There’s a well-known Simpsons scene that has the disco-loving character (appropriately named) Disco Stu pointing at a chart that shows the genre’s record sales increasing and increasing until the chart ends in 1976. “If these trends continue,” he says, then doesn’t finish his thought and opts for a spirited, “Ayyyy!”
This episode aired in 1997, and was set in 1997.
The joke is: when a trend is at its most omnipresent, it seems like its dominance will continue forever. From 2007 to 2023, we lived through the reign of superhero movies. Now that Deadpool & Wolverines are far less common than Joker 2s, we can see those years for what they were: a trend. Disco died, superhero movies crashed to the earth, and live-service games are living for shorter and shorter.
XDefiant Crashes And Burns, Like Concord Before It
XDefiant is just the latest casualty. Executive Producer Mark Rubin announced this week that the free-to-play hero shooter, which pitted factions from popular Ubisoft franchises like Far Cry and The Division against each other in Call of Duty-style deathmatches, will shut down on June 3rd, 2025.
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XDefiant Is Yet Another Game That Was Doomed From The Start
Ubisoft’s shooter deserved better, but was never going to get it.
I liked XDefiant, but this isn’t a surprise. The last time I checked in on the game was the day Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched and it was a ghost town. Each game was populated by bots, and that was when they were populated at all. I spent minutes running around in ‘Emporium’ and the map, set in an abandoned shopping mall, was fittingly abandoned.
But before XDefiant, other expensive live-service games from big publishers failed to find an audience in 2024. Concord is the year’s most famous flop (and maybe the biggest video game flop of all time), spending nearly a decade in development to last two weeks in stores before PlayStation pulled it from sale. That game — which I thought looked kinda cool but never had the chance to try out — has since been permanently killed off and its team, Firewalk Studios, shut down in October.
The Flops Will Continue Until Morale Improves
The year’s other giant flop, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, spent a similar amount of time in development. It was the first full-length game from developer Rocksteady Studios since Batman: Arkham Knight in 2015, and cost an enormous amount of money to make. But its peak concurrent count on Steam was 13,459 players. For comparison, Left 4 Dead 2’s monthly peak concurrent count hasn’t fallen below that level since September 2016. That game is 15 years old.
Skull and Bones and Foamstars were also found among the wreckage, and The First Descendant, like XDefiant, started out strong, but fell off hard. There were live-service games that found success — like Helldivers 2, Palworld, Zenless Zone Zero, Content Warning and Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket — but the failures were so huge and money-burning, that it’s hard to argue that this kind of game is a safe bet anymore.
So, why did publishers think that they were? The easy answer is that games like Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, Apex Legends, and Fortnite have shown that, when one of these games hits, it’s capable of raking in money unlike anything else. That’s definitely the primary factor. But I’d argue that in the past few years, the live-service genre has been buoyed just as much by one outlier period: 2020-2021.
How The Pandemic Skewed Multiplayer Expectations
During the first year of the pandemic, new multiplayer games blew up left and right. Animal Crossing: New Horizons hit at the start of lockdown and became synonymous with players needing to connect during the time of isolation. We were going to each others’ islands, showing off our designs, buying fruit, and if you played your cards right, Elijah Wood might show up. It was a massive hit and showed that the way people were seeking connection in this time was through multiplayer games.
Multiplayer games from huge developers were big during this time, too. I went back to Halo, playing through the first three campaigns with a friend. Warzone hit right before lockdown, and the Call of Duty battle royale became a massive hit. Valorant also launched this year and became one of the last shooters to ascend to the highest echelon of live-service games.
But what was really surprising about the multiplayer games that broke out during the pandemic is that they were largely from lesser known studios. Mediatonic isn’t a small company, but Fall Guys was still an out-of-nowhere sensation that no one expected from the same company that made Murder by Numbers. Among Us was two-years-old when streamer Sodapoppin helped it shoot to world-conquering popularity. Phasmophobia, a tiny horror game about hunting for footage of ghosts with your friends, was a similarly out-of-nowhere success. And in 2021, Valheim was the last big pandemic-era multiplayer success before vaccines became widely available and much of the population stopped quarantining.
Eventually, the market calmed down, people settled into a few multiplayer games, and in the same way that people stopped making sourdough once they could leave the house, a lot of people stopped playing games altogether. But, if you looked at that 12-month period, it would be easy to come to the same conclusion as Disco Stu. If these trends continue… Ayyyy!
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Sony’s Live Service Vision Is Doomed, Insomniac Is The Future Of Triple-A
Sony’s live service gambit is already on the rocks, meanwhile, Insomniac continues to pump out incredible, bite-sized triple-A games year after year.