Some Modern Examples:
Concord lasted two weeks.
Babylon’s Fall didn’t make it a year.
The First Descendant lost 97% of its players.,
skate. is fading fast, and its Steam reviews only recently clawed their way out of “Mixed",
Skull and Bones has probably shut down
KTLJ is a trainwreck, same with Gotham Knights
Even Marvel Rivals, the most “successful” newcomer, has dropped 90% of its audience since launch.
Marathon looks to be a failure
The “forever game” era also gave us LawBreakers, Battleborn, Anthem, and others that didn’t even make it past 1 or 2 years
Games built to be “forever experiences” are dying faster than the single-player titles they were supposed to replace, If live-service gaming was ever sustainable, we’d have more than a handful of survivors left.
So much of the ‘game design’ for modern live service games is less like game design and more like marketing campaign design.
Reveals, content drops, surprise reveals, ongoing narrative, roadmaps, engagement drivers etc is much more akin to building sales funnels and advertising strategy, never mind monetisation strategies.
And the secret to successful marketing is that you need to start with a product that a) people want and b) doesn’t suck. Marketing companies like to complicate it, because they get paid for their failures too, but that’s the core of it.
So you can take $100m, five years, and a thousand devs/artists/sound people/writers etc but if 80% of that time and money and effort is spent in pursuit of the sales funnel/advertising strategy type stuff it’s gonna take a miracle for you to come up with something more fun and organically engaging than a far smaller project where that was the primary, or perhaps only, goal.
They all want to be the next Fortnite, without realising that Fortnite was a fun game before it become a giant empty pop-culture monolith.