this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
143 points (96.7% liked)
Games
38427 readers
2117 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here and here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As long as there continues to be succesful live service games, they will never stop attempting to make new ones, because the succesful ones are the most profitable forms of entertainment ever devised.
Of course there is only room for a limited amount of live service games on the market (since gamers only have one life to waste on them), so most of them will fail, and many of them even before leaving the drawing board it seems.
This is an excellent point. An organisation the size of Sony is simply incapable of not attempting a live service hit as long as they have the resources to do so.
A smaller player can pursue a strategy where they gain profits from their (somewhat specialized) segement of the market. Sony lacks that flexibility due to their size.
Yep, they can make a bunch of games that costs them hundreds of millions to make it they manage to make one that brings in billions in profit... That's what we call gambling.
Most companies call it R&D.
But then, why do they keep canceling them before release? They don't know if they'd have been hits or failures.
Of course we can't really know what goes on behind the scenes. But obviously these kinds of games are designed by committee (namely board members). So every single detail is going to be dictated from above, and as new games are released by other publishers with new succesful features these dictates changes mid-production. I can't but imagine that the development of live service games are a complete shitshow from start to finish.
So perhaps at some point they decide to get rid of the entire mess and start afresh, only for the process to beging again of course.
I've seen project managment in industrial fields go in circles in similar ways, and now that you put it this way I can totally see it.