Beyond Concord: What Lies Ahead for Live Service Games?

The disaster of Concord and its failure to attract the attention of players has been dissected and examined by most gaming journalists and industry experts in great detail.

Does Sony’s renewed focus on single player games mark a global shift in game making?

The disaster of Concord and its failure to attract the attention of players has been dissected and examined by most gaming journalists and industry experts in great detail.

While some have questioned how a project with so much time and funding could fail (we have heard numbers spanning from 4-8 years and figures up to 400 million USD), others have followed the misfortunes of the team that developed Concord after the game was scrapped and its servers went offline.

However, the predicament that Concord faced isn’t unique to the live service game with an unexpectedly large sale price and a marketing approach that just failed to materialize as most makers of live service games have struggled to retain players of late.

For instance, this summer’s extremely popular XDefiant is estimated to have lost nearly 7,00,000 of its 2.5 million players (32% of the playerbase) in June, a month after launch. In the nearly 6 months since launch, the game has gained players only in the months of August and November 2024.

Similarly, Warner Bros’ gaming division has recently posted losses of nearly USD 200 million after the underperformance of the live service game Multiversus and the online centric Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions. While the former was in the beta phase for nearly a year with a strong, dedicated gaming community, it currently enjoys just 1,700 concurrent players on Steam and the latter, despite being available for free as part of September’s PlayStation Plus essential bouquet, has failed to find traction in spite of a fair broom flying competitive experience.

The failure of the games on this list highlights a major problem that plagues live service games – their inability to remain attractive and offer value for loyal/engaged players. It is essential that players view these games as not just places to commit time and effort to but also as sites of being where they find meaning and community while at the same time begin to think of in-game acts as habits and rituals.

However, that transition isn’t possible if game makers think of live service games as smash and grab opportunities. If one were to look at two such free-to-play (f2p) games from this year Indus Battle Royale (made by SuperGaming) and Squad Busters (made by Supercell) the difference in their approach to player engagement becomes clear.

In the case of Indus there was a lot of time and money spent to create hype before the game’s launch but little was done to assuage the players or keep them interested after the game’s lackluster launch. Squad Busters too had a less than perfect launch as most fans found little meaning and almost no skill-based value in the game.

There were too many inconsistencies as players lacked clarity between fusion characters, mega characters, and also how specific elements of the star-up mechanism worked. However, the game makers were invested in offering value to players and in less than 45 days (since launch) completely overhauled the game’s elements.

Gone were the megas – replaced by skins, in came some Transformer characters (Optimus Prime and ELITA-1) that were available for free to most players willing to grind and the game offered renewed meaning and joy to players.

Today, months on, the game is seldom not busy and you rarely ever face issues in matchmaking, Indus on the other hand lies forgotten – as its social media tries to create buzz while conveniently overlooking the negative content and reviews surrounding the game’s launch.

The message is clear – one firm chose to reach out to their players with utmost transparency and is focused on improving the game while the other chooses to ignore criticism and feedback.

At a time when the metrics for measuring a game’s success have drastically changed (number of concurrent players, streamed content about the game, and posts on social media) it is important to realize that players’ time and efforts can no longer be taken for granted. Thus, practices like developing detailed monetization strategies and systems have neither meaning nor purpose if the games they are part of offer no reason for players to return the next day.

The live service bubble has burst – and once again there is only value for great gaming experiences and games that offer emotional connections and meaning to their players.