Publishers hoping to launch the world’s next big live service game often give up on projects too soon, the boss of Warframe developer Digital Extremes has said.
Live service games with so-so launches could still be salvaged with more work, Digital Extreme’s Steve Sinclair told VGC, rather than moving on and ditching years of progress.
“They think the release is make or break, and it’s not. They have a financial way to be persistent, and they never do it,” Sinclair said. “It comes out, doesn’t work and they throw it away.”
Warframe, which originally launched in 2013, is still going strong a decade on. But plenty of other live service games end up shutting in just a fraction of the time.
Marvel’s Avengers, published by Square Enix in 2020, is a recent example of this. Anthem, from Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio BioWare, is another. And currently there are concerns from fans that, due to low player numbers, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad will be next, after its first year of content concludes.