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Take-Two Interactive Plans to Shutter Intercept Games, Roll7 as Part of Wider Layoffs and Closures |
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Take-Two Interactive Plans to Shutter Intercept Games, Roll7 as Part of Wider Layoffs and Closures | MMORPG.com
Take-Two Interactive appears to plan to shutter two of its subsidiary studios, Intercept and Roll7, under its larger subsidiary Private Division, which also faces layoffs.
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Intercept is a very different studio trying to recreate the same game and mostly failing at it, so they're hardly beloved.
Combine all of that with the COVID over hiring and yeah you end up with a bit of a perfect storm and the market correction you see now.
As the money pool dries up game studios have to scale back, particularly on anything not believed or proven to be a money maker.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Yeah forgot to throw in the "2" for that one even though I explicitly kept reminding myself to (like it's literally in the sub title), oops.
What I am getting at here is some of the reasons this has happened are being ignored by the industry, namely players getting fed up of live service, monetarization, oversupplied by the sheer number of games coming out, and fed up of both early access and proper launches not delivering as they promised.
Because of that I think the industry will do no course correction in those areas which means this downturn will just go on and on. If I am wrong we should be able to expect a bounce back this year, ok next year? I think this will still be with us in 2026.
What Are Live Service Games (And Why Are They So Polarizing)? (howtogeek.com)
Live service game fatigue is real, but can it be fixed? | GamesRadar+
To be fair that article you just linked isn't about those game being live service games but rather about the power of older, established nostalgia games having lots of staying power and making it difficult for new games to break through.
Minecraft and roblox are not so popular cause they are "live services" games and I would argue they are so popular for other reasons so lets not conflate their success with that one aspect.
Like I said our speculation is all anecdotal even the "hard data" can pretty much be manipulated to mean w/e.
No one here really has any "hard data", we all just have "hard speculation" based on our own anecdotal evidence/experience and what little "data" we can find online that may or may not be accurate.
One thing for sure while there may be lots of people that like live service games there is also lots of people that don't as evidenced by lots of the pissing and moaning in many game forums etc etc.
Personally I don't care so much for live service games such as gacha games, even though I sometimes play them I put zero cash in them, I don't mind it as much in mmo's.
However we see lots of...essentially single player games with some form of multiplayer with live service options which I frankly despise such as D4 for example. Like for example that data is also based on "monthly" active data so how that data is collated can change what is shows drastically, for example If it only counts how many people log in a one month period and people log in for like 1 hour a month it doesn't mean much if those same people are playing other non live service game for 60 hours per month rather than the 1 hour they logged in roblox and minecraft.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Part of this is that players are as you say sticking with live service, but what they are not doing is going on to new live service. Once again, this is not about the death of live service, it is about players starting realise just how much time they have to put into these games and deciding they cant stick another one on the rotation.
I do think their is increasing realisation that these games monetarization is very excessive (with some exceptions like Fortnite) but such players are still small fry when it comes to the total player base. It could be that there is an element of that concern in the decision to buy yet another live service game but it seems fatigue is the big factor here.
When you think about it, a sufficiency invasive form of monetarization becomes gameplay, take loot box gambling for example. We have seen players react against that but maybe now they are just getting tired of it.