live service games – Trekking with Dennis

Grand Theft Auto VI: Three (Potential) Problems In Store

I wanted to expand a little on something I said yesterday, when I made some predictions for the year ahead. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss my predictions, by the way! I had a bit of fun talking about some likely (and some not-so-likely) things that we might see in 2026. You can find that piece by clicking or tapping here.

In the “not-so-likely” category, one of my predictions involved Grand Theft Auto VI, the upcoming open-world crime game from Take-Two and Rockstar. I said that there’s a possibility – however remote it may seem right now – that GTA 6 fails to meet its sales targets, which are surely pretty high given the amount of money that’s been dumped into its development, and will end the year being considered an expensive failure. I only dedicated a couple of paragraphs to the idea last time, but I thought it was interesting enough to warrant a longer article.

So let’s talk about that!

Still frame from the second GTA VI trailer showing Jason. — Is everything sunny for *Grand Theft Auto VI*?

To get the most obvious point out of the way, no video game – nor film, TV show, novel, etc. – is a *guaranteed* hit. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sequel to one of the best, most universally-praised titles of all-time. It doesn’t matter if it’s part of a decades-long franchise with a huge fanbase. It doesn’t matter if it’s the most-hyped, most-highly-anticipated title of the year, the decade, or the century! There are *no* sure things in the entertainment industry, and anyone who’s convinced that “it’ll be a success because it’s Grand Theft Auto VI” is working from a faulty assumption.

Want proof? Look at the Star Wars franchise, beginning really with The Last Jedi, and especially with Solo: A Star Wars Story. Look at how viewership for Star Wars has gradually fallen away on streaming. Or take a look at Marvel, and how audience numbers, critic scores, and box office receipts have shrunk since Avengers: Endgame. Neither of these massive franchises has been able to successfully reach the heights they once did. And because of the way the industry (and capitalism in general) operates, it’s not good enough to make “a profit.” You have to make a bigger profit more quickly every time.

Posters for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, and Thunderbolts/The New Avengers. — Three recent Marvel films, which all underperformed.

In the games industry, too, there are countless examples. The long-running Halo series has been floundering since, to be realistic, Halo: Reach’s release fifteen years ago, back in the Xbox 360 era. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was not only a superhero game set in the DC Comics universe, but it was also developed by the established Rocksteady Studios, tapped into the live-service trend, and had a ton of money poured into it by Warner Bros. Games. And it lost $200 million. Star Wars Outlaws failed to break even for Disney and Ubisoft. The once-lauded BioWare has endured a decade-plus of failure, with Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. And dare we mention Sony’s Concord?

Have I made my point?

It doesn’t matter that the series or franchise is beloved and has been a hit in the past. It doesn’t matter who the developers are, or if their earlier works have been popular and well-received. It doesn’t matter if you’re a literal games industry institution. Gaming shifts and changes over time, with players’ expectations evolving, too. Name recognition and hype can only take you so far, and *especially* for a title that makes most of its money from an online mode which relies on long-term play and recurring spending, they aren’t enough to get you over the line.

Shark Cards for sale in Grand Theft Auto V. — Shark Cards for sale in *Grand Theft Auto V*.

The video games industry is not a static, stagnant thing. It’s been almost *thirteen years* since the launch of Grand Theft Auto V, and the way the gaming landscape looks today is pretty different from how it was back then. There’s been a pandemic, which saw loads of people stuck at home with little to do, there’s been the massive growth of a handful of online live-service titles, and there have been some pretty serious price hikes, too. Gaming has grown, but it’s also become more expensive, struggled to retain some of its new audience since the end of lockdown, and many younger players today stick with a handful of games – or literally just *one* – for years at a time.

Grand Theft Auto V has been at the forefront of some of the biggest trends in the industry in recent years. But being an industry leader is not a guarantee of success. Just ask Atari, Sega, or any of the developers of the games I just mentioned. Rockstar and Take-Two have been riding high thanks to Grand Theft Auto V’s online mode. But in 2013, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Grand Theft Auto V was a single-player title with an online mode tacked on. Because of the way the industry has shifted – and because of how successful that online mode became – Grand Theft Auto VI is a fundamentally different kind of title. It’s an online game first, with a single-player campaign being tacked on. A total 180° shift.

