Everything Everywhere Once A Week (02/03/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once a Week, a Patreon-fueled weekly newsletter where we talk about the biggest stories in gaming over the past week. There’s a lot to cover this week, so let’s just roll right into it.

Every Games-As-A-Service is Shutting Down (Except the Big Ones)

This week, we got sunsetting announcements from Knockout City, Crossfire X, Crime Sight, Apex Legends Mobile, and Rumbleverse in a span of around five days. The timing on all this is grim and conjures up the image of a reaper gliding through a field of games and scything everything along the way. That’s kind of what happened, except that the grim reaper is “unrealistic market expectations” and it was summoned by “financial year timing.”

Most of these games are under a year old, some are quite successful, and some are huge failures in one region that are popular elsewhere in the world. There’s actually quite a variety in the situations here, but ultimately they’re all kind of coming down to the same resolution: there probably is not a ton of room for lifestyle games in the marketplace right now.

We’ll start with Knockout City, because they had a surprisingly candid blog post about the entire thing. In the post, developer Velan is fairly concise about the problem of trying to maintain a live-service game that is growing beyond your means:

“Despite over 12 million players and billions of KOs around the globe, there are several aspects of the game in need of major disruption to better attract and retain enough players to be sustainable. Since we are a small, indie studio, it’s simply impossible for us to make those kinds of systemic changes in the live game while continuing to support it. So it became clear to us that we needed to take a step back and pave the way for Velan to do what we do best by innovating.”

So in Knockout City’s case, the game got too popular too fast, leading to them not being able to keep up in terms of resources or innovation. The developers are releasing a private-server version of the game and also just making all the items free.

In the case of CrossFire X, the Xbox release came along with Remedy’s single-player campaign and both were lambasted to hell and back by critics and fans alike. The only thing more likely than someone disliking playing CrossFire X is them not knowing what CrossFire X is in the first place. Pair that with the multitude of options available on Xbox Game Pass, including Halo Infinite multiplayer, Fortnite, or Apex Legends, and you have a recipe for a completely invisible game.

Rumbleverse, the melee-focused battle royale, lasted barely six months but by all accounts was fairly popular and well-liked. Developer Iron Galaxy didn’t state the reason for closure, nor did publisher Epic Games, but it seems reasonable to assume that there is a number somewhere higher that the game did not hit.

These three examples are almost entirely unique from each other despite all being live-service games. In Knockout City’s case, they grew too fast and couldn’t scale up in time being a smaller indie studio despite initially being backed by Electronic Arts. For Rumbleverse, they were published by Epic who has multiple battle royale and F2P games, but didn’t establish itself fast enough to make a cut. CrossFire X just seemed to be an all-around failure despite internationally being one of the most popular online games in the world and they decided to just call it rather than keep trying to make it happen in the west.

But that all kind of leads to the same truth: if you cannot get established immediately, or have such low overhead that your game can sit in the background until it pops off, there’s almost no chance to fit your “lifestyle” game into an already crowded market. And that establishment has to be a linear upward curve — the game has to be so popular that you can hire people to keep it current and has to grow so consistently that you can justify those hirings both retroactively and for the future. That’s an insane metric that will never work for most studios!

Compare Rumbleverse to Epic’s other free-to-play games, for example. Both Fall Guys and Rocket League were already established and Epic simply acquired the studios rather than launching something new. They did go free-to-play afterward, but they had an existing base, monetization model, and cultural cache. Then there’s Fortnite, which had none of those things, but came into a relatively empty market and already had a warm nest capable of massively scaling up once it started taking off.

To get to that same level, Rumbleverse would have had to become an utterly massive success within around three months and over-justify the number of people working on it so it had the room to scale up. This isn’t a scenario where a game like Among Us can just blow up a few years later, these games are built on a hope that is exceedingly unlikely to ever come to fruition and must be handled perfectly when it does.

Imagine you’ve decided to start running in the morning and your goal is to hit six miles on the second day. Also, there’s already established runners on the trail who will knock you over by just existing near you. That doesn’t sound very conducive to a long-term habit.

I am not sure how you really solve this problem. I guess my main advice here is, unless you have a real good hook to your multiplayer game or have scoped it in such a way that you’re comfortable existing with a lower ceiling, it’s probably not a sustainable path right now.

Electronic Arts Cancels Unannounced Single-Player Titanfall/Apex Legends Game

According to a story at Bloomberg, EA this week axed an unannounced Titanfall/Apex game that had been in development at Respawn. Codenamed Titanfall Legends, the game would reportedly have the return of Titanfall 2’s BT alongside characters from Apex Legends to bridge the two series’ shared universe together.

I’ve not tested this Patreon to see how you guys feel about me going “Yeah I had heard about that too,” but we’re going to test it this week because I’m going to do it twice. As far as I am aware, this project has been in development for roughly two years and Respawn had been incredibly excited about it. I can’t speak to what caused the cancellation, but staff had mentioned to me that they were worried about EA’s unofficial “ten million or more” threshold for single-player games coming back to bite them.

