Key points
- Anthem executive producer Mark Darrah believes studios have forgotten how difficult it is to compete in the live service market.
- Players have invested time and money in a game and often don't want to change.
- A new live service game has to be much better than the competition to attract a large community.
Former BioWare exec Mark Darrah, best known for his work on Dragon Age, recently took to his YouTube channel to discuss the pitfalls of creating a contemporary live-service game (nice post, Games Radar+ ). Darrah has had her own bad experiences with launching a live service game, as BioWare's Anthem is considered an abject failure and a black mark in the studio's storied history.
Darrah begins by making a salient point: newly released live-service games are often competing with titles that have included years of improvements, as well as a community that has been built over the course of several years. With games like World of Warcraft, any potential MMORPG is faced with a game that has received decades of updates.
Competing with decades of improvements
“When I try to convince you to get my forever game, what I have to think about is the fact that I won't be competing with that other forever game on launch day,” Darrah begins. “I'm not competing with World of Warcraft the day it came out; I'm competing with WoW the last moment the prospective player played that game. That game got better after it launched for that player. Even if they “They don't play it anymore, that experience has gotten better for them, hopefully, over the time they've played it.”
Additionally, there is the element of sunk costs for players of a live service game. Sure, there's the occasional success story of a large swath of the community moving from one game to another. For example, we've seen a significant migration from Counter-Strike to Valorant. However, for some people, a game's competitor might be among the best in the genre and players still wouldn't switch because of the time they invested in the game, or even money in some cases. There was significant controversy in the Smite community when Hi-Rez announced that cosmetics would not be carried over into Smite 2, even though the sequel is essentially a better version of Smite.
“You're competing with the inertia of the fact that people have already integrated this game into their daily lives,” Darrah says. “You have to be better enough than that game to make it worth all the trouble of switching. They have to buy this new game, they have to get their friends to follow them, they have to learn this game again, they have to level up again : There are many obstacles to switching between two live services but, even though I have already put the other live service aside, the fact that I have played it for so long has anchored a perception of what this type of game should be like, that this new competitive game must overcome.”
In Darrah's view, companies have forgotten that you need to blow away the competition to get people to switch games, not just release a comparable experience and expect people to flock to your game. We've seen several solid live-service titles fail because they didn't make a good impression, and Concord is a notable recent example.
Anthem is an online cooperative multiplayer game that sees teams of four band together to stop the Monitor from taking over the Anthem of Creation. It endured a rocky launch, and after the promise of a total rework, future development was halted in 2021.