Still frame from the first GTA VI trailer showing Lucia holding some cash. — Rockstar and Take-Two are hoping to cash in on *GTA VI’*s online mode.

GTA 6 is, according to reliable reporting, going to be the most expensive video game… ever. With a budget, when accounting for its extensive marketing campaign, that could come close to, or even top, $2 billion… that’s a *lot* of Shark Cards that Rockstar will have to sell for the game to merely break even, let alone begin to turn a profit.

To be clear: that money has been invested with the expectation that there’ll be a huge profit to be made. But the higher the budget, and the longer the game takes to develop, the more sales and the more microtransactions are needed in order for the game to simply make its money back. This is a trap that has tripped up *many* titles over the years; plenty of games could have been profitable if they’d just… toned it down. Star Citizen – one of the few games to have burned through almost as much money as Grand Theft Auto VI – is a case in point: so much money has been spent on development that actually turning a profit when (or if) the game actually launches feels basically impossible at this point.

Headshots of the Take-Two Interactive board of directors circa Dec 2025/Jan 2026. — The Take-Two Interactive board of directors circa January 2026.

There are really three main problems that I can see which could potentially cause Grand Theft Auto VI to stumble, beyond what we’ve already discussed.

The first is that a game with a bigger budget needs to sell more units, and convince more players to pay for microtransactions. But… Grand Theft Auto VI already hits a problem here. There’s a smaller potential audience for the game than there is for its predecessor – or even than there was in 2013 when GTA 5 launched.

At time of writing, there are approximately 120 million PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles out in the wild. Most of those are PS5s, but if you add the combined sales totals together, that’s what you get. That’s compared with close to 190 million PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles that have been sold. And on top of that, recent data from the second half of 2025 shows a serious slowdown in the home console market.

Stock/promo photo of a PlayStation 5 console and DualSense control pad. — There are fewer PS5s out there than PS4s.

In 2013, when Grand Theft Auto V launched for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, there were around 155-160 million of those consoles in homes. And across the lifetime of GTA 5, it’s had access to the 190 million last-gen systems, as well as at least tens of millions of PCs, too. And that massive audience, across three home console generations and PC, is what’s led to it becoming the second-best-selling game of all-time.

With a smaller potential audience at launch than GTA 5 had in 2013, by an order of some forty-ish million, and without the simultaneous PC release that Take-Two and Rockstar decided to cheap out on, will Grand Theft Auto VI have a comparable launch to its predecessor? GTA 5 earned a billion dollars in just three days… will GTA 6 do the same? Or will it take longer to reach that number? If it does take longer, will Take-Two and Rockstar *already* begin to panic?

Still frame from the second GTA VI trailer showing a character driving past the police. — *Grand Theft Auto VI* will have a smaller built-in audience at launch than its predecessor.

This leads into my next point: home consoles are expensive right now, and in a difficult economy in which ordinary people are struggling, that’s being reflected in a serious decline in sales. It now seems beyond unlikely that the PlayStation 5 will *ever* reach, let alone eclipse, the total lifetime sales of the PS4, and even the Nintendo Switch 2, which only launched a few months ago, has just endured a very rocky holiday season everywhere except for Japan. In October and November 2025, home console sales were the lowest they’d been for thirty years. *Thirty years.*

Not since the days of the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, and first PlayStation have home console sales been this low. Think of all the consoles to have been and gone since then: the N64, the Dreamcast, every single Xbox ever… that’s how rough things are in the home console market right now. Even the newly-launched Switch 2 hasn’t been able to drive sales to any great extent.

Front artwork on a Sega Saturn box. — Not since the days of the Sega Saturn have so few home consoles been sold.

There’s not even a question as to why, either. The tail end of the Xbox One/PS4 generation, as well as the middle of the Switch’s life, saw the Covid pandemic, lockdowns, and a lot of folks stuck at home with little to do… and furlough money or a stimulus cheque to spend. Console sales went up, naturally, as people needed to find ways to stay connected with friends, and things to do that didn’t require going outdoors!

