Player Satisfaction Will Be Maximized Until Morale Improves
Bungie's Marathon is at the mercy of Sony's live service mantra
"This cycle of test, of iterate, of test again, that is such a key component of the live service success both leading up to launch, but also throughout the life of the game and we're committed to continuing to leverage our learning to maximize engagement and player satisfaction throughout the lifecycle of the title."
That's how PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst recently described the making of Marathon to shareholders. He was reading from a teleprompter. It sounded like a threat. A week later the game was indefinitely delayed.
The vibes around Marathon have been tanking since an April alpha test. There were plenty of specific critiques going around but the basic problem was that too many people just weren’t having that much fun. It felt conservatively designed and a bit vanilla.
The art was cool—a cinematic short was more compelling than anything in the alpha test—and the Bungie feel was there but the extraction shooter loop as a whole just didn’t have the juice. Then an art theft scandal torpedoed remaining good will as naysayers weaponized the issue to write Marathon off completely.
Bungie wrote in a blog post this week that player feedback had been "strong and clear" and that the team needed more time to craft a game that "truly reflects your passion” and work on "deepening the relationship" with fans. That also sounded like a threat. A new release date will be revealed in the fall.
Hulst’s corpo-speak during a recent Sony business briefing is a perfect distillation of what makes so many players instinctively recoil at the phrase “live service” despite loving so many of the most successful ones. It conceives of online games as platforms where user telemetry is analyzed to keep people playing and monetize every minute of it.
Instead of buying a game, beating it, and moving on you’re essentially paying to hop onto a perpetual treadmill where the primary design consideration is to keep you running whether you’re enjoying it or not. Sometimes that’s a compelling gameplay loop. Sometimes it’s battle pass rewards. Often it’s just the fact that you’re friends are all still hanging out there.
“I was catching up on the Marathon delay news, and this quote by Herman Hulst perfectly sums up why these games aren't for me anymore,” wrote the lead developer behind 2024’s best retro FPS Selaco in a post that resonated with many on Bluesky. “Every single time all they talk about is analytics, test groups, engagement and research data. The word ‘Fun’ is never used in any of those interviews.”
Hulst’s comments were a mea culpa for Concord, a live service hero shooter that instantly flopped and cost Sony hundreds of millions. The biggest question at the time was how such a big publisher could launch such a mid game. Didn’t they have mock reviews? How did user testing miss the red flags? Why did they launch with such poor pre-order numbers?
One reason is that you just never know. Pre-launch marketing for Helldivers 2 made it clear Sony did not think that game would become even half the hit it turned out to be. Concord had a special edition PS5 DualSense at launch. Helldivers 2 famously did not.
“I don't trust any marketers that say they can forecast game sales," Shuhei Yoshida, the last guy in charge of PlayStation Studios, said in an interview after leaving Sony earlier this year. "You look at the commercial side of things but in the end you have to trust your gut."
Sony’s gut has not been very good lately. The PlayStation 5 generation has no identity. A dozen live service projects were greenlit and most have all been canceled or delayed. Helldivers 2 is the exception that proves the rule. Arrowhead is prototyping its next game and won’t be working with Sony on it.
"Arrowhead’s philosophy has always been 'a game for everyone is a game for no-one'," Jorjani explains. "That is the company slogan. It’s how our games are designed. You can feel it in every feature. I think it’s one of the big reasons that Helldivers 2 has been so successful. It feels fresh because it does a lot of unpopular stuff.”
Helldivers 2 is not a live service game that Arrowhead tried to make fun. It’s a fun game that happens to be a live service. That distinction can be profitable. There are around 2.5 million players every week. It’s still the second most-played game on Steam. It makes half of its revenue from microtransactions.
Here’s how Hulst talks about making games: "We've introduced much more rigorous processes for validating—for revalidating our creative, our commercial, our development assumptions and hypotheses, and we now do that on a much more ongoing basis," Hulst said. "That's the plan that will ensure we're investing in the right opportunities at the right time, all while maintaining much more predictable timelines."
Here’s how Nintendo’s Shiguro Miyamoto talks about making them: “For me it's much more fun to see if the thing that I made is actually going to sell well. Rather than me trying to create something that I think other people will like, I just keep making things that I like and then I just see if other people like them too.”
Live service interrupted
Dune: Awakening has a deep desert problem. The end-game map is split between PVP and PVE zones, and lone players are getting decimated by rival gangs. There are memes about just staying in the starting Hagga Basin area as a result, but certain resources can only be gained by venturing into the griefers’ wasteland. In addition to some performance issues, quick respawn timers also mean that players you just killed can quickly find you again. Less than half of all players have ventured beyond Hagga Basin.
“We have a lot of plans to address your points about respawn times and revives,” creative director Joel Bylos wrote in a long-ranging Q&A on Reddit. “Full loot is a decree that can be obtained via the Landsraad (so compete there if you want to make it a reality), there are control points in the deep desert already, we have no plans to reduce the DD size. As we work on the game we will continue to work on making PvP more rewarding (I am sure you will note I am not being very concrete but that is because we are planning and watching how people are playing and finding the right points to address).”
