After three exciting years, Activision has announced that Call of Duty: Warzone will be shutting its doors later this year. The studio wants to push players to new experiences like Warzone 2 and is putting all its focus on that title. Once September 21 rolls around, active players will lose everything that they have earned over the years and will be forced to find other battle royale games. It is sad to see this popular game come to an end, but it is something that live-service fans will likely have to grow accustomed to as the years go by.
Call of Duty: Warzone is just the latest game in a long line of live-service games that will have to shut down eventually. As the gaming industry goes all in on the concept, so many titles will have a predetermined endpoint. The money will stop flowing, the players will stop playing, and the studio will want to focus its attention elsewhere. While it would be great if every game could last forever, Warzone's closure is simply a sign of things to come.
Live-Service Closures Will Become More Prevalent
Live-service games only exist as long as players are playing and spending. Since these are primarily online games, everything that players do is tied to an online space. A space that can be switched off at a moment’s notice and will take everything that players earned along with it. Nothing that players earn is really theirs, and everything they buy only exists as long as the studio wants it to exist. This is the reality of the current video game landscape, and it will only become more prevalent as more studios go all in on the live-service space.
FPS games like Call of Duty have always had limited lifespans as the online servers will not be able to be run forever, but those games also had offline elements that kept the titles alive. Many of the older titles also still have active online servers, but very few players are logging in daily. Live-service games like Call of Duty: Warzone do not have offline elements and cannot be supported by smaller audiences, so once they are no longer making money, those games will vanish.
Groups like the MMORPG community have already dealt with this for years. Once an MMO's playerbase dies off, the game must shut down. So many classic MMOs have been lost to time, and it seems like every year more die off. While MMORPG genre kingpins like World of Warcraft will likely last for decades, even that game must come to an end at some point. Once those servers shutdown, everything players have built will be lost.
New live-service games launch almost every year, and that makes it a very crowded landscape. There are only so many players willing to dedicate weeks of their time to numerous titles, and only so much money to go around. Many of these titles will never find their audiences, and those that do will have to compete in a very crowded market. This has already resulted in plenty of live-service closures, from Knockout City and Apex Legends Mobile to Rumbleverse and Marvel's Avengers. More are bound to come.
It is sad to see a massive game like Call of Duty: Warzone shut its doors, but it is not surprising in today's age. These closures will become a core part of the gaming landscape for the foreseeable future; thus, players may want to be a bit more selective about the ones they dedicate time to. Maybe one day live-service games will all last longer than a couple of years, but that day is likely a ways off.
Call of Duty: Warzone will be available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One until September 21.