But that’s not even the half of it. The real reason why consoles are struggling right now is simple: price hikes. Xbox consoles have gone up in price. PlayStation consoles have gone up in price. And the Switch 2 is significantly more expensive than its predecessor. Even if the economy was working properly for everyday folks, these price hikes would be hard to stomach. But when people are *already* struggling to make ends meet? Luxuries like home consoles, especially overpriced ones, are the first things to be cut from budgets and Christmas wishlists.

Stock image of a Nintendo Switch 2 console. — The Switch 2, in its launch year, hasn’t sold especially well outside of Japan.

This is directly connected to my next point.

I don’t know whether the reports are true, and whether Rockstar and Take-Two genuinely plan to launch Grand Theft Auto VI at a ridiculously inflated price. But $100 is out there, being widely discussed, and it’s not a hot take to say that that could be the target right now. But we’ve already seen the backlash to that kind of pricing.

Mario Kart World, the first game to launch for $80, would probably have been subject to less criticism were it not for the inflated price. And Xbox had to walk back plans to raise some of their prices to $80 after very low pre-order numbers and a massive wave of criticism. So GTA 6 retailing for $100 or even “just” $80 would unquestionably generate a similar backlash, in my view.

Still frame from the second GTA VI trailer showing two people hiding from a helicopter. — Maybe *Grand Theft Auto VI* should be free-to-play…

Combine an unprecedented and unpopular price for the game with the already sky-high price of home consoles – and the fact that a lot of folks would need to pick up a new machine if they want to play the game – and you’ve got the perfect storm. In this economy, can players really afford to pay $750 to pick up a new PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X and Grand Theft Auto VI? And if they can… is it worth it for just one new title? How many players, who’ve already made it this far into the current generation without picking up a new console, are going to be convinced to shell out that much money to play one new game? Because that’s what Rockstar and Take-Two will be asking: it’s not just the price of the game, but also the inflated console prices that players have to take into account.

Finally, Grand Theft Auto VI will potentially run into the same problem that has knocked down many live-service titles: will players feel the need to switch?

Suppose I’m a big GTA fan, and I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto V for years. I have a group of buddies that I play with regularly, I have my in-game money, a base I’ve spent ages perfecting, and a character I’ve levelled up. I know the map, I know the heists, I know the vehicles and the weapons. I’m settled and happy in my GTA 5 server with my friends and my way of playing the game. Why do I need a new game? Why do *I* need to spend potentially hundreds of dollars or pounds on new hardware and a new title when I’m perfectly content with what I already have?

Promo image for Grand Theft Auto V Online. — The way people play games is changing; sticking with one title for years at a time is now commonplace.

This is “the Concord problem.”

Why did no one buy Concord in 2024? It was a well-made hero shooter. Sure, it was a bit generic… but so are a lot of those games, let’s be honest! But what did Concord do to convince fans of Overwatch or Apex Legends that they needed to switch? Fans of those titles, and others, are already settled. And many players nowadays only play one game – they find an online experience they enjoy, be it Roblox, Fortnite, Helldivers II, or the venerable Grand Theft Auto V, and they stick with it.

Even sequels, like Overwatch 2, have struggled. And in the more competitive scene, some recent titles – like Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 – have struggled to convince fans of the series or last year’s entry that they need the upgrade. We’re in a new era of gaming, where players often feel a strong sense of loyalty to a single title, and stick with it. And games companies have recognised that, adding new maps, new challenges, new weapons, and new content to existing games instead of making new ones. Why has Grand Theft Auto VI taken thirteen-plus years to be ready for release? Because Rockstar and Take-Two did exactly that with GTA 5 and its online mode.

Promo image for the KPop Demon Hunters characters in Fortnite. — Many players of online games like *Fortnite* (and *Grand Theft Auto V*) only play that one game.

Will Grand Theft Auto V turn out to be VI’s biggest competitor? That’s one of my big unanswerable questions right now. Fans of GTA 5, many of whom have been playing for literally more than a decade, may not be as inclined to buy a new game as Rockstar and Take-Two are hoping. And unless Rockstar instantly drops support for Grand Theft Auto V the same day VI launches… there’ll still be a reason to stick with the game they know and love.

