The video game industry is at a critical juncture, with major publishers increasingly prioritizing "forever games" (live service models) over single-player experiences due to the perceived infinite revenue potential, despite the high failure rate and negative impact on creative studios.
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The video game industry is rapidly
changing in 2025. We're seeing it happen
in real time with these mass layoffs at
major publishers like Microsoft. Entire
studios at giant companies are shutting
down. Amazon essentially shuttered their
video game division. The AAA video game
industry. It's at a crossroads. No one
knows exactly how to move forward. And
unfortunately, single player games have
become very low priority for a lot of
developers. And I think we need to talk
about why. Hi folks, it's Falcon and
today on Game Ranks, that's what we're
going to do. We're asking the question,
why do AAA publishers hate single player
games? The video game industry is
exactly that. It's an industry that
produces over $50 billion in annual
revenue, but growth has stalled since
2021. Games are still making a truly
absurd amount of money, but the
attention economy is fickle, and
publishers want more than your $70. They
want your money forever. Every company
looks at financial successes like
Fortnite and drools. These people want a
piece of that very, very big pie. If
you're a business executive, you see
Fortnite's estimated 3 billion per year.
And you think to yourself,
>> look what I FOUND IN MY POCKET. LOOK,
>> HOW HARD could it be to copy their
success? But we've seen time and time
again that the live service model comes
with a host of unforeseen challenges.
Single player games might be really
difficult to make and require years of
expensive development time, but it's
also really safe compared to the muddy
waters of live service. It seems like a
no-brainer to develop games that are
guaranteed to be profitable, but to a
big publisher, even a successful single
player game doesn't bring in enough
revenue. A game you can purchase and
play can never compare to a forever game
like Fortnite. Everyone wants a piece of
Fortnite. And nothing against Fortnite.
Fortnite, Roblox, and to a lesser
extent, even the Steam platform are all
examples of what big publishers truly
want. They don't want to make games.
They want to buy a spot in the video
game market where they can sit and
collect rent forever. It's real estate,
baby. Not free real estate, though.
Yeah, I'm sorry, Tim Hideker meme, but
it's not free. Services like Steam are
perpetual money machines without the
inherent risk of video game development.
There's a big reason we haven't seen
Halflife 3. Valve makes too much money.
From a monetary perspective, they're
interested in diversions like Dota or
the Foundry spin-off card game, cuz
those are forever games with infinite
cash potential. Like, you only have to
build the apartment building once. If by
some miracle the tenants stay there
forever, that's great. They pay you
every month until you're dead and you no
longer have to think about it. If they
don't stay, new tenants will come in and
do the same thing. But even more so,
they have Steam. If they wanted to just
offload Dota or Foundry, it doesn't
matter. Like, they collect money off of
other people making games and selling
the games. Valve never has to make
another game again, and they will
forever be the biggest name in the PC
gaming business. It's that simple. And
all of these services and the individual
service games vary in quality. And I'm
not saying that they're bad. Certainly
not at all. Steam is a great platform.
It has its problems, but it does what it
does probably better than anybody. And
Fortnite does what people want out of
Fortnite as well. These are the top tier
services to emulate. But publishers seem
to think that copying these things is
easy and that there's room for more than
one. Frankly, we have seen how difficult
the live service model really is time
and time again. Destiny 2 is the biggest
example of a modern live service game, a
forever game with microtransactions and
constant new content. It's a mill meant
to keep players engaged, and that isn't
always fun. Even fans will say they're
putting in the hours. It's a job. Live
service games live and breathe on FOMO,
and they put timers on their content.
The battle pass is such a ubiquitous
concept and it's the true marketing
genius of Fortnite. It doesn't ruin the
game experience for people who don't
want to engage with it, but those on the
fence are forced to engage with the
battle pass because it's a limited time
event. They're afraid of missing out,
maybe missing that new cool skin that
will never be available again if you
don't earn it now. It's a devious tactic
that's being used literally everywhere
in the industry. Honestly, you can't
even hardly fault it. If the game is a
forever game, you need to have something
that has some kind of scarcity. I am not
saying I like it, but I get it. Before
battle passes, we had loot boxes and
online multiplayer passes and map packs.
The Age of the Mat Pack, of course, long
past, and maybe we're better off for it.
