When video games launch to great success, the studios behind them are often pressed to make more of the same. Sometimes they’re even driven to continue working on those games indefinitely, adding more expansions and updates until demand slows — what we know as a live service game. Fortnite, Roblox, and Grand Theft Auto Online are all live service titans, and many rival publishers are hungry to feed players’ monster appetites for more.
The only problem is that wanting to make a fun live service game isn’t as easy as it looks; you need a massive amount of people to want to play it, and to somehow keep them interested over the course of years. Some companies have actually waffled on the decision to make a game live service. Electronic Arts had originally planned for Dragon Age: The Veilguard to be a live service game, and then it wasn’t, and then EA’s CEO argued that Veilguard would have done better had it been live service, and then many of the staff behind it were laid off.