Suppose Epic Games announced “Fortnite II” tomorrow. Would Fortnite’s players all switch over to the new game? Would Roblox players migrate en masse to a sequel, if one were ever created? Grand Theft Auto V’s player base – especially in the online mode – behaves more like players of other massively-multiplayer live-service games. Folks like myself, who grew up on single-player titles, happily hop from one game to another. But that’s not the way the industry at large is trending in the 2020s. Many gamers stick with the same game for years, and convincing players of a beloved, well-known, and perfectly functional game that they need to buy a new, expensive title – and perhaps new hardware, too – is going to be more of a task than a lot of people appreciate.

Still frame from the first GTA VI trailer showing cars on a busy street. — However good the game ultimately is, will it be enough to convince players of *GTA 5* that they need the upgrade?

You see this phenomenon in basically every genre, and establishing a new title – even in a long-running series – is more difficult in 2026 than it’s ever been before. When Civilization VII launched last year, many players opted to stick with Civ VI instead of jump ship to the new game – and some of those who tried it out drifted back. This happens in strategy games, in shooters, in party and puzzle games… and a title like Grand Theft Auto V, which has been at the top of the charts for over a decade? It could happen here, too.

So those are, as I see it, GTA 6′s three biggest potential issues.

To recap, they are: the smaller install base of current-gen systems, with fewer consoles (and no PC release) meaning the potential audience for Grand Theft Auto VI is smaller even than GTA 5 had in 2013. Then there’s the price of the game itself, combined with the price of buying a brand-new console in 2026 after all of the price hikes, with the general state of the economy being reflected in declining home console sales. And finally, there’s the difficult launch many live-service titles have when the live-service market is already saturated. Convincing GTA 5 players that they need to invest hundreds of dollars in a new system and a new title, when the one they have is still perfectly fun… that’s not an easy task, and it’s one that has tripped up many comparable games in recent years.

Still frame from the second Grand Theft Auto VI trailer showing the main characters sitting on a dock. — Problems may lie ahead for *Grand Theft Auto VI*…

To be clear, I don’t necessarily believe that Grand Theft Auto VI will be “a flop.” I think there’s a lot of hype, a lot of excitement, and even just a lot of interest and curiosity surrounding the game. But there are valid questions about the game’s price in the current economy, and whether players who are convinced to check it out will stick with it if their friends remain on last-gen hardware playing GTA 5.

In 2019, Rockstar and Take-Two hoped that Red Dead Redemption II’s online mode would rival that of Grand Theft Auto V, and they poured a lot of money into it… at first. But when RDR2 didn’t take off in the same way as GTA 5, they pretty quickly abandoned it. Red Dead Redemption II is still playable online, but it hasn’t received major new updates or content since 2021. Could Grand Theft Auto VI end up in the same boat if players don’t jump into the online mode with the enthusiasm Rockstar and Take-Two are hoping for? Even if the game breaks even and begins to turn a profit… how long do the content updates and new missions keep coming for if most players are sticking with GTA 5?

Grand Theft Auto VI will (supposedly) launch in November.

As we look ahead to 2026, which is supposedly the year Grand Theft Auto VI will launch, there may be causes for concern in the Take-Two boardroom. I don’t think it’s a five-alarm fire or anything, but there are a lot of eggs in this particular basket, and a lot of money has been invested in a title which, despite its name, hype, and status, cannot be seen as a sure thing. Though I still consider this an outside possibility, less “likely” than “plausible,” we shouldn’t write off the idea that Grand Theft Auto VI won’t meet its sales targets this year, and might even end up being considered a disappointment.

So I hope this has been interesting, at least! Grand Theft Auto VI was one of the first subjects I ever wrote about here on the website, all the way back in December 2019, and if you’d told me then that we’d be into 2026 with the game still not out… I don’t think I’d have believed it! But here we are, and at time of writing, a November 2026 launch is still on the cards for those of you lucky enough to have bought a PS5 or Xbox Series console before prices got silly. As for me… well, I play on PC. So if Rockstar and Take-Two can ever be bothered to release a port, that’s when I’d consider picking up Grand Theft Auto VI. But not for $100, though!

If and when we get more news on GTA 6, its price, a new trailer… or anything like that, I hope you’ll check in. I daresay I’ll have more to say on this game at some point soon.

Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled to be released in November 2026 for Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5. A PC release has not been confirmed. The Grand Theft Auto series – including GTA 6 and other titles discussed above – is the copyright of Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

The state of PC ports

Sun 14.05.23Dennis

The dreaded “release now, fix later” model that has been adopted by corporations across the games industry has shown up constantly in 2023. Although a number of console titles have been affected, by far the worst impact has been felt on PC. As PC is my primary gaming platform these days, this is something that hits me personally. Today, I wanted to talk a little about the absolute state of many recent PC releases.

Jedi: Survivor, Redfall, Forspoken, Hogwarts Legacy, and The Last Of Us Part 1 should have all been among the biggest PC releases in the first half of 2023. I was genuinely looking forward to several of these games myself. But all of them, despite being massive games with huge budgets backed up by major corporate publishers, have been released in broken, unfinished, and in some cases borderline unplayable states.

It’s Joel from *The Last Of Us*… apparently.

As a rule, I don’t pre-order games. I’ve been burned in the past, and as someone who doesn’t have money to piss away, pre-ordering just doesn’t feel like a good idea any more. But many folks still do, lured in by pre-order exclusive bonuses and the like, and many of these folks – as well as those who picked up titles shortly after launch – have been left severely disappointed in the first half of 2023.

I had hoped, particularly after the Cyberpunk 2077 debacle a couple of years back, that the games industry was beginning to learn its lesson. Just because it’s technically feasible to launch a title in an unfinished state and patch it out later, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea; the damage done by a rocky launch can be difficult to overcome – if not outright impossible. For every success story like No Man’s Sky, there are dozens of titles like Anthem, Aliens: Colonial Marines, or Assassin’s Creed Unity that are too far gone to be salvageable. And even titles that manage to continue development, like Cyberpunk 2077, are forever tainted by the way they launched.

Who knows how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 might’ve made had it been released six months later? The damage that game did to CD Projekt Red has set back the company immeasurably, damaging its share price and tanking its reputation with players. It’s an expensive lesson in how not to release a video game… so why have none of the other corporations in the games industry taken notice?

I didn’t buy Jedi: Survivor this month, even though I’d gone out of my way to save up for it and allocate money for it in my budget. Why? The reason is simple: I read the reviews, saw breakdowns of the PC port of the game, and decided to put my wallet away and wait. Electronic Arts lost what should have been a guaranteed sale because I’m not willing to buy an unfinished product. And make no mistake, that’s what Jedi: Survivor and all the other games listed above are: unfinished.

Cal falls through the map in *Jedi: Survivor*.

Unlike making a game for a console, developing for PC can be a challenge. Take it from someone who built their own PC last year: there are a huge number of different internal components from CPUs to GPUs, RAM to solid-state drives, and beyond. Ensuring perfectly smooth compatibility across an almost infinite range of potential PCs isn’t as easy as getting a game to run on an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, which don’t have this issue of varied internal components. And I get that, I really do.

But that isn’t a good enough excuse. I’d actually rather that a corporation delayed the PC port of a game than release it in a broken state, and I won’t be alone in saying so. It isn’t ideal to break up a title’s release by platform, and it’s something to be avoided if at all possible, but under some circumstances it can be forgiven – especially where smaller, independent studios are concerned.

Characters clipping through each other in *Hogwarts Legacy*.

I used to work in the games industry, and I know or knew dozens of developers at both small and large companies. Developers are great, passionate people who put a lot of energy and love into their work. Developers working on franchises like Star Wars, for instance, are almost always passionate fans who want to bring their story to life as best they can. These bad releases are not a reflection on developers – nor should anyone try to harrass or attack developers because of these broken games.

The fault here lies with games publishers: corporations like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Sony, and Warner Bros. Games. They’re the ones who hold the cards, and developers are forced to work to often unreasonable timelines. Even intense periods of “crunch” are often not enough to salvage a project in time, and a premature launch is almost always forced on a developer by a publisher. That’s undoubtedly what happened in each of these cases.

The fault lies with corporations like EA.

