Known often for their battle passes and microtransaction-fueled free-to-play models, so-called live service games have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. While some have managed to demonstrate that the games-as-a-service model can be successful when implemented with a player-centric focus in mind, many others have fallen flat, with support for them ending way ahead of schedule.
There are many reasons why a live service game might fail, from overly aggressive monetization to the games just not being very good. Ultimately, the outcome is typically the same: with many of those who did get behind the product left with egg on their faces and a rather noticeable chunk of change missing from their bank accounts. For the most part, these failed live service games promised a lot, but massively underdelivered before support for them was prematurely pulled.
1 Chocobo GP
What makes Chocobo GP so frustrating is that, mechanically, the game itself isn't actually that bad. To be clear, it's no Mario Kart, but once all of the ugly monetization has been stripped away, it's actually a half-decent kart racer. Sadly, however, that aforementioned monetization was pretty difficult to ignore, with many of the most popular Final Fantasy characters locked away behind a ridiculously large paywall.
The game was released to widespread criticism in March of 2022, with both players and critics bemoaning its monetization model and paid-for season pass. Square Enix did attempt to address player concerns by handing out free in-game currency, though this did little to make the game feel less like a free mobile title. Just nine months later, it was announced that support for Chocobo GP was coming to an immediate end, with no further large-scale updates planned for the title.
2 Babylon’s Fall
To say that 2022 wasn't a great year for Square Enix when it came to live service games would perhaps be a bit of an understatement. In addition to the premature death of Chocobo GP​​​​​​, the Japanese company saw another one of its products fail miserably, with Babylon's Fall somehow managing to perform even worse than the Chocobo-themed kart racer. The PlatinumGames-developed title was released in March of 2022, yet failed to survive even a single year.
Unlike Chocobo GP, Babylon's Fall had very few redeeming qualities, which led to some pretty abysmal review scores. The combat wasn't terrible, but just about everything else about the game could be best described as bland. Players seemingly agreed with this assessment, with the number of concurrent players on Steam falling to just one within a few months of the game's release. Four months later, Square Enix officially announced that servers would be shutting down in February of 2023.
3 Marvel's Avengers
Yet another failed live service game published by Square Enix, Marvel's Avengers at least made it past its first birthday before the plug was eventually pulled. In fact, the announcement that support for the game would be ending came 868 days on from the game's September 2020 release, making this one of the Japanese giant's more successful live service games. Of course, Square Enix had nothing to do with it by that point, having sold Crystal Dynamics to the Embracer Group in May of the previous year.
At its heart, Marvel's Avengers wasn't a bad game. It was, however, a pretty terrible live service game, with nowhere near enough content to keep players coming back. The game quickly became repetitive for new players, leading to player numbers plummeting within just a month or two of the game's release. By the time the next-gen ports finally arrived, the game was already as good as dead, though it would be another ten months until Crystal Dynamics finally confirmed its fate.
4 Anthem
The only thing more disappointing than an objectively awful game is one that is packed full of great ideas and potential but let down by its poor execution. Anthem definitely falls into that latter bracket, with BioWare's multiplayer shooter ultimately leaving a lot of its players frustrated by its failure to turn all of that promise into a cohesive and enjoyable experience.
What made this all the more frustrating was that BioWare is one of the most capable development studios in the gaming industry and is responsible for some of the best RPGs ever made. For whatever reason though, the studio just couldn't find the right formula for Anthem, which led to post-launch support for the game ending in February of 2021, just one year on from the developers having committed to reinventing the core gameplay of the title.
5 Splitgate
The live service graveyard is littered with the corpses of awful games, but there are plenty of great ones buried there too. Most of these died at a ripe old age before shuffling peacefully into the pages of gaming's history, but there are one or two that saw support end prematurely, typically for reasons outside of their control. This was ultimately the case with Splitgate: a fantastic game that was ultimately a victim of its own success.
So popular was the portal-inspired multiplayer FPS game that developer 1047 Games actually had to delay the game's departure from early access by a few months so that servers could be upgraded to deal with the high demand. Unfortunately, transforming what was originally planned to be an indie project into a AAA title proved to be difficult for the developers, which led to them announcing that they'd be shifting the bulk of their focus to a new project in September of 2022.