Live-service gaming is in a difficult moment of transition. Even as the industry continues to consume millions of hours of play, successful new launches are few and far between and the frequency of closures has increased. Franchises like Destiny and Overwatch have moved to free-to-play models in an effort to keep their player numbers high, and premium live-service games – that is, games with a full purchase price, as well as some intent to monetize players. in the long run – are a dying breed.
In 2024, there were two dramatic, high-profile failures in the premium live service. Rocksteadies Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League flopped to a $200 million loss for WB Games, while Sony is even more expensive Treaty so it failed to strike a chord with the players that it was unceremoniously eliminated after just a few weeks. (Sony did have a live service hit in the form of Hell divers 2but judging by the publisher’s marketing efforts for the two games, Helldivers was apparently not something that Sony executives expected (or perhaps even wanted) to get off the ground.)
Still, Blizzard’s 2023 release Diablo 4 is a certified hit, with big sales, strong expansion in 2024 and apparently an enthusiastic audience. How did it break the trend? For Rod Fergusson – the famed Gears of War producer turned general manager of the Diablo franchise – that’s because Blizzard didn’t set out to make a live-service game. The studio simply wanted to make a Diablo game, but Diablo’s brand of action role-playing game essentially requires it to be a live-service game.
An ARPG is inherently a live service. The question is what you do about it
– Rod Fergusson
“I’m going back to the genre,” Fergusson told Polygon in an interview in November. “In the beginning there were these conversations. (…) Is Diablo 4 a live service game, or should we roll credits and call it? And I was like, look, if you look Diablo 3 and the millions of people who showed up every season, whether you like it or not, is an ARPG inherent a live service. The question is what you do about it.”
For Fergusson, live service is an opportunity to continually refine and rebuild a game, but only if the audience’s demand to keep playing arises naturally from the game design. “For me, if you’re Diablo-ish, (…) people will try to play the campaign, but then they’ll look at what I call the hundred- or thousand-hour game. They want to be able to continue this progress, they want to have the power fantasy, they want to go back to it again and again.” This creates the space for the developers to keep feeding new ideas into the game to keep it fresh. “That was one of the things that was great,” Fergusson said. ‘It wasn’t like that fait accompli where we say, ‘It’s in the box and we’re done.’ We get the opportunity to improve Helltide. We will have the opportunity to add the Pit, we will have the opportunity to try the Gauntlet.
There’s a simple lesson here for game publishers: Don’t force it. When Suicide squad was previewed, players immediately noticed that the game didn’t seem to fit well into a live service framework; it didn’t flow naturally from the game’s storyline or genre. Treaty belonged to an appropriate genre – it was a hero shooter – but it seemed to have been created to meet a publisher’s demand for a live-service game, rather than player demand for an alternative to Overwatch. The game concept was not in the first place.
Conversely, Diablo 4 worked because people wanted a new Diablo game, and they wanted to play it for hundreds of hours. It’s like a reversal of the classic line of Field of dreams: not “If you build it, they will come,” but “They will come… so you might as well build it.”