XDefiant – another failure to add to the list (Ubisoft)
A reader is worried that publishers like Sony and Ubisoft will destroy themselves before they give up trying to copy Fortnite and other live service games.
While some people complain about Sony’s lack of announcements recently, or Xbox’s apparent cluelessness, I think the real problem in the last few years is that it’s shattered any illusion that the people in charge of games companies – at least those in the West – have any idea what they’re doing or any concern other than the shortest of short term gains.
Obviously, all these companies care about is money, that’s no kind of revelation, but I think the shock has been that none of them have any concern about maintaining the industry at large. They’d let the whole thing burn down rather than make the tiniest effort to do something that doesn’t instantly and directly benefit them. Short-sighted isn’t the word, not when someone like Sony stops making games and then wonders why less people are buying their consoles.
Rather than address the problem of games costing too much to make they instead just stop making them and sack hundreds of people. They replace talented artists with AI but never think of doing the same with their brain dead CEOs. In short, they make the worst decision possible at every moment and absolutely never learn their lessons.
This, of course, brings me to live service titles. It’s been seven years now since Fortnite Battle Royale became the biggest game on the planet and still it hasn’t got through to publishers that copying its success isn’t easy, not through all that time and all the dozens, if not hundreds, of failed copycats.
It’s very hard not to think about the Far Cry 3 quote about the definition of insanity being to do the same thing again and again and expect a different result.
No matter how big the pile of evidence gets, that it’s near impossible to manufacture a hit live service game, especially not on the scale of Fortnite, they keep trying. And almost always with lame copies of games that already exist, instead of anything actually new.
This week we had XDefiant (a bland Call Of Duty clone) throwing in the towel as well as FoamStars (a bland Splatoon clone) and before that Concord (a bland Overwatch clone). They spent eight years making that last one, and XDefiant seemed to have hundreds of people working on it, and yet nobody thought that maybe these weren’t the most appealing games in the world?
I am not the first person to point these problems out and yet it never seems to have occurred to anyone at the publishers. Execs who are no doubt being paid millions a year to make big decisions and who think they understand the industry.
I can only imagine these execs and bosses have dollar signs in their eyes, like some old cartoon, and it’s blinding them to the reality of how difficult live service games are to get right and how it doesn’t make sense to waste time and money on something that has such a small chance of success, versus something that does.
Not only has the prospect of making the next Fortnite turned them mad, but it’s made them blind to the damage they’re doing to the games industry. Sony has wasted almost the entire generation on live service games and even if it’s made a U-turn recently (which we don’t know for sure) it’ll take them another five years or so to get anything close to normal again.
Or consider Ubisoft, who are already in talks with Tencent and with every new failure their bargaining position gets worse and worse. These companies are destroying themselves in their obsession with making live service games and in turn the industry itself.
When Ubisoft are gone the number of independent third party publishers will be tiny compared to just five years ago. Sony has risked their market position on a stupid gamble everyone else could see would never succeed. You might say that they’re only lucky Microsoft isn’t much in the way of competition but at least they haven’t got the live service fever that everyone else seems to have.
The obsession is ruining everyone that gives into it and I’m very worried where all this is going to end, because at this point it’s beginning to seem like only going bust or another industry crash is going to stop this madness.
By reader Ishi
Concord – are lessons being learned? (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
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