When Ubisoft announced that Hyper Scape, its ambitious battle royale game, would be shutting down on April 28, news articles were blunt. “Forgotten,” “failure,” and “massive flop” were common descriptors, and the general conclusion was that the game hadn’t done enough to differentiate itself from established competitors in a crowded genre.
Hyper Scape is just the latest live service game to meet an ignominious end. Battleborn, LawBreakers, Crucible, and PlanetSide Arena are a few notable titles to go under in the last few years, the latter surviving a mere four months. And once the servers for these games go down, they’re gone forever.
Maybe this is the natural result of an overcrowded marketplace intent on chasing trends. But how do developers feel about working for years on games that fail and vanish for reasons beyond their control? And how do they feel about continuing to work in a medium where, as more games turn to the live service model, their creative efforts become increasingly precarious?
Taylor (a pseudonym), who worked on Hyper Scape, said via email they “try not to get too attached to anything in game development, as its nature is fleeting and things often get cut or reworked. That being said, this was the first game I was on where a lot of my work remained intact, and it does suck that none of it will survive.”
Games fail for all sorts of reasons, many of them beyond the control of developers. But a failed single-player game still exists to potentially be stumbled across by new fans. A dead online game is just gone, millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work up in smoke.
Game writer Mikko Rautalahti, whose credits include Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and numerous dead or canceled titles, said during a phone conversation that the death of an online game is unique. “If you write a book, you can count on that being around, people can experience it later,” Rautalahti said. “Once those servers go down, what’s left is just a bunch of random YouTube videos where you can catch glimpses of the work we did. It feels like a shame to just let it slip past our fingers.”
That doesn’t mean these games aren’t worth making. Game designer Chris Morris, who worked on Lawbreakers, tells WIRED, “I don’t consider that work to have been wasted, it was a valuable experience and a fun project. It would have been great if things had gone differently and the game found an audience. I do wish it was still available to play today in some form.”
Narratives tend to form quickly around doomed games. Hyper Scape was criticized for sporting unbalanced weapons and a brutal learning curve, and by the time Ubisoft began addressing these concerns its troublesome reputation had calcified. For developers, it can be frustrating to see good ideas fall by the wayside.
“I think LawBreakers’ levels, movement, gunplay, and character abilities worked together in interesting ways,” Morris says. “I feel like there was a lot of untapped potential and depth. If the game had been able to stick around, I could see a future where the team would have continued to learn the game alongside players and found new ways to keep it fresh and interesting.”
But in an industry that’s always keeping one eye on the next quarterly report, struggling games rarely receive the time they need to turn around. Sometimes they aren’t given the chance to succeed in the first place.
“I constantly felt like management treated us like we were working on a single-player game,” Taylor says. “There were so many unrealistic expectations, a lack of planning, and way too many last-minute decisions. We had gotten praise post-launch about a playable character being a hijab-wearing Malaysian woman, praise I felt conflicted about because we couldn’t even be bothered to hire a voice actress who could actually speak Malay. I think it’s inevitable that not every live service game is going to be successful, but a lot more could’ve been done to set Hyper Scape up for success, and it just didn’t happen. It was disappointing and frustrating.”
Despite LawBreakers failing to survive a gauntlet of competitors that included Overwatch and Fortnite, Morris is bullish about the opportunity to work on another live game. All he can do, he says, is work hard and hope to produce something compelling, while recognizing that countless games are competing for a player’s time. As a fan, however, he has concerns.
“I wouldn’t want to see an increase in risk aversion just because a game might fail to find an audience. As someone who has always enjoyed collecting games, however, my concern is that more of these games could disappear completely. We don’t have any meaningful way to archive or access them.”
No medium is invulnerable—countless movies, for example, have been lost—but the gaming industry feels uniquely indifferent to its own fate. Nintendo’s recent decision to shutter the WiiU and 3DS eShops, killing access to hundreds of digital-only titles, is just the latest instance of a chunk of gaming history suffering casual annihilation.