Crappy PC ports used to be fairly commonplace, but as the platform has grown and become more lucrative, that games industry stereotype seemed to be fading away. 2023 has brought it right back, and I’m now in a position where every PC game release is treated with scepticism. As players and fans, we shouldn’t be in the position of assuming a PC release will automatically be buggy, laggy, and an overall worse experience – yet here we are.

I’m not prepared to accept this as being “just” one of the downsides of PC gaming, either. Corporations need to make sure they’re allocating enough time and energy to their PC ports as they are for consoles – and if they can’t guarantee that a game will be in a playable state, the only option is to delay it. Ideally a game would be delayed on every platform, but in some cases it might be okay to go ahead with a console release and merely delay the PC port.

As consumers in this marketplace, all we can do is refuse to participate. It’s on us to tell corporations that we aren’t willing to pay their inflated prices to do the job of their quality assurance team, and that releasing games before they’re finished and before they’re basically playable is not acceptable.

One of the disappointing trends that I’ve seen, not just with PC games in 2023 but with a whole host of “release now, fix later” titles, is players and fans covering for and continuing to support these faceless, greedy corporations. Too many people seem willing to make excuses on behalf of big publishers, essentially doing the job of a marketing team for the. Some games, like Jedi: Survivor, have even received positive reviews on platforms like Steam and Metacritic, even as the reviewer admits that the game is in a poor state and playing it isn’t a great experience. Why say that? What benefit is there?

A couple of examples of positive Steam reviews for *Jedi: Survivor*.

I’m also deeply disappointed in some professional outlets. Practically all of the titles above received positive reviews from professional critics, reviews which in some cases glossed over or outright ignored bugs, glitches, and other issues with the titles in question. There’s a stinking rot at the core of the relationships between some games corporations and certain media outlets – and while I would never accuse anyone of writing a paid-for review, there are clearly incentives given and threats made to keep review scores higher than they deserve to be in some cases.

I also don’t buy the excuse of “pandemic-related disruption,” not any more. That might’ve worked three years ago, but as the World Heath Organisation downgrades covid and society gets back on track across the globe, it’s beginning to stretch credulity to blame any and all problems on the pandemic. That’s a cheap excuse by corporations who don’t want us to know the truth: they’re greedily publishing unfinished games to grab as much cash as possible for as little work and investment as possible. That’s always been the case, but it’s been turned up to eleven in recent years.

At the end of the day, this is all about money.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this trend disappearing any time soon. For me, all PC releases are now suspect, and I will be checking out multiple reviews and tech breakdowns of the latest titles before I even consider parting with my money. I would advise all PC players to take the same approach – and to not shy away from calling out games corporations that misbehave. No other industry could get away with this – not in entertainment nor in any other sector. We wouldn’t take this kind of behaviour from other corporations and companies – so why should we be forced to put up with it with our games?

It is infinitely better to delay a game, continue to work on the issues it may have, and only release it when it’s ready. This is a lesson that the games industry really ought to have learned by now – but I guess we’ll have to do whatever we can to hammer the point home. Why should we accept low-quality, broken, unfinished games with promises of fixes and patches to come? We shouldn’t – and this awful trend of crappy PC ports has to stop.

All titles discussed above are the copyright of their respective developer, studio, and/or publisher. Some screenshots and promo images courtesy of IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

The “live service” spiral

Mon 19.07.21Sun 13.11.22Dennis

Have you ever wondered why so many so-called “live service” games fail to live up to expectations and ultimately get shut down? Or why so many of these types of titles are actively despised by players all around the world?

I’ve lost count of the number of times an exciting-sounding game has been announced only for me to end up sighing with disappointment when I hear the dreaded words “live service.” To many players, those words have come to epitomise all of the worst things about gaming as a hobby in 2021, and it’s got to a point where a game has to offer something truly exceptional before I’ll even consider stepping over the live service hurdle to give it a shot.

This is how “live service” games make me feel!

I’ve talked on a number of occasions about the “release now, fix later” business model that has corrupted the modern games industry. In short, games companies see the internet as an easy way to roll out patches and fixes after a game has been released, thanks to the ubiquity of internet connectivity on every gaming platform nowadays, so they figure they can release a game in an incomplete state and fix it after launch. Though games like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Cyberpunk 2077 prove that this isn’t a phenomenon unique to live services, these kinds of titles are almost universally afflicted.

