Helldivers 2 Proves Live-Service Games Aren't The Real Problem

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Live-service games can feel like a blight on the video game industry sometimes, but if proves anything, it's that the situation is a little more complicated than that. As a third-person, bigger budget sequel to an acclaimed top-down shooterpacks a lot of interesting action and strategic gameplay into an online co-op experience. It's also had a bit of a problematic launch, with overburdened servers, optimization issues, and way too many error codes making it difficult to actually play the game — but it's still managed to quickly attract a community of ardent fans.

The first introduced an interesting community aspect with the idea of the Galactic Campaign, an overarching mission against alien species that progresses with the achievements of players as a whole. has doubled down on this idea, focusing the game more around its online services and introducing more concrete plans for continual updates and content monetization. Although this could be an immediate turn-off for some, the experience that is offering isn't as easily dismissed as many live-service games.

The concept of live-service games has garnered an increasingly negative reception over the years, as the term tends to be associated with titles that focus more on monetization and less on robust content offerings at launch. When looking at currently popular online games, it can be frustrating to see option after option that locks content behind battle passes that can require significant investments of time or money to unlock. The joy of jumping into a match with friends is easily diluted by constant entreaties to pay up, and live-service games that don't generate large player bases tend to die quickly.

Even as live-service titles have grown increasingly common, some companies have started shifting away from emphasizing the concept, as the backlash has become increasingly hard to ignore. The developers of recent live-service title danced around the phrase during promotion and tried to emphasize free content, but