Live service games get ditched "too soon" by big publishers, Warfame boss says

Publishers hoping to launch the world's next big live service game often give up on projects too soon, the boss of Warframe developer Digital Extremes has said.

Live service games with so-so launches could still be salvaged with more work, Digital Extreme's Steve Sinclair told VGC, rather than moving on and ditching years of progress.

"They think the release is make or break, and it's not. They have a financial way to be persistent, and they never do it," Sinclair said. "It comes out, doesn't work and they throw it away."

Warframe, which originally launched in 2013, is still going strong a decade on. But plenty of other live service games end up shutting in just a fraction of the time.

Marvel's Avengers, published by Square Enix in 2020, is a recent example of this. Anthem, from Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio BioWare, is another. And currently there are concerns from fans that, due to low player numbers, Rocksteady's Suicide Squad will be next, after its first year of content concludes.

"Isn't that a shame when you put so many years of your life into iterating on those systems or building technology or building the start of a community, and because the operating costs are high, you get terrified when you see the numbers drop and you leave," Sinclair continued.

"We've seen this with amazing releases that I think have massive potential, and I think they eject too soon."

Presumably, Sinclair isn't reflecting on Digital Extremes' own business decisions here - such as its cancellation of The Amazing Eternals (formerly Keystone), a free-to-play online first-person shooter it ditched in 2017, less than two months after it launched in beta.

"The competitive landscape at that time was pretty hefty," Digital Extremes' Meredith Braun said at the time. "We just saw [Cliff Bleszinski-made online FPS] LawBreakers not do so great, and it was a fantastic game, so that was sad. That happened right when we were starting our closed beta for Amazing Eternals."

This weekend we learned that Warframe's 1999 expansion has a shopping mall, romance system, and you even get to fight a boyband.