Over the course of the last twelve months many, including myself, have gladly declared that the live service model of games is dead. Marvel's Avengers getting shut down was the siren's call that signalled the beginning of the end as even the massive Marvel brand couldn't survive the current market. In recent weeks though, this trend has only continued with Sony announcing the canning of various live service products that were in development. It's safe to say by now that live services are dying and that this purge will leave only a few survivors standing.
However, in between leading toasts and setting off celebratory fireworks, I have been given pause for thought. Even as the lid of the coffin closes upon live services, certain games still give me an unsettled feeling. It's as if a genie has been loosed from its lamp that won't be going back in any time soon. This, reader, is what I wish to discuss today because while gamers everywhere may be congregating for the funeral of live services, the spirit of games as a service still hangs over the industry today. The Modern Single-Player Model Have you played any Triple-A single-player games recently? Chances are, if you're the kind of person who ends up on a nameless gaming blog on the arse end of the internet, you probably have. Personally, I recently played through both God of War 3 and most of God of War (2018). The series's reputation is what tempted me to try both games to begin with but, as you might have picked up from the previous sentence, this didn't go according to plan. Having massively enjoyed God of War 3, I ended up throwing in the towel at the 25 hour mark with its successor. Upon examination, what made God of War 3 so much more digestible than God of War (2018) was its pacing. For a lot of my time with God of War (2018), I couldn't help but feel as though the game had long periods of narrative emptiness between story developments punctuated only by pitched arena battles that began to blur together after a while. By contrast, my 10 hours with God of War 3 was a whirlwind of bloody deicide where the game never gave me the chance to get sick of it by bombarding me regularly with new ideas. This, for me, is endemic of a wider trend in the games industry where single-player games keep feeling longer and longer to the detriment of their pacing. For another high profile example of what I mean, look at the Final Fantasy VII: Remake. FF VII and VII: Remake are both listed at taking around 20 hours to beat. This makes sense until you consider that FF VII: Remake only covers one third of the story of the original game meaning that, by the time Square Enix shuffle out the remaining games in the planned remake trilogy, Final Fantasy VII will somehow have tripled in length. For the record, I know that the remake games aren't telling the exact same story as the original which could explain this difference. However, I would also like to point out that even if Square Enix added in 20 hours of brand new plot elements, which seems like a doubtfully large amount, that would still leave another 20 hours left to be accounted for by padding across the trilogy. So, why is this the case? Why have perfectly good single-player games become so much longer in the last ten years or so when the rising costs of development would suggest that it makes more sense for them to remain shorter and more digestible? Well, for that, we must reluctantly return to the world of live service games. The Ghost of Gaming's Past For me, it seems all too suspicious that the last ten years has played host to both the extension of single-player games' lengths and the rise and fall of the live service trend. Some part of me can't help but feel as though the story of the live service and the story of the new, longer single-player Triple-A game are somehow intertwined. Remember when Jim Ryan at Sony said that live service games were the way of the future? Highly dubious call in retrospect but Ryan was by no means unique on this. Over the years, voices at Microsoft, EA and other Triple-A outlets all echoed similar sentiments on the grounds that shorter single-player games don't encourage the same long-term revenue and brand loyalty from players. Even on the consumer side, similar arguments can also be made. Why buy three single-player games that will last you 30 hours when you can buy one live service that could potentially fill your free time for years? This logic is what allowed live services to flourish to begin with. For consumers, it offered an entertaining and ever-evolving experience while, for businesses, they provided a consistent income stream. If you were a video game developer back in the mid-2010s, this was the market that you had to navigate in order to obtain both publisher and consumer attention. It is at this point that these two stories, one of increasingly inflated single-player experiences and the other of the rise and fall of live service games, begin to cross over. The publishers wanted massive, marketable experiences and gamers wanted value for money with their new releases. The result? Single-player games had to get longer so that they could compete with the live service games on the market and justify themselves to expectant publishers. Looking at the biggest games of the pre-live service era like The Last of Us, Batman: Arkham Asylum or Portal 2, you can see a general trend of main stories that take under 15 hours to complete. By contrast, the live service games of the post-live service era like The Last of Us: Part 2 or God of War (2018) consistently boast play times of 20-30 hours as a minimum. Games are longer. So what? This whole situation that I've described isn't necessarily a problem. Ask anyone who plays games whether more game for the same price is a good thing and they're more than likely to say yes. However, for me, this pursuit of value for money in single-player games has created more than a few artistic problems that the industry is still coming to terms with. Namely, single player games now have very different stories and expectations which may not be detrimental to the industry but do lay out some problems. Let's start with narratives which I have already complained about. While same money, more game is a lovely idea in practice, it does make it harder to tell a strong story. To return to my earlier example, when you compare the number of significant plot developments between God of War 3 and God of War (2018), you'll probably find a fairly similar level of narrative action with various hurdles and twists that Kratos has to navigate on his way to a conclusion. The problem is though, that God of War (2018) stretches those plot developments over a much longer period, leading to far worse pacing. God of War is not alone in this. The Last of Us 2 also received some flak upon release for being overly long to the detriment of the story being told. So long as developers keep feeling the push to make their games as long as possible for the sake of value for money, it's likely that we're going to continue seeing poorly-paced Triple-A releases. Another problem that this creates is expectations. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 received flak from a smattering of people that seemed put out at the game's 17 hour story. Similarly, after rumours circulated that Grand Theft Auto 6 might have a story length of around 35 to 40 hours, the immediate response from some gaming outlets and their followers was disappointment and to report on the game as 'shorter than expected'. As such, this overwhelming trend of increasingly bloated single player games is also setting expectations astronomically high for every new triple-A release. This serves to create a cycle where developers have to keep one-upping the length of their previous game, creating even more expensive games that have worse narrative pacing. What's more, longer development times lead to fewer big releases each year which makes publishers even more risk-averse in case one of their few big releases in a year doesn't knock it out of the park. Conclusion I have no problem with the idea that people want value for money from their games, hell, from their anything. However, I do feel that a problem has been created by the live service trend that is going to stick with us long after its death which is the need to measure the value of a game by its length. This has driven up development times and costs which has stifled innovation because publishers are afraid to invest the now-expected millions of dollars into new, risky ideas and, on top of all of this, the difficulty of managing the pacing in longer games makes it all the more likely that the single-player games that do make it to market will be overlong and less tightly enjoyable experiences. Hopefully, over the next few years, shorter and less expensive games in the double-A or indie sphere might help to demonstrate how shorter single-player experiences can be just as satisfying to consumers as bigger games and more reasonably budgeted for the publishers. Just don't look at Modern Warfare 3 if you're taking notes. All images and properties utilised here belong to their respective rights holders and are deployed here for the purpose of criticism and review
(Images property of Santa Monica Studio and Sony Interactive Entertainment) 
(Image property of Santa Monica Studio and Sony Interactive Entertainment) 
(Image property of Square Enix) 
(Image property of Santa Monica Studio and Sony Interactive Entertainment) 
(Image property of Square Enix) 
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(Image property of Santa Monica Studio and Sony Interactive Entertainment) 
(Image property of Insomniac Games, Marvel and Sony Interactive Entertainment)