The video games industry’s obsession with live service games seems to be coming to an end, as Warner Bros. admits it lost $300 million chasing Fortnite.
Given how much video games cost to make, publishers are always looking for ways to increase the odds of their games being a success, which usually means sequels or licensed titles that can avoid the risk of creating something entirely new.
Whenever there’s a new genre or bandwagon they also try and jump onto that, in the hope it will be a shortcut to success. Back in the early 2000s, every publisher made their own MMO, to rival World Of Warcraft, before eventually realising that there just wasn’t room in the market (or people’s free time) for more than a couple of successful ones.
20 years on and almost exactly the same thing has happened with live service games trying to chase the success of Fortnite. And after the failure of Suicide Squad, Concord, and MultiVersus it seems that big publishers are finally starting to give up.
Warner Bros. already admitted it lost $200 million on the disastrous Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League and now it’s revealed that Super Smash Bros. style fighting game MultiVersus, which is also a free-to-play live service game, has cost them another $100 million.
The push for live service titles – despite single-player game Hogwarts Legacy being by far the company’s biggest hit – was driven by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who has no games industry experience and is not the sort of person to admit mistakes in public.
Nevertheless, in the company’s latest financial call he said that Warner now intends to make less video games overall and concentrate on just four franchises.
‘We have four strong and profitable game franchises with loyal, global fans – Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, Game Of Thrones and DC, in particular Batman,’ said Zaslav.
‘We are focusing our development efforts on those four core franchises with proven studios to improve our success ratio.’
Although there was no talk about MultiVersus being shutdown that was certainly the implication; while emphasising Batman over DC was no doubt a nod to the failure of Suicide Squad, and to a lesser extent the Batman-less Gotham Knights.
In fact, it’s been almost a decade now since a big budget, non-VR Batman video game, which seems a baffling state of affairs to be in. Although the talk of using ‘proven studios’ does increase the chances of Arkham Asylum creators Rocksteady working on a new title.
Hogwarts Legacy 2 is already in development and while soft reboot Mortal Kombat 1 fared notably worse than other recent entries there’s no doubt another one is already underway.
The only mystery is what Warner might be planning for Game Of Thrones, which has never had a big budget console adaptation. It might seem an obvious fit for Shadow Of Mordor developer Monolith Productions but they’re currently working on a single-player Wonder Woman game, which was announced in 2021 but still hasn’t been shown in public.
Has Sony given up on live service games?
Meanwhile, over at Sony, there’s also a reticence to admit that the focus on live service games was a mistake, especially as it’s still unclear who’s idea it was – previous PlayStation boss Jim Ryan or current co-CEO Hermen Hulst.
At one point, Sony was going to release 12 internally developed live service games by 2026 but so far they’ve only managed to launch one: Concord, the biggest flop in the company’s history.
Sony has never talked in public about where their plans are now and, as with Warner, no exec wants to admit they were wrong, but a quote from their latest earnings results seems to suggest a much more sensible approach.
‘We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period, that combines single-player games, which are our strength and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP, with live service games that pursue upside, while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release,’ said senior vice president for finance and IR, Sadahiko Hayakawa.
This is exactly what we and most other outside observers have been saying all along: a good quality single-player game will almost certainly be a success to some degree, while a live service game is far less predictable – no matter how good or bad it might be.
Hayakawa said that lessons would be learnt from both Helldivers 2 (which was developed externally but published by Sony) and Concord, with the implication that Bungie’s Marathon would be Sony’s next live service game and that it would receive a lot more pre-release testing and betas than Concord.
‘We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system,’ said Hayakawa.
Sony has released very few new single-player games in the last few years, with nothing it considered to be a ‘major’ title in this entire financial year (Astro Bot, despite its critical acclaim has so far only sold 1.5 million copies).
Ghost Of Yōtei was announced recently, for release in 2025, but that’s been the first major first party game announcement in over a year and it’s unclear how long the wait will be for another one.
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