Will it be? Probably not.
When Rocksteady announces a new game in the Batman world, you get excited. When that game is then being marketed as a live service game, you lose interest. And yet that is what keeps happening over at WB.
I could write a book about all the things I disagree with the new head of WB doing. Taking content from your more popular service (HBO) and licensing it to rivals? How does that make sense? And those cancelled movies…. Anyway, one of the biggest gripes I have with WB is live service games.
It’s flop after flop after flop for them. They were once kings of the video game industry with absolute hits like Batman Arkham Asylum which put them at the top of critics charts, but then for whatever reason that level of quality diminished, quickly. Seeing live service games like Fortnite and Destiny making billions, they decided their games too could try to milk gamers for all their worth. It didn’t work.
Back 4 Blood, Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad, it’s loss after loss for them. And their “shift to live service games” doesn’t feel very promising. Their once mighty leaders that changed the industry in so many ways, are making uninspired titles that are quite forgettable.
Which is a bit ironic considering WB has one of the longest running titles that has been basically a live service game for years, Mortal Kombat. What’s so different about it though? Well passion. I could sit and listen to the developers talk about Mortal Kombat all day. Their drive for a story, character dynamics, and fine tuning the game are unmatchable, which makes you get excited for new roster updates.
But beyond that, it’s what they do. Period. Nether Realm Studios has been doing this for ages, they know how to make basically a live service game from the ground up. When you take other studios known for single player experiences and have them build multiplayer, live service, games, there will obviously be challenges.
Those challenges include basically building duds. Suicide Squad currently sits so low on Steam charts that even the dead and cancelled Avengers game from Square Enix has more players. As of writing, the peak daily count on steam is around 120 players….
From a consumer point of view this is daunting. I personally would love to try Suicide Squad. As a person that actually enjoyed Gotham Knights, I think it would be rather fun, if not for a week or so, but I’m not going to buy a game that is so beat down and will likely be canned after season 1, and then become a paperweight in my library because it’s unplayable due to all the live service features being shut down. By comparison, the Avengers games had nearly triple the peak player count and was still cancelled.
Spending $70 on a game is quite an investment these days, and seeing the game getting wrecked before it even launched is what prevented me from buying it. Live service killed the game for me.
It’s one thing to make a game that feels complete with a bonus of live service content, like Helldivers. It’s one thing to make a game that feels like a major studio put tons of effort into it, like Destiny. It might be time for WB Studios to take a step back, look at what made their older games so good, and find a way to build something remarkable that changes the industry again. Simply “loop building” their single player games to encourage spending doesn’t seem to be working.
In the meantime, WB might be happy with MultiVersus filling that void.