It seems unlikely that would be the only reason a game like this would get canceled, especially with major critical successes like Dead Space and Jedi Fallen Order coming from the publisher, but who knows. It’s possible that the closure of Apex Legends Mobile may have required shifting of resources to rebuild that internally at Respawn without Tencent as a partner.

Either way, this is disappointing. Titanfall 2 deserves a follow-up.

E3 Likely Loses Major Console Platform Holders

In an exclusive by IGN, the outlet reports that Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are all intending to skip out of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June of this year. This would mark the first time in the event’s history that all three major platform holders are choosing not to have any presence on the show floor, though that definition gets a little sweaty the more you try to categorize it.

You may remember that I said something similar last week, but IGN did great work in confirming it through strong reporting. The overall feeling about this year’s show had been optimistic until it became time for companies to start planning their presence in Los Angeles this year. For most major exhibitors, E3 is costly at its most basic, and an increasingly-unjustifiable expense for the bigger booths. Even just being near E3 with your own adjacent conference is expensive, not to mention it’s a lot of money to spend to inconvenience the people who are there to see you.

I suspect most people reading this have seen a fair few arguments of why E3 is dying and, I would guess, are fairly tired of them. I have seen people complaining about game journalists — the cabal that we are — are dancing on the show’s grave when it’s responsible for so many good memories of them. More than once, I have seen people mourn the loss of the “gamer christmas” that E3 represented.

Here’s the thing: of fucking course it’s gamer christmas for you. It’s like you have 30 parents and all of them are divorced and vying for your attention. It just sucks for those 10, or 20, or 29 parents you don’t pay attention to and have spent a small fortune trying to win accolades.

Which doesn’t take away from you being able to enjoy it, but you’re an adult, understand why this thing is unfeasible now. There was a perfect middleground where streaming was becoming bigger, so you could see these events live, but it was not so big and easy that these companies realized they did not need to physically be in one place to get their marketing out. That era has mostly passed.

E3 doesn’t force anyone to give you announcements or trailers, it merely provided an excuse to do so if they were already inclined. I understand mourning what E3 was, but let’s rush ahead through the transition of whatever the next thing is, because the things you loved about E3 are the things you loved about communal experiences and are inherently ephemeral anyway.

You Can’t Put Ashley in a Dumpster Anymore and That’s Good

Some new Resident Evil 4 remake details have come out this week courtesy of my former workplace Game Informer, including some changes to how Ashley works from the original game. Notably, Ashley functions more like a character you need to escort than one you can just put into a garbage-suitcase safe from bad guys until you’ve cleared them out.

Now, I’m not someone with a lot of complaints about Resident Evil 4. If you press me, I’m sure I can tell you that some writing has not aged very well, or the island is not as good as the castle, or whatever. I don’t think that putting Ashley in hiding places was bad at the time, but I think having her stick by you in the midst of the action and the danger is for sure better.

I know, I know, I am asking for more escort mission-like changes, but hear me out here.

In Resident Evil 4, Ashley is essentially an extension of Leon’s character. She does not move unless you have pressed a button telling her to move. She is as much a playable character as Leon is, just without as much to do. By placing her in a box while you do cool action guy stuff, you’re essentially eliminating a mechanic for a little while. It’s like putting on armor for a fight.

Does this drastically change anything? No. But it says to me they realize keeping Ashley safe — a character who does not run off on her own or do anything without your say-so — is a fundamental part of the game. That excites me, because they’re thinking about how all the gears fit together.

If You’re Using Twitter to Log In to Things, Stop

This week, the brain geniuses at Twitter decided that they are no longer going to make Twitter’s previously-free API quite so free now. They intend to make API calls, which include things like the Ace Attorney Bot or the Daniel Craig Weekend Bot or, it turns out, logins into services using your Twitter account, cost money now. At least one game is ringing the alarm bell about this.

Hoyoverse, the developers of Genshin Impact, have asked that players who have previously signed up for accounts through Twitter go into their account pages and switch their linked accounts to Hoyoverse ones instead. They state that if players don’t do this, they’re at risk of no longer being able to log in to their accounts, which could contain quite a lot of invested time and money.

While I haven’t seen a lot of other developers issue this warning, I think it would probably be good sense to follow the same advice. In fact, maybe just don’t log in to other services using a Twitter, Google, or Facebook account. You never know when an idiot will take over and just fuck the whole thing up.

Anyway, I wonder how Hoyoverse feels about all their Elon Musk references these days?

Other Things:

• We’ll have a new Materia Possessions next week with Natalie, Andrea, and Nerium! Will there be a Nintendo Direct to talk about? We'll see!
• I’m close to the end of Fire Emblem Engage and I’m kinda baffled at the mediocre reviews. I suppose that’s a matter of priority, as many of them cite the admittedly paper-thin story, a thing that does not matter much to me here. The actual tactics are so good that I can’t really be bothered by that.