FBC: Firebreak players have been skipping it’s most important resource. Lost Assets are folders of classified intel players can pick up during missions. “A whopping 90% of our players have never picked up a single Lost Asset,” Remedy Entertainment confessed on Friday. An emergency update made them easier to identify and tried to fix a host of other onboarding issues, including separating out cosmetic unlocks from upgrades that impact gameplay in the shooter’s Helldivers 2-like battle pass.
Another big change addresses how players unlock missions. They consist of multiple sections, and originally players had to finish one section to unlock the rest, re-doing everything in-between each time. No longer. The enemy variety, combat, and objectives were a bit sleepy for me but there are some really neat ideas unique to the Control setting like a post-it note debuff that turns you into a paper monster if you’re not careful.
Final Fantasy XIV has cracked down on a stalking tool that fans were freaking out about earlier this year. The makers of PlayerScope, which lets users track players anywhere in the game, following them from one server to the next and exposing alternate accounts, have abandoned development following a cease and desist. Given the issue still exists at the level of the MMO tech itself, it’s unclear if copycat trackers will continue proliferating in the background until Square Enix fixes the underlying problem.
The publisher is also fixing the Occult Crescent's Forked Tower raid that has only been cleared 400 times since it was added. That’s because it’s a 48-player activity that requires everyone to filter in through 8-person instances, making it a nightmare to coordinate outside of the most devoted guilds. As of update 7.3 in August, alliances will be able to queue all at once, director Naoki Yoshida confirmed in a recent livestream. He also said that thanks to the development team’s hard work, hats will soon be available to all characters. Metal helmets, however, will take some more time.
Mario Kart World has an online meta and it revolves around driving the Baby Blooper and picking random. That’s because the random category automatically filters out transition tracks from one course to the next, letting players engage in traditional repetitive laps rather than road trips with long straightaways. Some brave Baby Blooper truthers, however, are arguing that other karts are just as viable.
Elden Ring Nightreign has a new hardest boss: Enhanced Gaping Jaw. I’ve already spent three nights and nearly 10 hours trying to kill it to no avail (we got soul crushingly close!) but am still, somehow, hungry for more punishment. By far the most taxing part isn’t the fight itself but the 30 minutes of racing around the open world map trying to maximize loot and XP. Also this fucking guy.
Rematch is a third-person action soccer game from the makers of martial arts RPG Absolver. “Rocket League but with people and no flying,” is how one fan put it. There are teams of five with no fouls or out-of-bounds. Players are already demolishing one another by chaining headers together right outside the goal.
Peak is a co-op climbing game from the makers of Another Crab’s Treasure. It’s $8 and sold a million copies in its first week. From one Steam review: “Told my friends with panic in my voice that the lava is rising even though it wasn't, one friend panicked and died because of it. 10/10 game.”
Patch notes
Lies of P version 1.9.0.0 will now let players start the Soulslike’s new Overture expansion at chapter 5 instead of chapter 9. It also reduced the stats of rank-and-file enemies and nerfed the difficulty of the DLC on new game plus after veteran players complained about it being unfair.
War Robots: Frontiers season 2 added new mechs, pilots, rewards, and balance changes. The update stemmed the tide of mixed reviews on Steam by nerfing some of the PVP shooter’s “most toxic weapons” like Noricum missiles which low-effort trolls were spamming in every match.
Escape from Tarkov patch 0.16.7.0 received a host of quality-of-life fixes like the ability to finally search items in your stash by category or name. Players won’t have to manually convert junk to cash to buy new items anymore either.
Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.3 has been delayed. The new patch will be similar in scope to the last “final” one, which included new character creation options, custom cars, and Keanu Reeves riding shotgun.
Other links
Alzara Radiant Echoes was an indie JRPG that raised over $300,000 on Kickstarter. Now the studio behind it is shutting down. “We used that success to develop a new demo of the game incorporating the latest advances on Alzara,” Studio Camelia wrote in an update. “We attended various events (Tokyo Game Show, DICE…) to meet with potential partners from around the world. We had in-depth discussions earlier this year, but unfortunately, none of them resulted in a contract.” One commenter wrote back, "“So this campaign was for a demo? Would have been nice for that "little" disclosure at the beginning.”
Third-party game sales on Switch 2 outside of Cyberpunk 2077 are disappointing, The Game Business reported. Circana game research director Mat Piscatella says it’s too early to really know. Two big contributing factors might be the fact that most day-one buyers have access to all the games they already bought for Switch 1 and that most third-party releases are ports of old stuff. Batman: Arkham City came to Wii U a year late. Yakuza 0 is already 10 years ago.
Borderlands 4 is getting a combat radar in response to fan requests. With double jumps and gliding it’s becoming more and more like Destiny 2 everyday. The skill trees will be bigger than Borderlands 2 and 3 combined.
Fortnite Blitz is now the battle royale’s most popular mode with abbreviated matches that can take as little as five minutes to complete. Online PVP for the TikTok generation.
Riot's Minecraft-like sandbox RPG Hytale is dead. Revealed in 2018 and banking on a 2021 release, it kept getting delayed. Hypixel co-founder Noxy said the project got outpaced by the rest of the genre. “We looked at reducing scope, adjusting timelines, and finding new angles to keep moving forward,” Noxy wrote. “But each of those options would have meant compromising on what made Hytale special in the first place. It wouldn’t have been the game we set out to make.”