Morris would therefore love to see more live games include sunset plans. Whether that’s the ability for games to be played offline against bots or for fans to set up their own matches and servers, it would mean the difference between a niche fandom getting to play a game for decades and having to watch it vanish forever.
While matchmaking systems and dedicated servers have their strengths—a massive game like Destiny 2 would be inconceivable without them—they also turn live games into time bombs. Offline modes and server tools wouldn’t be practical for every live game, but making them common would be a step toward keeping hard work from disappearing. Team Fortress 2, for example, only sees about 75,000 players a day, but those players have the tools to create their own servers and enjoy the title indefinitely.
Rautalahti stressed the value of digital preservation, although he sees fans and institutions like the Internet Archive as being more probable saviors than developers. “It really would be worthwhile to have some kind of effort to preserve these things. It might not seem that valuable right now, but as someone who works on this, it would be nice to know that games aren’t just lost in the ether. I’d like to think they’re also culturally significant, not an individual game necessarily, but as part of a whole. In 50 years I’m sure you could see a lot about how online culture has progressed.”
Archival options are a good long-term goal, but what can help keep more live games online today? Morris points to the increasing ease of cross-platform multiplayer as a way to shore up player numbers, while Rautalahti highlights the need for good onboarding.
“One problem with live games is that they’re really hard to approach as a player. There have been any number of events you missed, so you’re completely lost. Are there good onramps for the narrative? Can you even experience the narrative, or is someone just going to be shooting you in the face the whole time?”
A good story wouldn’t have saved Hyper Scape, but Rautalahti points out that Destiny 2, League of Legends, and Warframe, all of which started with thin and obscure stories, now have reams of lore and dedicated fans who create or consume Wikis and YouTube videos about them.
“When Warframe came out, it was pretty much weird space ninjas going around and killing each other. But over the years they’ve completely revamped their story and made a big effort to bring it to a higher level. I think that’s made a huge difference in how people view their game.”
There’s also the fact that live service games can become second jobs, demanding much of your free time if you want to keep up. If hardcore players don’t get a constant stream of content, then they’ll leave for another game, forcing developers to produce endless updates, which makes it intimidating for new players to get into a sprawling game with esoteric mechanics and lore videos longer than most movies.
That constant need for content can turn live service development into a pressure cooker. Taylor loves the genre but questions how these games are made.
“The model can be extremely lucrative. The problem is that many companies are getting into the market with such a poor understanding of what makes live games work. Planning and scope is extremely important for live games because they need updates. Players expect a constant stream of new content. Live games can be improved over time, but if you launch with the expectation that you can just ‘fix it later,’ then a lot of players are just going to drop it.”
While all AAA game development is challenging, the strict schedule of live service games is especially demanding. Delay an update, and you could lose players to another title. Rautalahti notes, “You get no slack. You have to keep putting stuff out. In order to make any piece of content you need a programmer, scripter, artist, animator, level designer, writer, a producer to coordinate, maybe a voice actor … and if anything in that chain gets delayed for whatever reason, that immediately leads to crunch. And you can't disappoint investors by [putting] the health and safety of your crew first.”
Rautalahti adds that he often used to work long weeks and weekends, which inevitably leads to exhaustion and mistakes, although he now has more comfortable working hours. He also told a story about a colleague who, on an old project years ago, began suffering blackouts from overwork.
“I really wish the industry would slow down and evolve culturally instead of technologically,” Taylor says. “The way we develop games right now is just unsustainable. Every project I’ve ever been on felt like we were flying by the seat of our pants, making things up as we went and hoping for the best when we inevitably launch earlier than we should’ve but later than expected because the planning was just bad. Game developers are so burnt out, me included.”
Despite the risk of funding a flop, the live service model isn’t going anywhere. Players love the games; the potential for profit is huge; and Morris, Rautalahti, and Taylor are all happy to make them. But there’s no such thing as a modest success: You’re either a phenomenon or a flop. For the genre to keep both developer and player happy, the endless supply and demand of content needs to be re-evaluated … and creators need to think about the day when their game dies.
