Gaming is in a strange place. Development times and production budgets are ballooning, so live-service games are stepping in to replace the shorter release cycle, offering something to fill in the gaps and promising a neverending well of money for publishers to make. While goliaths likeCall of Dutyare shovelled out yearly, most shooters now offer years and years of support via expansions and seasonal updates, whether it’sFortnite,Destiny, orCounter-Strike. For most, it’s an unsustainable bubble that we’re watching burst in real-time, but it’s also created new expectations for gamers that are bleeding out across the medium as a whole.
Single-player games ‘fail’ and ‘die’ when their player count dwindles, despite this being completely normal for something you can finish and never go back to. Multiplayer games, especially live-service ones, are designed to keep you coming back, so they never end. But single-player games are designed to tell stories that wrap up by the credits. There’s often not a hook to keep you playing for months after launch. Regardless, that’s an expectation now, used in console war trite to push narratives about competing studios.
Then we have the post-launch update period.Baldur’s Gate 3has added a lot since it left early access in August, likea fully-fledged epilogue scene, but it’s not a live-service game. Those updates will eventually cease as Larian Studios shifts its focus almost entirely to the next big thing. That’s normal, games update and release DLC and expansions, and then the studio moves on, but we’re seeing another expectation crop up - keeping that support going.Animal Crossing: New Horizonsreceived updates for just under two years and yet, nearly two years after Nintendo announced it was moving on, people are still saying it was “abandoned”.
The conversation typically goes something like this, ‘I can’t believe Nintendo abandoned New Horizons so quickly! This year has been really dry.’ The idea is that stopping updates is to squander potential. But New Horizons wasn’t an unfinished game, it was a complete package that Nintendo was simply adding to. None of those updates were remotely necessary. Sure, they were good additions, but the game was fine without them - the desperation for more is just a result of ignoring what’s right in front of you.
Had Nintendo continued to support New Horizons for the foreseeable future because of its popularity and enormous success, the studio would be trapped between the live-service cogs as the machine whirred on unendingly, stifling all innovation. We’ve seen it at Activision, where the success of Warzone malformed into a raging wildfire. Instead of putting it out, entire studios were thrown into the blaze. Ever wonder why we don’t have new Crash and Spyro games? Because the developers were dragged away to help keep the Warzone lights on.
Naughty Dog had the sense to step back and look at the wider picturebefore it was too late. Its The Last of Us: Factions spin-off, intended to be one of PlayStation’s many live-service games,was cancelled. The reason being that, if it was a success, Naughty Dog would be tasked with keeping it updated, funneling resources into its support and leaving no room to develop the prestige single-player games it’s known for. The live-service machine is all-consuming which is exactly why it’s unsustainable. To keep these games going, studios have to put everything into them, so if those games collapse, the entire house of cards comes tumbling down.
Would you rather play the same Animal Crossing for a decade with minimal updates, or wait for a new one?
New Horizons was not abandoned. It was not cut short. It’s not unfinished. Nintendo had the foresight to see that capitalising on its success by transforming it into a live-service game would drain the studio dry and strip away its potential to develop something new.
This is an incredibly normal phenomenon, something that we were accustomed to for decades before the live-service behemoth reared its ugly head. But with those new expectations, many see popularity as a reason to shackle developers to single games, failing to understand that doing so would bury the potential that led to hits like New Horizon in the first place.
