How Live Service Video Games Are Poisoning The Industry

4. Live Services Eat Each Other

While these issues so far could seemingly be solved if publishers stopped exploiting the leeway the genre gives them, the bigger problem is that, quite simply, nobody has time to play all of these live-service games. They're designed to encourage you to log into them regularly, perhaps even daily, so you don't fall behind and are ready for the next major expansion. That would be doable if there was only a handful of them, and they were the only games you played, but these days every major release is adopting live-service elements to some extent.

Consequently, unless you dedicate your entire life to playing games, it's going to be virtually impossible to get the most out of these experiences. If you fall behind, or pick up another game, it's difficult to return, because they're designed to be experiences you can't necessarily "complete". The idea, essentially, is that if they consume your life, then they'll consume your wallet as well.

It's not only a problem for players, but for devs as well, whose hard work probably won't be seen or appreciated by a huge chunk of the audience. The days of seeing everything a game has to offer have long since passed, as they're too sprawling and demand all of your time.

The demand for games to be bigger, to adopt live-service elements and be all-consuming on the surface does give players way more bang for their buck, but by focusing so deeply on quantity over quality, it's resulting in the big titles all blending into one homogenous mess of familiar, bloated content that punishes you for not constantly engaging with it.