60% Of All Playtime In 2023 Was Spent On Live-Service Games More Than Six Years Old

and here’s the full report without needing to “join” the site or use cookies 'cause i’m GOATed

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I’ll never be able to find again or remember which company did it, but I remember the results of one of these types of surveys doing “Top X” most played games by country/region, and it generally was “GTA V, Fifa, PES, Minecraft, Fortnite” except for countries with different sports (Madden would be in the US, 2K appeared occasionaly)

I don’t think developers - or at least the executives - understand how games “work”, how demanding of players’ times they are, and how little you can adjust to satisfy that. The new AAA hotness might be in the spotlight for a while, but that’s a one and done that you can’t put all your eggs into, and at the same time you just can’t drop yet another live-service game and expect people to drop their main one forever. I can watch a 30 min intro for a new cinematic masterpiece, or attempt to learn the mechanics and idiosyncracies of the current online hotness, OR I can play a few matches in Warframe/Fortnite/Valorant/Rocket League etc.

Even if you get the rare case of Overwatch toppling down other team based shooters, at the end of the day you’re competing against fairly well established franchises and the concept of time.

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yep, time is finite. that said this really only says something about attempts at NEW live service games. one and done experiences are fine if they’re budgeted properly imo - which is where the issues lie in that area - and like you said, no one wants to commit to another “forever” game when me and the homies already have one we play.

on top of that 90% of people are not enthusiests who just wanna play COD, Fortnite, and a sport game like you mentioned.

fighting games tend to be the exception but i haven’t eaten enough to dig into why

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The whole live service game thing is about people hooking into your One Game and never playing much of anything else.

Naturally after this was established ages ago everyone has been chasing that promise for years and failing because people already have their Game. It’s like when everyone was trying to make an MMO or MOBA in 2012 and they mostly all flamed out.

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i was just about to make the MMO comparison lol. that’s especially silly because you’d think we’d have learned the lesson given that MMOs were ALSO gigantic money sinks that could destroy your business. But NOPE gotta go for that infinite money glitch lmfao

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I really would have expected more people to constantly quote experiences from the MMO gold rush when talking about modern live service shit. It’s just 1:1 the same mistakes.

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Its genuinely absurd if you’ve lived through that era, because MMOs (and online gaming in general) were THE shit, everyone wanted to make theirs, until eventually we went past “Make a MMO” to “Make the WoW-Killer” (and, surprisingly, WoW is somehow still alive, or on life support)

Today I saw someone posting about how Hollywood blockbusters are like an executive watching lighting hit a spot, then move his bottle to that spot and then see lighting strike another place, then move his bottle to that place. Its really the same thing, people mindlessly attempting to raise and gut the next cash cow without ever understanding why something works.

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That’s just all of everything these days somehow lmao. Like, all the Boeing stuff is exactly this, too. The McKinsey mindset lol