Romanticizing the past is a trap many of us have fallen into at one point or another. I used to play a game called War of the Monsters when I was a kid, and sure, some small part of me knows it's not the best game ever made, but I'll be damned if a much larger part of me doesn't believe it to be the greatest work of interactive entertainment ever produced by man. It's certainly not a bad game, but I'm sure much of my adoration of it can be traced to my having played it when I was a child. There's a certain sense of awe and wonder that we lose as we age, but it still colours our memories and blinds us to the flaws of the games we used to love.

I say this because recently I (and I'd wager a fair few other people) have been feeling a little underserved by the latest crop of big AAA releases. It's no secret that as the gaming scene has ballooned in size, becoming the largest entertainment industry in the world, the nature of what it produces has changed dramatically. Hence, the rise of what have come to be known as "live services". Now the live service model isn't necessarily a bad thing — look at games like Genshin Impact, which largely get this stuff right — but they do tend towards being lazy, uninspired, and at their worst, exploitative and manipulative.

World of Warcraft Dragonflight human on a blue dragon

The reason for their existence is obvious. It makes a hell of a lot more sense from a publishing perspective to keep the money coming in on a long-term basis. Rather than a one-off payment, the player base is encouraged to support the game via a subscription fee or must purchase new content on a regular basis in order to get the full experience.

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It's basically the model that World of Warcraft has been finding huge success with for almost two decades now, which raises a couple of questions: Why has "live service" only just started to have negative connotations, and is anything about to change?

You see, I've had it put to me that all my gripes with games like Gotham Knights, Anthem, Fallout 76, and the like are due to my nostalgia blindness, that I just don't understand what people want today, and I am looking back at a time gone by through rose-tinted spectacles. There may be some small degree of truth to this, but I have my doubts.

Firstly, live services have been around for a hell of a long time. I mentioned World of Warcraft earlier, but we also had other successful games like Everquest and even the Quake Arena series from around the same period. I suspect then that a large part of the reason people are tired of them now is their overexposure, as opposed to them being inherently awful. The AAA sector is producing live services with such frequency, and at the expense of all else, that people are just overwhelmed.

Resident Evil 4 Remake Ada Wong Response

Meanwhile, what's been going on in the world of single-player games? Enter the recent flurry of remakes from between 15 and 20 years ago. You see, these are exactly the kind of games that publishers used to try and persuade us that we don't actually want, yet they're proving to be at the top of a lot of players' charts. Games like Dead Space, Resident Evil 4, and Metroid Prime, are intricately crafted with a focus on narrative, exactly what games like the ones I mentioned earlier just aren't.

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In other words, they're a lot harder to do well than your typical skinner box with one simple, endlessly repeated primary loop — i.e, loot and shoot. It's not hard to see why a lot of publishers have tried to push the live-service model with such fervor then; it's just hell of a lot easier for to make money that way. The bubble has to burst eventually though, and that's why I think we've seen all these remakes just recently. It's a kind of holding pattern — the current strategy has started to stall out, and so publishers are putting a different kind of game with a guaranteed return of investment while they go back to the drawing board.

Does it mean live service is over? Almost certainly not. An old MMORPG like World of Warcraft still brings in around 8.5 million monthly players, and younger, sexier battle arena Fortnite can pull nearly 10 times that amount. Still, it's impossible to deny the popularity of this new wave of nostalgia-heavy single-player remakes, and I'm hopeful that their success is going to lead to a new golden age of fresh, narrative heavy solo experiences. While there are some notable exceptions, the AAA sector has been getting lazier and lazier as time goes on, rushing out inferior grind-fests in the hope of making a quick buck before the live service gold rush comes to a close. Just look at the fate which befell the truly pathetic Babylon's Fall.

Chai and 808 (Hi-Fi Rush)

The public has finally tired of meaningless crafting mechanics, confusing UI's, and copy-and-paste combat encounters. I get the sense that there is now a palpable yearning for games that feel hand-crafted and have a bit of soul to them. Just look at the success of Hi-Fi Rush, which Bethesda released completely without fanfare, almost as if they knew it was exactly what people actually want and thus didn't need the hype. Funny that.

I'm not generally one for trying to predict the future, but I think we're already seeing things start to change. The wheels are in motion and with any luck, we're about to enter a new golden age.

Next: What Makes A Great Video Game Remake?