Key Takeaways
- 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 don’t often want to switch.
- A new live-service game has to be much better than the competition to attract a sizeable community.
Ex-BioWare executive 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 spot, Games Radar+). Darrah has had his own negative 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 had years of improvements included, as well as a community that’s been built over several years. With games like World of Warcraft, every prospective MMORPG is up against a game that has had decades of upgrades baked in.
Competing with Decades of Improvements
“When I’m trying to get you to pick up my forever game, what I have to think about is the fact that I’m not competing against that other forever game at its day of launch,” Darrah begins. “I’m not competing with World of Warcraft on the day it came out; I’m competing with WoW at the last moment that the prospective player played that game. That game got better after its launch for that player. Even if they’re not playing it any longer, that experience improved for them, hopefully, over the time they played it.”
Furthermore, there’s the element of sunk cost for players of a live-service game. Sure, there’s the occasional success story of a large swathe of a community moving from one game to another. We saw significant migration from Counter-Strike to Valorant, for example. However, for some people, a game’s competitor could be among the best in the genre and players still wouldn’t switch because of the time they’ve invested in the game, or even money in some cases. There was significant controversy in the Smite community when Hi-Rez announced cosmetics wouldn’t be transferring over to 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 day-to-day life,” Darrah says. “You need to be better enough than that game to make it worth the while of going to all the trouble of switching. They need to buy this new game, they need to convince their friends to come along with them, they need to relearn this game, they need to re-level up – there are a lot of barriers to switching between two live services. But, even if I’ve already set that other live service aside, the fact that I played it for so much longer has anchored a perception of what this kind of game is supposed to be like, that this new competitive game has to overcome.”
In Darrah’s view, companies have forgotten that you need to blow the competition out of the water to make people 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 big enough impression, with Concord being a notable recent example.
Anthem is an online co-op multiplayer game that sees teams of four come together to prevent the Monitor seizing the Anthem of Creation. It suffered a rocky launch, and after promises of a total rework, future development was stopped in 2021.