Free-to-play Smash Bros.-style brawler MultiVersus has significantly underperformed, publisher Warner Bros. Discovery has admitted, contributing to a further $100 million writedown for the company’s games business in 2024.
Now that I think about it, this idea was probably a good one for standard release, not live service. People get enticed by IP rights even if they don’t necessarily devote hundreds of hours to a game like this.
It works for things like Injustice. They see a Batman/Superman fighting game even if they aren’t going to hit Gold rank in competitive. Even if they only hit 10 hours, they paid the entry price.
People vote with their wallet repeatedly against live service games, and they keep releasing them. Eventually they’ll stop, right? Right?
Now that I think about it, this idea was probably a good one for standard release, not live service. People get enticed by IP rights even if they don’t necessarily devote hundreds of hours to a game like this.
It works for things like Injustice. They see a Batman/Superman fighting game even if they aren’t going to hit Gold rank in competitive. Even if they only hit 10 hours, they paid the entry price.
Do they though? The biggest and most profitable games right now are all live services. Consumers are very much voting for live services.
They voted for a handful of them, and then violently voted against the next thousand.
Same for every genre. For every Sonic or Mario there are 1,000 Bubsy’s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubsy
But they don’t have any false expectations of making hundreds of millions of dollars, betting everything they have that it will.
Yes but it’ll take years. Just keep the pressure up