One way we're not better off is the glut
of live service games that are in
development now. There are some amazing
standout examples like Hell Divers 2 or
The Finals that deliver tons of fun
without feeling like a literal job. I
mean, if you don't care about failing
major orders in Hell Divers 2, we don't.
But there's too many games in
development that absolutely they just
have no way that they will ever be
successful. Single player games have a
chance at being mildly successful, even
very successful. But live service games,
more often than not, will crash and burn
immediately. Take Concord for example.
This game reportedly had a massive
budget of hundreds of millions of
dollars and it shut down within 2 weeks
of launching. It wasn't just a huge
financial failure. It was also a
complete embarrassment for Sony. Somehow
this was a first party published game
that absolutely no one wanted. Sony
actually, they're the current leader in
live service announcements that no one
wants. As part of a massive live service
push by former Sony Interactive
Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan, the company
purchased Bungie, the developers of
Destiny 2 and the original developers of
Halo, for $3.6 billion. For perspective,
Disney bought Star Wars for $4 billion.
Now, I understand that $400 million is
an obscene amount of money, more money
than I will ever see, certainly. But if
your purchase of the Destiny 2
developers puts you in the neighborhood
of Star Wars, something is wrong. Like,
according to Sony, post Halo, Bungie is
worth just shy of what Star Wars is
worth. one. It's just the most baffling
decision. One of the most baffling in
video game history. It was part of
Sony's strategy to develop 12 new live
service games by 2026. As of writing,
eight of those live service games have
been cancelled. That includes a God of
War live service game, a Spider-Man live
service game, a Last of Us live service
game, and I don't know the other ones,
but I'm sure that if they touched any
major franchises, they also would have
been embarrassments. How would those
games work as multiplayer games you play
with friends? You know what? I asked
that question not wanting to know the
answer. I don't want to know the answer
to that question. I just don't. And you
know what? Here's another dumb thing.
You know how many Fortnites there are?
There's one. Epic Games owns it and they
don't try to make another Fortnite. Sony
was trying to make 12 things. They were
seriously trying to make like these
games historically struggle with
attracting players. even like the
biggest names, they have to attract
players away from other games, the
biggest games they're already playing.
And Sony planned on competing with
itself 12 times over, assuming one of
those games was successful. In their
minds, it was worth it to try to
fragment the market with 11 other
entries. I just can't imagine that
working. Like, even if one of them was a
wild success, how would you possibly
think any of the others wouldn't just
harm your successful one? Hell Divers 2
is one of the few successes Sony's had
with the live service experiment and
thankfully it seems like they're winding
down the idea as like a big initiative.
Jim Ryan left the company in 2024 and
his bad bad ideas unfortunately like you
make decisions at that level and they
affect the video game division for a
while. It's a year later and they're
just finally kind of getting out of his
decisions. Other big publishers have
different ideas on how they're going to
rent seek. Microsoft is seemingly
dropping the hardware business entirely
to focus on a subscription model, which
has been both great and terrible for
single player games. The Xbox Game Pass
needs a constant supply of new games to
keep players interested. So, Microsoft
purchased way too many game studios. too
many to handle as a matter of fact
because that's the reason Microsoft gave
for closing down Arcane Austin the
developers of Prey and backup developers
on Dishonored. Yes, Arcane Leon is still
in existence, but talk to a lot of
people and Prey is the best Arcane game
there is. I mean, it's not a completely
unanimous opinion, but it's near that.
Most people think Prey is a masterpiece
who like that kind of game.
Representatives of Microsoft say it was
a strategic decision to consolidate
resources or that Bethesda did it, but
that's all smoke and mirrors. Microsoft
owns Bethesda and Bethesda essentially
forced Arcane Austin to develop Redfall.
Redfall is another major live service
failure story where an extremely good
video game studio made something they
didn't want to make. And it was clear
because if you played it, you knew that
nobody wanted this thing to exist,
players or developers alike. It was
clearly executives that wanted it to
exist. By the time Redfall was released,
70% of the staff at Arcane Austin had
just straight up left the studio. That's
a big warning sign that nobody wanted to
make the game. And here's the thing.
