10 Failed Live Service Video Games With Shockingly Short Lifespans

Is the live service model dead yet?

It’s not a great mystery why so many video game publishers and developers are keen to get a solid live service game off the ground. Keeping players engaged means a product that brings in money for longer and that’s good for everybody.

Well, so long as the game is actually good and people in fact want to keep playing it. The financial side of producing live service titles might be a no-brainer but to expect to maintain an audience developers need to provide a steady stream of new content, interesting gameplay systems, and something to set itself apart from the pile of other live service games already saturating the market.

In the case of the games on this list, they failed to do some or all of the above, ultimately not managing to find or maintain a player base and consequently getting the server and support axe not long after they launched.

For various reasons, here are the live service games you won’t be playing today but not to worry, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to.

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10. LawBreakers (2017-2018)

lawbreakers game
BossKey

Starting off strong with a live service game that seemed like it had everything going for it, particularly given it was being created by Cliff Bleszinski of Gears of War fame.

LawBreakers was a first-person shooter that released onto PC and PlayStation 4 in August of 2017. If you’re sitting there thinking it’s odd that the game didn’t come out on Xbox One, you’d be right to wonder. Bleszinkski said it was strictly business but would later regret the move to leave out such an important platform, particularly while trying to get a live service game off the ground.

The game was originally intended to be free-to-play but was pivoted to a paid release.

Despite receiving some positive reviews for its dual-faction format that pitted the Law against the Breakers, and a number of varied and interesting modes, the game simply couldn’t build an engaged playerbase. In April of 2018 developer Boss Key revealed the game was not generating enough revenue to cover the costs of keeping it online and later that year the servers were shut down and the game was removed from Steam.

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Contributor

Likes: Collecting maiamais, stanning Makoto, dual-weilding, using sniper rifles on PC, speccing into persuasion and lockpicking. Dislikes: Escort missions.