Live gaming is going through a difficult transition period. Even as the sector continues to consume millions of gaming hours, successful new launches are rare and the frequency of closures has increased. Franchises like Destiny and Overwatch have moved to free-to-play models to keep their player numbers high, and to premium live service games – that is, games with a full purchase price and the intention of monetizing players in the long term – are a dying breed.
In 2024, there were two dramatic, high-profile failures in the premium live service. Rocksteadies Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League a loss of $200 million for WB Games, while Sony is even more expensive Concord It was so unpopular with players that it was unceremoniously shut down after just a few weeks. (Sony had a live service hit in the form of Helldivers 2but judging by the publisher's marketing efforts for the two games, Hell diver apparently wasn't something Sony executives expected – or perhaps even wanted – to take off.)
But Blizzard's release in 2023 Diablo 4 is a certified hit with big sales, strong expansion in 2024 and apparently an enthusiastic audience. How did it buck the trend? For Rod Fergusson – the famed Gears of War producer turned general manager of the Diablo franchise – that's because Blizzard had no intention of making a live service game. The studio simply wanted to make a Diablo game, but Diablo's nature of action RPGs essentially demands that it be a live service game.
An ARPG is inherently a live service. The question is what you do about it
—Rod Fergusson
“I’m returning to the genre,” Fergusson said in an interview conducted in November. “There were these conversations early on. […] Is Diablo 4 a live service game, or should we roll the credits and call it? And I thought, “Look when you look at it.” Diablo 3 and the millions of people who were there every season, whether you like it or not, it's an ARPG by nature a live church service. The question is what to do about it.”
For Fergusson, a live service is an opportunity to continually refine and redesign a game, but only when the audience's demand to continue playing flows naturally from the game's design. “For me, if you're a Diablo-like, […] People will try to play through the campaign, but then they'll try to play what I call the hundred or thousand hour game. They want to be able to continue that progression, they want to have the power fantasy, they want to keep coming back to it.” This creates an opportunity for the developers to keep bringing new ideas to the game to keep it fresh. “That was one of the great things,” Fergusson said. “It wasn't anything like that fait accompli where we say, “It's in the box and we're done.” We'll have the opportunity to improve Helltide. We will have the opportunity to add the pit, we will have the opportunity to try the glove.”
There's a simple lesson here for game publishers: don't force it. When Suicide Squad When the preview was shown, players immediately noted that the game was strangely suited to a live service framework. It didn't flow naturally from the game's plot or genre. Concord was in an appropriate genre – it was a hero shooter – but it seemed to have been made to satisfy a publisher's demand for a live service game, rather than player demand for an alternative to Overwatch. The game concept wasn't the first priority.
Vice versa, Diablo 4 worked because people wanted a new Diablo game and wanted to play it for hundreds of hours. It's like a reversal of the classic line of Field of dreams: not “If you build it, they will come,” but “They will come…so you’d better build it.”