Yes, you'll have some staff that isn't
necessarily the most jazzed about every
project of all time. But seven out of
every 10 people that worked at Arcane
Austin found it unbearable enough to
leave a dream job for a lot of these
developers. People with passion, the
people that developed prey, talented,
passionate people who liked what they
did were like, "Actually, you know what?
I could go anywhere else." And they did.
If the people behind the game don't
think that the game's going to be fun,
it's not going to be fun. It's also just
a really simple truth that traditional
video game development requires
different skills. Your regular video
game developer just can't transition
into live service development without
really just rebuilding the company.
We've seen it repeatedly. Rock Steady
Games is one of the best developers out
there with an incredible sterling track
record. The Batman Arkham games. Do we
need to say anything else? These are
some of the most incredibly polished
games with a clear vision. Some of our
favorite games of all time. and Suicide
Squad killed the Justice League,
ironically just killed all that
momentum. Like other live service
failures we've discussed, the game
stopped support before the end of the
game. After a few updates, they pulled
the plug and this really expensive flop
was finally put out of its misery. It's
not the first time a beloved developer
was crushed by the challenges of live
service development, either. Again, at
the behest of the demands for more money
by these big publishers, Boware barely
survived Anthem and had to fight to cut
all the live service elements from
Dragon Age: The Bailguard. Yes, that
game could have been much, much worse
than it was. It has its own rocky
development history, but we can say with
confidence the version of the game that
came out was an improvement over the
thing that EA wanted. One of our top
tier developers of all time, Platinum
Games were also almost crushed by Square
Enix's Babylon's Fall. It's another game
that was pulled completely from stores
and is currently unplayable. Thankfully,
Platinum got a second chance and made
the absolutely phenomenal Ninja Gaiden
4. That game was funded by Xbox Game
Studios to feed the Xbox Game Pass and
its neverending need for new content.
But it's an example of if you pair the
right developer with the right project,
it can work. forcing developers of
single player games to make quasi
multiplayer forever games. It's
dangerous from a financial position.
When one of these developers survives
and comes back up from the live service
dungeons, scarred or not, we're very
thankful. We've talked a lot about the
dangers of live service. But there's
another player that's taking a lot of
luster away from AAA developers. It's
the double A developers where the
mid-budget games thrive. For a long
time, we did not see many of these
releases, but that was because these AAA
publishers kind of owned all of that. As
we've seen, they've kind of just given
up on it. So, the double A space kind of
just was ripe for the picking. You know,
people went in and got the good
cherries, no pun intended. We'll talk
about Team Cherry in a second, but
mid-budget games are back at the
forefront. big successes like Clare
Obscure are these much smaller scale but
still find a way to bring grandeur to
it. Games like Korean and Chinese
developers like Lies of P or Blackmth
Wukong, those types of things, those
feel like they're bigger budget games
than they are. They're not on the level
of a Call of Duty by any even vague
stretch. And indie games on Steam are
getting more attention than ever. I told
you Hollow Knight Silkong, it's the kind
of huge money maker that publishers can
only dream of. It's a game that captured
the conversation for a very long time.
And the interesting thing is these
publishers would likely never pay for
the extremely long development time of
Silkong, which is to the advantage of
these much more interesting smaller
developers like Team Cherry. They don't
need to keep paying a staff of
thousands. When game budgets for AAA
games are ballooning to unnecessary
levels, it's no surprise that publishers
are looking for easier ways to make
money. Game development is very, very
hard. Making a single game that lasts
for a long time and continually makes
money as it exists sounds easier than
making 10 games. And I think that's a
lot of what's going on here. For an
industry that's about having fun,
developers are routinely required to
work 80our weeks or longer to get their
games made. Making one game instead of
10 maybe sounds like they might bypass
that cuz those 80hour work weeks, I
guarantee you that overtime ain't cheap.
But the game industry is at a
crossroads. A lot of people think single
player is dead because a few industry
analysts say that single player is dead.
They're wrong though. Single player
games are everywhere. The DA space is
growing and there are just too many
incredible indie games to even count. We
can only hope that these big publishers
learn the same lesson Hollywood is
learning right now. Big budgets don't
always equal big success. And before we
wrap this up, I want to give you an
example of somebody who proves it.
Capcom, while everybody else has been
panicking about the death of single
player and playing the lottery every
single day, hoping one day they'll hit
it big and get a Fortnite going. Capcom
doubled down on single player. They
release focused, polished singleplayer
games, and the results speak for
themselves. Their market cap has grown
more than tenfold over the last decade.
