The video game industry layoffs of the past few years have shown us that big-budget game development is unsustainable: all that crunch and ballooning costs don’t necessarily equal commercial success on the scale companies demand. Even when they do, this won’t prevent companies from axing everyone who worked on the game anyway. Today, the big brains at corporate seem to think the solution for this is more live service. I’d argue the solution is the opposite: more one-and-done mid-tier games, adequately ambitious; games that stick with you without consuming every moment of your life.
Some quotes by Warner Brothers games head J.B. Perrette, cited by GameSpot, are making the rounds today, where he talks about the company’s plans following the poor performance of the contentious Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Perrette told attendees at a Morgan Stanley event that WB will be leaning into mobile, free-to-play, and live service games, saying, “Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?”
Let’s put aside that Hogwarts, a single-player game, was financially successful for WB (though also an eternal stain on their souls), whereas Suicide Squad, a live service game, was not. Live service seems to be the trend of the moment, though results are mixed, with the breakout success of Helldivers 2 standing next to struggling games like Suicide Squad and Overwatch 2. If you want to look from a purely business perspective, live service makes a certain sense: in a tough time for video game investment, that steady drip of money from committed players is potentially more reliable than counting on a huge number of single purchases. That players are growing tired of live service games’ grosser monetization strategies, or not wanting to dedicate ever-increasing time to one game, doesn’t seem to factor into many game companies’ plans. Perrette notes that WB, with its stable of—sigh–franchises and IP, is in a good position to leverage all that into Endless Content. As GameSpot points out, Disney is taking a similar tactic with its recent partnership with Epic Games to bring its own plethora of Content to live-service battle royale Fortnite.
The feeble imaginations of the men who hold the purse strings think they can make live service happen by shoving the names they own down everyone’s throats. Since they hold said purse strings, there is, to an extent, no stopping them. Luckily, they aren’t the only game in town when it comes to games; they might be able to suck up all the money and dominate all the marketing, but there’s a universe of other, smaller games out there, even as layoffs wrack the games industry and studios fall by the dozens.
Recently, I’ve been playing The Thaumaturge, a historical RPG from developer Fool’s Theory, published by 11 bit, which came out yesterday. Taking place in Warsaw in 1905, you play as Wiktor Szulski, a thaumaturge who has the ability to see and capture “salutors,” demons that attach themselves to people based on their character defects. Your time is split between running around a lovely isometric diorama of the city using Wiktor’s powers of perception to solve mysteries, primarily by clicking on triggered items until the game solves them for you, and using your captured salutors to fight turn-based battles.
I’ve spent about 8 hours with it so far, wandering leisurely through its slow-burn story and getting completely wrecked in its combat (which, judging by reviews, seems like a me problem). It’s a little janky in spots: the voice acting can be uneven, and the detective gameplay can rely too much on methodically pointing-and-clicking, but I’m charmed by its blend of history and folklore and all the ambitious things it seems to be trying to do through its different systems, even if they don’t always mesh for me. I love its setting and the topics it tackles, even when they’re rooted in a time period I’m unfamiliar with; chatting over the day’s events with Wiktor’s buddy Rasputin is a total delight. The salutor design is evocative of some of The Witcher’s coolest monsters. (Also, like The Witcher, there are haircuts.) The dialogue options–affected by your stats in various areas–offset my feeling that the mystery-solving is a little simplistic in execution; even if I just followed the breadcrumbs into a conversation, there are so many ways that conversation could play out, based on my other choices.
It keeps reminding me of 2018’s Vampyr, another historical game starring a guy with a beard who wants to be helpful. That game also lost me a bit in its efforts to blend its setting and interpersonal relationships with its combat. Both games are reaching at something ambitious that doesn’t always work for me, but add up to experiences I find hugely compelling, maybe especially for the reasons I feel they fall short. Both feel ambitious in a human way; I can feel the effort of real people trying to make something challenging, having an intriguing vision and specific interests that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and which they don’t always fully pull off, but feel unique and stick with me.
I would take 100 of these games over a live service slog through an established IP. I can’t speak to whether that proposal makes financial sense, but as game developer Sam Barlow said on Twitter, “I just want to spend a few hours feeling closer to another human being's experience and if possible experience something transcendental. Is that too much to ask?” Live service brand tie-ins are also, of course, made by people, who surely work very hard and put their all into them, but these games are also the brain children of corporate goons who want to make shareholder profit first and games second. A good game doesn’t have to be one you play forever, or one with an endless universe to explore, or one where horse balls shrink with the weather. It can be a weird, interesting, thoroughly adequate game you play once, maybe revisit in a few months or years to explore things you missed. It can leave its mark on you through your memories or emotions, not in the sheer volume of the limited minutes of your life it gobbles up.
Perrette’s comments feel dire, but they ultimately don’t matter much. WB’s massive budgets and dumb ideas are outnumbered by how many other people make all kinds of other games. There are more one-person or small team indie games than you’ll ever be able to get to. There are more The Thaumaturges out there than IP WB can own. We don’t have to live in an always-on universe of Harry Potter if we don’t want to. We can just go play something else.
