This article was originally published on April 10, 2026 - read the full issue

By Rob Fahey

What does the pathway to success look like for a live-service game in 2026? Amid all the talk about this sector – from the high-profile failures of games such as Concord and Highguard, to Epic Games' recent layoffs raising questions about the long-term health of Fortnite – there's surprisingly little discussion of what it looks like to succeed. The well-documented pathways to failure are six-lane highways festooned in neon signs, while whatever road to success remains is hidden, overgrown, and largely seems to be stumbled on by accident as much as by design.

It's not that money isn't being made in live service. The big hits still hit big. Even as its star begins to fade, Fortnite still has massive sales. Roblox is an economy unto itself, chalking up around half a billion dollars in sales every month. Farther down the tier list, games including Apex Legends and Arc Raiders have carved out profitable market niches for themselves.

Do we focus too much on the failures? It's understandable to feel pretty glum about the seemingly headlong rush to turn everything into live service, especially when we've seen so many recent cases in which years of work by talented teams are thrown out within months or even days of launch for failing to instantly hit player and revenue targets. Those failures and their catastrophic impact on their studios are easy to obsess over and to point to as evidence for a broader market failure.

Yet looking more closely at some of the success stories doesn't necessarily paint a rosier picture. Epic's layoffs, apparent proof that its reach has exceeded its grasp in its ambitions for Fortnite as a cultural pillar, cast a long pall, but it's really in the next tier down of live-service games that we find genuine cause for concern about this entire market sector.

Arc Raiders is by any yardstick a major success – it was reportedly made on a modest budget and the latest data point released showed that it had sold 14 million copies at its $40 price point. Yet whether it's actually succeeding as a live-service game – turning those strong initial sales into a sustainable month-to-month business – is less clear. Players complain of the content becoming stale and repetitive, an issue developer Embark Studios has acknowledged; Steam player numbers (admittedly only one slice of the market, but the best data we have nonetheless) have been in steady decline, falling from consistently recording 400k+ concurrent peaks at the start of the year to rarely breaking 200k over the past month.

It's far from alone in trending this way. Helldivers 2, another game sold with a premium price tag but with live-service monetisation thereafter, was almost universally acclaimed at launch but eventually met with similar complaints about its content and a drop in player numbers. Blizzard's Overwatch saw a major resurgence in interest after effectively relaunching a couple of months ago, but Steam stats suggest that player numbers rapidly fell off again, dropping from concurrent peaks of over 160k to back well below 100k.

Bungie's Destiny 2 struggled massively to get players to come back after finishing its main story arc in an expansion pack a couple of years ago. In this tier of games, only Apex Legends seems to have escaped the steady erosion of its playerbase.

And these are the success stories. Every publisher that green-lights a live-service game has the stellar revenues of Fortnite and Roblox in mind as motivation, but the reality is that those are extraordinary lightning strikes. Realistic, attainable success in this market looks more like an Arc Raiders, a Helldivers 2, an Overwatch – and all of those games appear to be in a constant fight against relentless gravity.

This is happening, in part, because live-service games have an ecosystem problem, one that is far bigger than flaws or issues with any one game. The rush to launch so many of these games has created a massive supply of attractions competing for players' attention. No sooner does a player engage with one game than the next is clamouring for their attention, and the trick of using their financial investment in skins or other unlockables to trigger a sunk-cost fallacy seems to have seriously diminishing returns as they cycle through new game after new game.

Is that really an ecosystem problem, though, or is it the actual basic ecosystem of videogames reasserting itself over a distortion? Many of the players talking about stale content and cycling through to newer games (or back to old games to see what's changed) have racked up hundreds of hours of playtime – a figure that would have been considered absolutely fantastic for games in the past. Playing a game for a few weeks or months before moving on has been the norm for decades – and still represents an attention span far greater than almost any other kind of media demands.

Whether or not you buy into the notion that players' attention spans have atrophied in recent years, it's fairly grim that a large swathe of the game industry has painted itself into a corner where that success – keeping people engaged for a few months – has been redefined as a sign of struggle, and the equally reasonable feat of keeping people entertained for a few weeks is a catastrophic failure state.

While there will always be a lucrative corner of the market for live-service games, the low-hanging fruit they were once thought to represent feels increasingly out of reach, and that may not be simply because of the glut of such games on the market. Sales psychology isn't an eternal constant, and players who have felt burned by investing in games they didn't enjoy for long enough to be satisfied will be wiser the next time around. Moreover, players are aware that a lot of live-service games don't survive past the first few months, with publishers increasingly quick to cancel games that don't immediately record massive player numbers or huge revenues. That also makes consumers wary of spending money (or attention, an even more scarce commodity for many) on new games, creating a vicious cycle for the whole sector.

All of this has made the risk profile for this kind of game even more excruciating than before. It's not enough to do well at launch; you must absolutely smash it out of the park at launch to have any chance of long-term survival. There's no room for fixes and improvements, for gradually finding your playerbase, or for homing in on the real core of your game that's revealed as players engage with it. Such freedom, taken for granted when titans such as Fortnite and Counter-Strike were initially building their audiences, are now unimaginable luxuries for live-service developers. Perhaps the problem isn't just that the road to success is obscure, it's that the definition of success has changed into something unattainable to most.

This article was originally published on April 10, 2026 - read the full issue