And their revenue and profit lines have
been stable, predictable, and up. They
didn't chase trends. They didn't throw
all their money into a live service
money pit. And they didn't expand to an
unsustainable team size. They just made
good games that people actually wanted
to buy. And the funny thing is that
works. If you make something worth
buying, people will buy it. And you will
make money, often a lot of money, just
not all of the money, and you'll have to
make another thing that's worth buying
next year or the year after. You won't
be able to just sit on your ass and
collect infinite money forever. You'll
actually have to do things. I understand
that's not appealing to an executive.
But the thing about creative businesses,
whether that's the games industry,
books, movies, any kind of art, the only
reason it's an industry in the first
place is because everybody needs to be
able to have the time to make these
things, which means that people have to
get paid for it. But once money starts
changing hands, people who are not
interested in art become interested in
the business that's taking place around
it. They don't understand that for that
business to exist, people have to
actually be satisfied sometimes. That's
really what a lot of this really boils
down to. The forever game has to almost
satisfy you time and time again. You
can't get closure. You shouldn't feel
catharsis. And it can't end. Satisfied
customers are repeat buyers. And
eventually, if your business model
revolves around not quite satisfying
people, the people are going to leave.
And it's not a vote with your dollars
type situation. That's not how things
work. In order for this all to collapse,
people have to understand that they're
not going to get what they want out of
this thing. And that is coming. And in
the meantime, people who are making
single player games are taking advantage
of literal catnip. If by some miracle a
publisher is listening to this and you
have a brain and can digest this
information, think about this for a
minute. You can make a lot of money by
making a satisfying product. Yes, you'll
have to make more than one. And no, you
will not make all of the money in the
world forever, but you will make no
money. In fact, you will make negative
money. You will sink money into a hole
99 times out of 100. If you chase the
live service trend, you probably are
going to fail. And it is proven that
even though you don't grow to be the
biggest godamn thing in the world, you
still grow and make tons of money by
just making good games. You've got the
entire AA industry. You've got the indie
games industry. And you've got, like I
said, a great example of a AAA like
Capcom that has done nothing but single
player games and grown every step of the
way. Just stop doing this [ __ ] You
can't all be Fortnite. You won't all be
Fortnite. Most of you will not own a
platform. Epic has more money than you
can imagine, and they have not made a
dent in Steam. And hell, they own
platforms. The Unreal Engine and
Fortnite are both technically platforms.
Like, people use Unreal to make their
games, and that makes epic money. People
use Fortnite not only for fun, but
people make content with it. People rent
their intellectual property to it, and
they do these collaboration events. And
it's this stuff. It It's It's something
you're not going to get. A lot of these
companies were either first or entirely
locked into it. Why do AAA publishers
hate singleplayer games? Because as
Tears for Fears put it, everybody wants
to rule the world. The problem with that
is that's not how the world works. We
all have a lot of different ideas about
how the world should work. And my idea
is probably very different from the idea
that these people have. But it doesn't
matter what I think or what they think
because the world works the way the
world works now. Any input from Jim Ryan
or myself will not change that. If you
want to be in the games business, make
games people want to play. You're not
going to rule the world with that, but
you'll do pretty damn good. If you're
picking up what we're throwing down
here, a lot of this came from
discussions we have making the Falcon
Show, our new membersonly podcast. Now,
some of it you can hear on the show.
Some of it happens around the show, but
that's where a lot of what this is about
came from. The Falcon Show is the first
thing we're doing for our new 1% club.
Now, that's kind of an ironic name. The
1% has always meant the elite, but we're
kind of co-opting that a little bit,
talking about how these executive types
that this video has been very pointed
at, look at single player gamers, like
we're some small segment of the
population that shouldn't be paid
attention to. We need to go out after
naive fools and children who don't know
any better, uh, who will become addicted
to our endless services. If you want in
on our 1% club and the Falcon show,
become a member today. We thank you so
much. This has been and will continue to
be a passion project. The single player
game space is what we really hold dear
here at Game Ranks. And on that note, we
want to know what you think. Leave us a
comment. Let us know. If you like this
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We upload brand new videos every day of
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