Summary
There are two kinds oflive-service games– those you pay upfront for, and free-to-play titles. Both attempt to make money by slapping dollar signs on stuff, though some games use scummier tactics than others. For obvious reasons, free-to-play games have more incentive to double down on squeezing players for as much money as humanly possible, with the worst offenderslocking entire mechanics behind a paywallso you have to pay not just to win, but even to play as intended. But that doesn’t mean that paid games don’t do the same, of course.Just look at Diablo 4’s skins.
Sony’s ‘Pay First’ Live-Service Strategy
In 2022,Sonyannounced awildly ill-advised push into live-service gamesand announced it had a whopping 12 in the works. Late last year, the company saidsix of those would be released in the 2025 financial year, with the rest still up in the air. A mere month later, Naughty Dog’s attempt at entering the multiplayer spacewas cancelled.
And yet, it’s still pushing on with a strategy that basically anybody could tell you is a terrible idea.Helldivers 2, its single major success so far, was received very positively andstill has quite a healthy player base, despitehaving lost a large portion of playersin a typical pattern of attrition for the genre. The latest of Sony’s live-service releases,Concord,never broke 1,000 playersonSteam, andhas been losing players since.
Both of these games launched with price tags, though they’ve had slightly varying approaches to monetisation. Helldivers 2 has beenwidely praised for its Warbondsand very fair monetisation. Concorddoesn’t have battle passes at all, though itdoes have microtransactions for cosmetics.
Will Concord Have To Go Free-To-Play Like Foamstars?
Now, let me point your attention toSquare Enix’sFoamstars, which was released in February to a middling reception and fizzled out quickly after. Foamstars was picked up by Sony as a month-longPlayStation Plusexclusive, and is nowgoing fully free-to-playin an attempt to revive the game by drawing in new players.
You can currently only play Foamstars on PS4 and PS5. The exclusivity window has passed, though, so we may see Square bring the game to other platforms in the future.
Despite having an upfront price tag, Foamstars has beencriticised for its expensive cosmeticsand has always been monetised almost like a free-to-play game. It’s unclear how this move to free-to-play will affect its monetisation, but I doubt it’ll be in a good way. Regardless, the players who have stuck around seem pretty excited about the prospect of actually having people to play with, so good for them.
This isn’t the first live-service game to go free-to-play after player numbers dwindled, but it’s a reminder of a rather unsavoury reality, and I’m starting to wonder if Concord will go the same way. It seems from Helldivers 2 and Concord that Sony will be releasing other games on its slate at the same $40 price point, though it hasn’t made any commitment to that. That price point seems to be specifically geared to enable less predatory monetisation tactics in a gamble to win over players sick of free-to-play games trying to take their money at every turn.
But trying to convince players to shell out for a live-service game before playing it is significantly harder when there are so many far more established free-to-play competitors in the space. The console exclusivity certainly makes things harder, though Sony has done the smart thing and simultaneously released them on PC with crossplay to soften the impact on player numbers. Free-to-play games generally hugely boost player numbers, something that Concord in particular sorely needs. I’m unsure how Concord will survive even the next two months without drastically boosting its player count.
At the time of writing, there are 68 people playing Concord on Steam. The 24-hour peak was 198.
And yet, I’m hesitant to say I want Concord to go the same way as so many other live-service games. Fewer and less predatory microtransactions are always a good thing, and making these games paid instead of free-to-play enables that. $40 isn’t a ton of money, considering we’re coming to a point where triple-A games can cost double that, and significantly more for special editions.
I’d happily pay upfront for a game knowing it won’t try to squeeze me for more, but most players don’t feel the same. Even with open betas, Concord simply wasn’t original enough to sway players away from the similar, free-to-play games they were already playing. I want there to be space in the live-service genre for games to eradicate the worst forms of monetisation, but so far, Helldivers 2 is looking like a fluke. Sony will probably have to change its strategy with Concord, and I hate that. It probably shouldn’t have greenlit all those live-service games, huh?
Concord
WHERE TO PLAY
Concord is an upcoming FPS from Firewalk Studios, part of the PlayStation Studios family. A PvP multiplayer title, it is slated for launch on both PS5 and PC in 2024.
