Good Things Come to Those Who Take

Just days ago, Ubisoft's xDefiant was announced to be winding down. Months ago, Concord was announced DOA after 2 weeks. Babylon's Fall didn't quite make a year. Lawbreakers scraped out a month. Anthem limped along for two sad years before being put down. Rumbleverse eked out about 6 months. Knockout City managed about 2 years.

These are just the ones that come to mind for me. Game after game after game, put down like a dog with a limp after not meeting expectations. Some admittedly, fairly so, like Concord. Others show just what kind of metrics they're up against. CNET claims, "XDefiant achieved 1 million players within the first two and a half hours of its launch window in May 2024, and averaged 300,000 concurrent players within the first 48 hours it was available to play." These games can often reach impressive heights, but fail to meet their goal of being a gamer's only game. Every one of them wants to be the game.

Steam's player counts as of 12:10 AKST on 12/9/24 show this:

1. Counter-Strike 2 (F2P)- 953,317 active players
2. Dota 2 (F2P)- 549,087 acitve players
3. Path of Exile 2 (Early Access Paid Launch for F2P game) - 498,966 active players
4. PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS (F2P) - 205,619 active players)
5. Rust (Paid)
6. Banana (F2P) - 119,827 active "players"*
7. Call of Duty® (F2P*) - 114,185 active players
8. Grand Theft Auto V (Paid)
9. Delta Force (F2P) - 98,875 active players
10. THRONE AND LIBERTY (F2P) - 72,616 active players
11. Baldur's Gate 3 (Paid)
12. War Thunder (F2P) - 70,213 active players
13. Crosshair X (Not a game)
14. Farming Simulator 25 (Paid)
15. Football Manager 2024 (Paid)
16. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege (F2P) 59,315 active players
17. Apex Legends (F2P) - 59,024 acitve players
18. EA SPORTS FC 25 (Paid)
19. Team Fortress 2 (F2P) - 55,339 active players
20. Stardew Valley (Paid)
21. Wallpaper Engine (Not a game)
22. DayZ (Paid)
23. Euro Truck Simulator 2 (Paid)
24. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl (Paid)
25. Crab Game (F2P) - 45,788 active players

Even factoring the not-games in, paid game players are outnumbered by F2P players by a factor of 5:1, adding up to about 600K paid players and 3.1M F2P players. And even further, this isn't counting the two biggest F2P games on the planet: Fortnite (2.4M players right now) and Roblox (roughly 5.8M players right now). These are orders of magnitude we're dealing with in this discussion.

A super-exclusive club that everyone is squabbling to get into is dominated year over year by the same names. They want to be in these ranks above, that's how a live service game lives on. Yet, the chances are essentially zero. There are a finite number of players, with a finite number of hours to play. The dark patterns and FOMO exploitation only work so long before players burn out or give up.

It shows the hubris of these various publishers. "Our other 15 live service games didn't work, but this one will, and it only takes one to win!" That's a gambler's mindset, but because we are talking about large corporate players, they're playing with near infinite money and the chips are human lives and livelihoods. They can't lose in the end, but individuals will. They especially win if people overspend because of predatory practices in microtransactions. They want addicts. That's why it's free. You can taste- but the good stuff is kept in the back in the paid section.

They all want the whales, they all want the hours, they all want the eyes, the revenue, etc. And they simply won't make it. So people slave away making assets barely seen for a game barely played that is no longer available under any circumstance a year later. It's a horrific destruction of the longevity of art, of being able to show what you took part in. But it shows no signs of stopping, because those numbers keep going up, and that's all that matters.

* "Players" is used because Bananas is an idling "game" where you click a banana and occasionally get item drops of other bananas. It's a lot of people hoping to get rich quick by getting an expensive banana and selling it for a pretty penny. It's frankly an insult to idle games and I wish them the worst.

** Call of Duty has a F2P portion (Warzone, their battle royale), and a paid portion (Traditional multiplayer). It's impossible to separate the numbers and they don't provide the metrics themselves.