As We Play

Imagine seeing multiple studios working on live service games get shuttered and games cancelled because of how oversaturated the Live-Service market is, and still dumping lots of money into more of those games.

That’s what WB seems to be doing, announcing in their latest earnings call that they will be focusing on turning their existing franchises into live service games full of monetisation and player-engagement. It seems especially tone-deaf considering how most new live-service games tend to struggle.

Live games are inherently meant to hoard as much of your time as possible and are often reliant on players engaging with the game’s ecosystem daily, with continuous money poured into never-ending monetised content. Due to this, there will only be a few games that will ever succeed in this space, as players don’t have infinite attention to give multiple live games.

In fact, at the time of writing this, even Sony has started delaying its live-service games. I genuinely do believe that Sony seems to be taking a more cautious approach and knows not everything will be successful.

It is especially depressing when you consider the IP that WB Games holds, including DC properties. I was recently replaying Arkham Knight again, and although it’s (often understandably) called the weakest of the series, I still forgot how good that whole experience was. It is a shame that the next time we might see a Batman game, it will be part of content designed for maximum player engagement and grind.

Hints of this can already be seen with the upcoming Suicide Squad game, which purportedly has everything from battle passes to challenge mechanics reminiscent of a live-service game. In fact, one could argue that elements of this were present in Gotham Knights as well. Now, although I genuinely believe that at its current state, the game is not a live-service game, a lot of the mechanics do seem like they were changed late in the development cycle to avoid Avengers’  level of backlash.

In fact, Avengers is probably the best warning WB can look at, for how it tried to exploit a universally loved IP with live-service and monetisation led mechanics.

Now to be completely honest I don’t think Live-Service games are always bad, and in-fact during its prime Destiny 2 was probably one of my most played games. One of the reasons for this was that at its core, it was just a very good shooter with amazing music and interesting lore. This led to some interesting loops of content that I really enjoyed.

In Destiny’s case it felt like their main goal was to create this fun experience for players full of interesting gameplay and setpieces. One could argue, that as they started to fall more into the monetization hole, the game started getting weaker.

Despite the intentions, as mentioned before there still isn’t enough room for every game to be a live-service property and only one out of many will succeed. What makes this decision even more grim, is that ultimately, we know it will most likely fail, but the people who will take the biggest hit will be those making the game, rather than those greenlighting these decisions.

Honestly, WB, if you just want to waste money at this point, burning it would be simpler, and will end up destroying fewer lives. Maybe its time to spend money where it makes sense, especially since its currently more expensive.