It was striking to see actor Ben Starr stride out onto the Summer Game Fest stage at the weekend to give a double-thumbs up in support of Fortnite – though perhaps not for the reasons Epic would have liked. For many years, the battle royale has been the Polaris that CEOs and shareholders have steered their ships towards, representing the promise of steady success and a ready audience built around a single game. That daydream curdled in the post-pandemic era, when Fortnite became the focal point of metaverse mania: a grand philosophy for digital shopping malls that inspired gabbled essays from executives, yet failed to coalesce into anything tangible.
Now the money which fuelled that movement has been funnelled into the next pipedream that end users don’t particularly want: large-language models. And the games industry is in the midst of a painful contraction that has seen studios collapse left and right. Among the most shocking headlines was the news that Epic was laying off 1,000 employees after a significant downturn in Fortnite engagement. “We’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season,” Tim Sweeney told staff at the time.
It’s telling, then, that Epic is now leaning on the Starr power of an actor made famous by his roles in two single-player RPGs – Final Fantasy 16 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The worm has turned, and solo experiences are proving to be a more dominant cultural force in games than many publishers had reckoned with. Today, Fortnite is feeding on that force to bring extra attention to its content machine.
“It has all been building to this moment,” Starr said of the in-game Shattered event that kicked off in Fortnite on Friday. But it’s fair to say that even the most successful live-service developers have struggled to deliver satisfying story conclusions while constantly stringing players along with new activities. Arguably the greatest mistake Bungie made with Destiny 2 was putting out The Final Shape, a well-loved expansion which tied off many long-running plot threads and offered players a natural stepping off point. The game never recovered, and is soon to enter life support after its final major update.
Throughout last week’s Summer Game Fest show, other live-service announcements were notable largely by their absence. Those that did appear were, in the main, ancient survivors of the MMO wars that followed the launch of World of Warcraft. Jagex was there with Dragonwilds, the survival spinoff from RuneScape which portrayed players chopping down trees and hacking at rocks – just as they did a quarter of a century ago while leeching off their parents’ credit cards.
Similarly, the announcement of Guild Wars 3 relied on old memories to stir up enthusiasm. ArenaNet showed little – a craggy climb, a brief ride through a field on the back of a horned, luminous beast – but promised the “next evolution of the MMORPG”, a genre it believes has “stagnated”. That might resonate with those who remember what Guild Wars 2 did for the genre: freeing up quests from dialogue boxes while allowing players to stumble across battles and events dynamically. But it rather makes a mockery of the millions upon millions spent in pursuit of new live-service franchises this past decade – much of it exclusively papering the cutting room floor.
The last few years of publisher cutbacks have smothered a number of new studios in the crib. Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi is facing the likely closure of his company, for instance, despite Gang of Dragon’s reveal at last year’s Game Awards. Those new studios that have survived appear to be making clearly scoped games with a beginning and an end. One example is That’s No Moon’s Crossfire: a third-person shooter with an impressively malleable cover mechanic revealed at SGF.
Meanwhile, more established studios are pivoting away from live-service. Remedy – who, fun fact, put out its own Crossfire shooter a few years back – was represented at SGF by Control Resonant, which melds an architecturally-impossible Manhattan with mind-bending mystery. The developer’s own live-service effort, FBC: Firebreak, has already been put to bed just a year after launch.
The latest Nintendo Direct told much the same story. Rayman Legends Retold offers couch co-op only, while the Vampire Survivors take on battle royale maxes out at eight players – a rebuttal to the steep server-filling demands of the genre that dominated charts just half a decade ago. DayZ and Final Fantasy 14 made appearances too – but there were no apparent successors jostling for their crowns.
Even Nintendo’s flagship competitive live-service game, Splatoon, has been redirected in favour of single-player storytelling. With Splatoon Raiders, the company emphasised the challenge of overwhelming combat encounters fought against seaside wildlife armed with pots and pans – rather than sweaty showdowns with other players online.
This year’s Xbox Games Showcase, meanwhile, was a reminder that disastrous launches are the norm in the world of live-service. Fallout 76 has enjoyed a transformative turnaround – one that began in the pandemic after Bethesda repopulated its wasteland with NPCs, and gained momentum with the arrival of Amazon’s TV show. But before that expensive resuscitation, many believed it was dead-on-arrival.
Then there’s Sea of Thieves – Rare’s only publicly known live-service project, after nine years of development on Everwild ended in cancellation. The developer has long since embraced Sea of Thieves as a piratically themed hangout space – but that took a long while to manifest, since the game’s strengths were originally buried beneath the common live-service curse of repetitive loops and progression grind.
And of course, Xbox spared a spot for The Elder Scrolls Online – depicting a Thieves Guild member nabbing a potion from a market stall. But I’m old enough to remember when stealing from vendors was impossible in ESO. The omission of stealing mechanics caused enough player upset that developer Zenimax made sweeping changes to the very fundamentals of its game, in the hopes of winning over Skyrim diehards.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that years of fumbling and catastrophe are inherent to the process of building a live-service game to last. And in today’s industry, few publishers can spare the funding to churn through a sustained period of review bombings and near-empty servers. It simply isn’t worth the risk of financial ruin.
Perhaps the healthiest option would be for the games industry to accept that the “forever game” – the one that tops charts perpetually, and entertains without end – simply doesn’t exist. But in the absence of healthy thinking, we’re looking at a different sort of forever game: the classic single-player story that keeps on coming back. Hello, Halo: Campaign Evolved – the latest redo of a game that gets a facelift every decade. Once more onto the beach that welcomes Master Chief to The Silent Cartographer. Another ride around the ringworld where grand-theft-Warthog and casual grenade play are mixed to such spectacular effect.
You may have picked up on the fact that Halo Studios isn’t building a multiplayer mode this time around. And who can blame it? If even Fortnite can’t live up to the promise of Fortnite, why bother?
Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs.
