Concord, the latest game in Sony’s ongoing live service salvo, came out a week and a half ago. Already, the writing was on the wall. There was no buzz. It just didn’t have the juice. Still, nobody was prepared for what happened today: Sony announced that it plans to pull the game from stores and offer refunds to anybody who bought it. Concord was smothered as it clambered out of the cradle – the ultimate object lesson in what happens when triple-A behemoths commit to live service for live service’s sake, despite the ever-increasing production demands of big-budget video games.
Concord faltered for many reasons. Despite what the most irritatingly ill-informed people on the internet are saying, diversity didn’t do it in. Instead, eight years ago the game set off down what would become an impossible path, iterating on hero shooter concepts that were in vogue at the time and arriving looking polished but feeling rusty. In the time since Concord began development, Overwatch rose and fell, the battle royale boom redefined multiplayer shooters and petered out, extraction shooters became a thing, and an endless procession of competitive shooter hopefuls crashed and burned while a small handful – Valorant, Apex Legends, and Escape from Tarkov among them – carved out enduring fiefdoms.
Concord entered a massively competitive playing field feeling dated on day one, having to justify itself not just against other shooters, but popular live service games in general, whose audiences only tend to rove when their friends start sniffing at greener pastures. This is why Sony’s plan to release 12 live service games by 2026 – which got cut in half late last year – never made much sense. Live-service games do not automatically print money. On the contrary, between regular upkeep and constant streams of new content, they are hugely costly, as even titans like Roblox can attest. Attracting an audience – especially with no immediately-apparent hook beyond triple-A production values – is hard, and keeping it is even harder. Perhaps Sony imagined one or two smash live-service hits would ultimately balance out the odd miss here or there, but at this scale – with so many careers on the line – that’s an unconscionably risky gamble.
This is hardly a problem exclusive to competitive live-service games. Starfield, which shared a similarly lengthy incubation period to Concord, launched last year feeling like it emerged from a time capsule. Suicide Squad, which attempted to satisfy lovers of both traditional narrative-driven games and live-service grind-a-thons, only succeeded in letting everyone down. Layoffs recently followed. The latter found itself clinging to the wreckage of basically the same Titanic as Concord: Beyond triple-A production values, it couldn’t justify its own existence.
And yet, it’s little wonder why major video game publishers keep trying to squeeze blood from this particular stone. With triple-A games taking more time, money, and manpower than ever to make, they want the biggest, longest-lasting return on investment possible. But big publishers’ approach to live service is an unsustainable solution born of unsustainable development practices. The arms race to make bigger, longer games – with more impossibly-detailed hallways that most players won’t even blink at – is a dead end. It has been all along. Papering over that with a business model that only appears to generate infinite revenue will not, in the overwhelming majority of cases, fix this fundamental problem. Most games in this mold will struggle to break even, and even the success stories will fall into the live-service death spiral, a miasmatic pit of community toxicity that burns out developers and inspires reactive design decisions over anything truly inspired or forward thinking.
This is not to say that new live-service games cannot succeed; you just have to be creative about it in ways that big companies are loath to embrace. Most indies now launch ambitious, community-driven games in early access – real early access, where major features and chunks of content are missing, rather than money-grubbing “pre-order now!” early access that does not actually allow for feedback or substantial changes before release. Valve, which played a pioneering role in giving developers the tools to do this, is now taking cues from the scene it’s cultivated, stealth-dropping its own hero shooter, Deadlock, in earlier-than-early access and attracting a sizable player base in the process.
But this approach is antithetical to major publishers’ addictions to secrecy and long lead times, as well as endless marketing drip feeds and elaborate pre-order bundles. Moreover, it still doesn’t address the elephant in the room: Big-budget game development is not sustainable, nor does it serve an apparent need. Games don’t have to be enormous; most players only experience a fraction of them. Triple-A fidelity has become a fool’s errand; games from more than a decade ago still look great now. Developers at envelope-pushing studios like Spider-Man developer Insomniac do not believe players notice the fruits of billowing budgets -- at least, not enough to make the additional investment worthwhile.
It’s a cliche to ask for shorter games with worse graphics, but I don’t think there’s any other actual solution to this problem. Triple-A games have become too costly, both in terms of money and a harder-to-measure though far more important human toll. As Concord and other games like Destiny 2 have shown us, live service is not a silver bullet. In fact, it can exacerbate these issues. Every major release is now a potential catastrophe – a bomb waiting to go off, the fuse of which was lit the better part of a decade ago. The triple-A video game industry can’t go on like this. If it keeps blowing up its own foundations, it will destroy itself. Change is still possible, but as we’ve learned from Concord, it needed to happen yesterday. That’s no longer possible, so I guess we’ll have to settle for tomorrow.
