It's not a failure of Knockout City that I had all of my fun in its first month. With Fortnite as the north star, live service got to where it is now, with studios betting everything on the notion that if it makes a good game for free, the money will come later. Those older games listed above? They all have battle passes now and all went free. Fortnite is everywhere in everything, and not even pre-Fortnite games are immune. In-game events became out-of-game opportunities to sell double-priced skins that can't be earned with in-game currency. The 12-week season became the six-week season with an extra "midseason" content drop. To compete in a post-Fortnite world, your game had to release cosmetics weekly, develop limited-time events that'd make headlines, create a 100-tier battle pass, and above all else, be free-to-play. Fortnite's unbelievably quick turnaround on meaningful updates, its surprising implementation of live events, and its "more is more" approach to cosmetics ballooned our expectations around how much "service" a game should provide. We know it doesn't have to be this way.Įpic essentially rewrote the book on live service when Fortnite took off in 2018. If Chivalry had been held to that standard, it would've shut down a decade ago. Games are only as successful as their last month. Watching these shutdowns gave me a guilty knot in my stomach-should I have played more? Is this because I didn't buy last season's battle pass? It's ridiculous to think I'm somehow complicit in destroying a promising videogame because I stopped playing it for a while, but that's the vicious cycle of live service. Knockout City announced its shutdown in February and weeks later MultiVersus was pulled from stores (though the devs say it's coming back next year). Then two more games I loved got the chopping block. I always meant to get back into Rumbleverse, but a month ago it died. ![]() A battle royale with deep melee combat and zero guns struck me as a thing that deserves to exist. I liked Rumbleverse too, enough to play it for about a week. I wish I could say the same thing about Rumbleverse, the Epic-published wrestling battle royale that came out last August.
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