8 Reasons The Video Game Industry Is Headed For Disaster (Again)

8. Live Services

Contrary to what the likes of EA and Activision believe, time is not an infinite resource.

Ever since Bungie popularised the model in 2014 with Destiny, publishers have been infiltrating the market with their own alternative 'Live Service' games, vast playgrounds filled to the brim with an unending gameplay loop meant to keep its player base running the hamster wheel until the end of days.

The Division, Anthem, even Ubisoft's flagship single-player series Assassin's Creed: all of them have taken cues from Destiny in pursuit of their own slice of the pie, ignorant of the unsustainable saturation resulting from total homogenisation.

Diminishing returns is all that awaits any of the inevitable copycats to come, as the available pool of potential 'one-game' players shrinks until sooner or later, the bubble bursts. Even for the fortunate few able to sink hundreds, potentially thousands, of hours into several such games at once, familiarity will inevitably lead to fatigue.

Hell, if BioWare's beleaguered Anthem is anything to go by, the downward trend has already begun.