![]() If you look at it a certain way, a battle pass is a literal, actual loot treadmill. The model lets a studio make the game it can afford instead of an MMO (which most studios can't bankroll). The live service model's strength lies in its flexibility. It can be a Breath of the Wild-like RPG with cute anime people, it can be a first-person looter shooter, it can be a battle royale or an asymmetric horror game. 'Live service' describes more of a business model than a genre, and that's its strength: a live service game can be anything. ![]() Still, there was potential to make bank on something similar-enter the live service game. If you have no players, you start losing money. Fail to deliver on those two points, and your players will drop like flies. If you play an MMO, you expect it to be, well… massive and multiplayer. ![]() Plus, players expect a faster cadence of updates. Most games have huge budgets, sure, but the sprawling server infrastructure, scope, and operating costs of the MMO makes new ones prohibitive. MMORPGs are uniquely expensive to make and maintain. So, why not try to hop on that train? Because it's a bad idea, that's why. Granted, this includes monthly subscriptions and revenue from other games, too, but that's still an obscene amount of cash. In 2021, Activision Blizzard (now a part of Microsoft) announced it had made $5.1 billion via in-game purchases. Turns out, cosmetic microtransactions make bank.Įven MMOs that kept the subscription model added cash shops and paid cosmetics to grease the wheels, and it paid big dividends. The ones that chugged along managed to make money, and for a small amount of effort, too. A lot of the games I mentioned went freemium-some even survived because of that choice, like Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was seen almost as a natural part of an MMORPG's life cycle, like how a star will inevitably become a red giant as it ages. We're still laughing at that, it's just tinged with sadness now.īefore battle passes-before loot crates, even-MMORPGs were moving away from a monthly subscription model and into the realm of charging you big bucks for XP boosts, funny hats, and sometimes just raw power. When the silly skins first darkened our land's door, we all laughed. Before the Emperor of Live Service claimed the Kingdom. Gather 'round the fire, rest your weary legs, for I shall tell ye a tale of an age before this one. The question is: why? Before Live Service ![]() I thought Black Desert bucked that trend for a second, but it was actually released in 2014, only coming to America and Northern Europe in 2016. Our online editor Fraser Brown's list of the Best MMOs of 2023 has some solid recommendations, sure, but aside from Lost Ark every single one of his suggestions came out in that 5-year period. In terms of that 2010-2015s golden age, though? It's long past. Season of Discovery's been popular, too- Bell points out its peak Twitch viewership has been higher than Wrath of the Lich King and Burning Crusade Classic. Granted, these raids have been a lot easier-but as Michael Bell notes: " week two clear rate is in fact higher than some other raids across their entire tier." As for its harder difficulties, the guild master of Liquid's raiding team calls it "the best raid they’ve made in a long time". 3,022 guilds cleared Vault of the Incarnates in this first week, 5,322 cleared Aberrus, and 8,618 cleared Amirdrassil.
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