Live Service Economy

Last week, Epic Games announced that it would be letting go of more than 1000 employees. Stating that it is due to Fortnite's popularity going down, and that they are currently spending more than they are making. Now think about it, when I tell you that for 2025, Epic Games made an estimated $6 billion. Most video game companies could only dream of making such revenue, and especially maintaining it for as long as Fortnite has. Epic Games really struck gold with this IP, and since its release in 2017, it has majorly shaped the video game market. This success made live service the next big thing that so many studios have since tried to recreate or incorporate in one way or another, with results swaying from some success to absolute dumpster fire. Yet here we are in 2026, with even the mighty Epic Games struggling to keep the lights on, they claim. Simply uttering the term "live service" today along with a new project can bring a chilling feeling down the spines of video game enthusiasts and market analysts. Why? Well, it has gained quite a reputation in the last couple of years, and there are a multitude of factors that I want to point out.​

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Inherently, live service games are not evil and corrupt, like many other people seem to immediately associate them with. They can be used as a great tool in order to keep bringing new content to the game and keeping player retention. When they work, they work really well, almost too well. Their problems come from a couple of reasons, namely: greed, oversaturation, blatant unimaginative copying, and executives being so out of touch with their customers, it's comical. Everyone wanted to have a piece of the pie that Fortnite had baked. The industry went a bit too wild. Many tried to copy the success but ultimately lost their identity in the process of chasing revenue. We had developers being forced to make live service games like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024) that were an abomination, a major flop, and severely damaged the fans' good view of the studio that took years to build through previous high-quality releases. The once mighty developers of Batman's single-player Arkham series. So many studios became empty husks of what they once were in this chase over the last couple of years. We also had new IP's such as  Concord (2024), a $400 million disaster that lasted only for 2 weeks before being shut down. As well as Highguard (2026), $200 million for less than 3 months of being online. Those are only some of the many fails in that category. Due to their oversaturation, live service in general has become a very tough market to get into. Yet in some cases, simply making games because we want revenue is so blatantly insulting from studios that I am not surprised that, given the current economy and culture, players are much smarter with voting by using their wallets and also their time. Executives have also prioritized monetization over experience. Tons of games are engineered around spending, not fun; microtransactions seep into every corner of UI design. Battle passes lock cosmetics behind paywalls. Events disappear if you miss them. The general mechanics of FOMO are being understood better than before, and people are getting tired of it.

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This brings us back to Fortnite, Epic Games, and what is causing the giant to bleed. They seemed to have forgotten what made them the trailblazers. Simply put, they themselves fell into the chase of trends. Fortnite doubled down heavily into the "Metaverse" (Remember Facebook's failed vision), thinking that with all of their crossovers and IP collaborations, they could become the Metaverse of the video game industry. They poured millions into expanding Fortnite with modes that had nothing to do with their original game. Guess what, surprise surprise, people still only played the original battle royale mode while Epic was bleeding money for IP rights or ideas that nobody was interested in. They expanded too quickly and are now paying the price for it. Not to mention the almost total abandonment of Rocket League that Epic Games acquired only to use in their metaverse for Rocket Racing, which is now shutting down. All that while treating Rocket League and its community like a garage project, while the game by itself has much more potential alone than what they did with their Metaverse project as a whole. As a whole, the economic market might be tough right now for the entire video game industry, but with it, more cracks and bad decisions are coming out within the live service model.

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To conclude, recently, Ryan Gosling said regarding "saving cinema" that it's not the consumer's job to keep the film industry afloat; it's the studio's job to make worthwhile projects that people are willing to pay their hard-earned money for. The same applies to video games. Take indie games, for example, they have been flourishing beautifully and showing that with actual love and passion, not dictatorship driven by greed and misunderstanding of community and culture, amazing projects can be made. The idea, guided by seemingly incompetent executives, of growth no matter the cost, is backfiring, and I love watching it from the sidelines. Yet I feel terribly sorry for the number of artists, developers, and many other creatives in the video game industry that are forced to make this slop instead of chasing projects with actual passion behind them that would naturally bring in the fandom and, organically, revenue for a good product.

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