, which is why so many live-service games launch strong, then die an agonizing death as they try to build up live-service teams that should have been in place a long time ago.

Then there’s the players: not only is their thirst for new content endless, but they don’t mind telling developers where they’re falling short, giving developers access to immediate player feedback and criticisms. This means the dev teams need to have the flexibility to react and change horses midstream to address that feedback. In my discussions with live-service developers, I’ve heard it’s not uncommon for entire projects to be shelved to shift focus towards addressing more immediate concerns issued from fans online.

But even though the path is fraught with difficulty and littered with pixelated corpses, that hasn’t stopped developers from pushing on. Part of the reason for that is plain old dollars and cents, as one big GaaS success can single-handedly finance a company’s projects and growth for years to come. But the other major part of the equation is the live-service model itself, which unlocks a form of game development that previously didn’t exist.

It just isn’t feasible to take 8-10 years to make a game from scratch if you’re employing dozens or even hundreds of developers before you start selling anything. If you have an idea so ambitious it would take a decade to finish making, then in a world where selling a $60 game is your only option, you either have to cut down the scope of your project or shelve the idea altogether. But with GaaS you can ship a “minimum viable product” like the vanilla release of Bungie’s Destiny, then develop and improve it over the course of a decade with feedback from the community until it finally becomes something as impressive as The Witch Queen.

Nearly every developer out there wants to be the next Fortnite, and that’s caused a tidal wave of GaaS games to flood the market. With so many live-service games reaching the hands of players these days though (and with many more on the way), I think it’s likely that we’ll see a higher number of failed GaaS projects than we’ve ever seen before. That’s because there can only be so many successful games that ask you to spend all of your time (and maybe a lot of your money) playing them. Even if you make a great game, you’re competing for the finite gaming hours of players who partake in live-service games, and that’s a zero-sum game. How many games that want you to spend 10 hours a week playing them can be successful at once? We’re likely to find out.

But that doesn’t mean the live-service model is dying — every indication we have tells us that it’s very much here to stay.

Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.