The "live service" model is all played out | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

We all have a pretty intuitive understanding of the anatomy of a trend in game design. A very successful title is followed by a wave of games which copy key aspects of its design – some taking inspiration while innovating successfully on the formula, others rather more shamelessly seeking to cash in by copying anything that's not nailed down (or protected by intellectual copyright law).

Within a few years of the launch of the initial defining game – be it Doom, or Command & Conquer, Grand Theft Auto 3, Dark Souls, or any of a host of other widely-imitated titles over the decades – the market is awash with games replicating its ideas.

Diminishing returns kicks in hard, though, as consumers begin to tire of ideas that no longer seem fresh. Some games' ecosystem of "clones" can escape this trap by diversifying enough to become a genre of their own ("Doom-clones" essentially becoming FPS games, "GTA-clones" more or less evolving into the open world genre), while others will spiral away through growing player apathy as attention moves on to the next trend or fad.

That's a normal part of the landscape of the industry and well-understood by most people involved. What's perhaps less understood, or less accepted, is that there are aspects of monetisation design that are just as susceptible to trends and fads as any other part of game design.

Nobody is shocked when a certain type of game design falls out of favour – these trends come and go, after all – but the industry always seems taken by surprise when a monetisation strategy that was effective for a few years suddenly seems to drop off a cliff.

That's a paradigm that's gone from being on top of the world to being for all intents and purposes an epithet

Perhaps there's a false sense that monetisation is based on some kind of concrete economic principles that should remain stable, unlike game design which is to such a large extent a matter of subjective taste – but this fails to acknowledge both the extent to which game design