Many live service games launch with a “roadmap” – another dreaded gaming neologism that rightly turns off anyone who hears it. In lieu of actual gameplay features, levels, and content, the game arrives in a threadbare state with a so-called roadmap, which is little more than a euphemism for promises of updates and new content. All too often, though, the promised updates never arrive because the game gets shut down. The roadmap leads to a dead end.

How’s that roadmap working out for you, *Anthem*?

If a game felt complete – with enough characters, levels, and whatever else it needs – promises of further content would be no bad thing. It would give the game’s fans something to look forward to while they enjoyed what was available at launch. But it’s rare that a live service feels complete at launch, and most roadmaps end up promising content that should have been part of the original game.

So we come to what I’m calling the “live service spiral.” Here’s how it goes: a live service game launches to mediocre reviews from critics and players, with many criticising its threadbare state and unfinished nature. Though there is a roadmap promising further content to come at some nebulous future date, many players who were considering picking up the game instead adopt a “wait-and-see” approach, biding their time until the promised updates arrive and the game is actually worth playing. But this leads to lower-than-expected sales, which in turn means that the publisher panics and decides to cancel the roadmap, ending development on the game and cancelling planned updates and patches. The game’s remaining players drift away, disappointed, to await the next title and begin the cycle again.

The first *Destiny* game was an early example of this phenomenon.

In 2021, having seen so many of these live services stumble out of the gate and get unceremoniously shut down shortly thereafter, I have less and less sympathy for players who still believe the hype and get hooked in with promises. If a game isn’t good enough when it launches to be worth my time – and more importantly, my money – why should I give it either on the back of vague promises? And if you choose to invest in a live service game knowing how many have come and gone in the blink of an eye, why should I offer you my sympathy when the next one follows the pattern and also fails?

So many games have been in this position. Just in the last few years we can call to mind titles like Anthem, Star Wars Battlefront, WWE 2K20, Destiny 1, and probably Marvel’s Avengers within the next few months. So there are more than enough examples to serve as warnings that this business model is not worth investing in.

*Marvel’s Avengers* could be next on the chopping block.

Here’s the basic problem that games industry managers and executives can’t seem to wrap their corporate heads around: for every Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto Online there are a dozen or more Anthems or Destinys. For every title that adopts a live service model and makes a success of it, there are dozens more that fail. And if a company isn’t willing to put money and effort into creating a title that players actually want to spend their time playing, desperately chasing the faltering live service trend will always be a losing proposition.

Many live service games were doomed from the very moment they were conceived in the mind of a business executive. Someone with precious little understanding of the industry looked at Fortnite or Rainbow Six Siege, and without knowing the first thing about those games nor realising they’re about a decade too late, said to their team “make me one of those.” From that very moment the game was dead on arrival – but nobody realised it, or at least nobody had the balls to tell the publisher.

Not every game will see the success of titles like *Fortnite*. Companies need to set realistic expectations.

All the way through development and through the extensive marketing campaign that followed, dedicated developers tried their best to build a game to the specifications of some moron in a suit, and it was all for nothing. All of that time, effort, and money was pissed away chasing after a concept that’s already played out for a company that never understood it in the first place. In many cases, “crunch” and other abusive working practices saw developers and other employees suffer actual quantifiable harm, all for the sake of a meaningless, useless piece of shit game like Anthem. Imagine working yourself half to death for the sake of Anthem, only to see the game shut down months after it launched.

Hopefully the backlash some of these games generate, combined with lacklustre sales and continued failures to meet expectations, will see this business model slowly start to die off. But all of us need to be very careful about throwing our money into any live service game that comes along in future. Companies have proven time and again that they see these games as disposable and they’re willing to cut and run from a failing project no matter how many players get screwed over in the process. If they treat their own games with such little respect, why should we buy into such a model?

We have to find a way to break the live service spiral, to show games companies that this business model is no longer viable. Some noteworthy failures, like those mentioned above, will start to cause a rethink in corporate boardrooms, but the process needs to accelerate. Not just for the sake of us having better games to play, but for the physical and mental health of those in the industry working on these titles.

All titles mentioned above are the copyright of their respective studio, developer, and/or publisher. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.