Is this going to mark the end of the glut of battle royale games?

I can't remember a time when so many games folded as quickly as they have the last couple years.

Welp, Jan officially jinxed it on this week’s Bombcast. Surprised it made it this long though, good for them.

I often think of something Dave Lang said on an E3 at Nite appearance that was akin to "publishers are saying 'no more battle royale pitches, please' but a few months ago that's all they wanted."

Look, I was never the target audience for these things, both because of the battle royale structure and the game-as-service do-your-dailies forever-game parasitism, so I really don't have a horse in this race outside of how it affects the people who put in the labor to actually make the damn things, but I couldn't help but laugh a bit as I saw the endless wave of Johnny-come-lately battle royales from folks who thought they could make it big if they just made the right product. The product is irrelevant; it's better to be big than good, and that means having the resources to not just get that weekly Fortnite squad to dip into your game, but to keep making new keys to jingle in front of them so that they stay. The obvious comparison would be the WoW-chasing craze of 20 years ago, but even more recently we've seen multiplayer games of all stripes -- mobas, hero shooters, arena shooters -- learn that players are a finite resource, and most of them already have a church. So please, small and mid-size devs without huge publisher war chests: I love you, maybe make a really good single-player game instead.

For what it's worth, Knockout city wasn't a battle royale, it was a small team (typically 3v3, no more than 4v4) "Deathmatch/Slayer" with dodgeballs/power-up balls. My group still plays it with some regularity, and I don't recall there ever being a battle royale aspect to it, although it's possible it slipped us by.

@xputnameherex: Oh man I totally had Hyper Scape in my head, classic goof. Well, as I said, no brand of multiplayer game is immune!

It seems like 2023 is the year that live service games are getting cancelled like Netflix shows. I feel sad for the people, no matter how small, whom genuinely enjoyed playing those games. For some funny irony, the game most people thought would get abandoned by now, Battlefield 2042, is still getting updates and support. So enough people are clearly playing it.

@av_gamer: Battlefield is one of EA's tentpole series. Those games NEVER really get abandoned no matter how badly they do because they know if they abandon one they won't be able to sell the next. Some game series are too big to fail.

Add it to the list

To be honest, when 25+ battle royale games were announced roughly at the same time, I was already saying things that it seemed to take months for the rest of the gaming sphere to say: "If every game coming out is a live service full of retention elements, but there are only so many gamers with so many hours a day to play games, how will all the new games maintain financial reasoning to stay online since they all seem to want to poach players from one another?"

And, well, I'm starting to get the answer, which really is not the one I'd hoped for, but I was never going to play any of these anyway. I'm sitting here now asking the question, who exactly was going to play all these?

"If you build it, they will come" is one of the biggest lies of capitalism.

At some point, I am starting to wonder how many of these smaller free to play game closures and mobile game shutdowns are related to companies not wanting to abide by Belgium's laws on loot boxes and exploitative game practices.

@zombiepie: This is an indie studio that was self publishing and Knockout City (and many of the other games closing) came out after the Belgium law so I doubt it's that.

Also Belgium is a country of 12 million people. It has the market power of Illinois or Ohio. It's not nothing but it's not going to completely change companies' market strategy.

This game, like many other of the F2P multi-player games, failed to grab me in any way, but it's still a bummer. It seemed like a really well made, polished, and creative game. This has been a freaking brutal couple of months for like every facet of the games industry.

@bigsocrates: This comment was not directed explicitly at this game. Also, citing the population of Belgium is one thing, but it is important to note that pulling mobile loot box focused games from Belgium only is tricky in that it would possibly violate EU law about treating all member states as a single financial region. Also, the EU in general is moving towards using Belgium as a model for the entire block. The tide is against the practice in some form and that's partly the reason for Apex mobile shutting down.

@zombiepie: So far the ban has not had a lot of impact. It seems to me that it's not likely to be driving much of this. Companies are just still operating as normal despite the ban, or they've found ways to pull out of Belgium without rousing the rest of the EU (I think at least some companies have pulled the loot boxes from the Belgian version but not others).

If the EU goes the Belgium route that would, of course, change the calculation, but for now my guess is that the games just aren't performing and are too expensive to maintain.

This would make an excellent local multiplayer arena sports brawler. I would love to see them rework it into something like that.

@bigsocrates:

In the netherlands things are quite murky too.

Diablo Immortal didn't launch here and Dota2 shows you what the next lootbox will give you upfront.

But there's also the case of Fifa, which was deemed to pay €500,000 every week it continued to sell lootboxes in Ultimate Team, until they appealed it and the court decided that the lootboxes were not a game of chance, because the overall mode the lootboxes were a part of was a game of skill, and therefore it would not constitute gambling. Therefore the fine didn't have to be paid.

And with that ruling, there's a clear road for lootboxes to continue to exist in the Netherlands. Just make sure that the actual game it is tied to requires some sort of user input instead of it being a clash of numbers. I feel like Diablo Immortal could easily point to this ruling and be like 'our game requires skillful character building and enemy management. Better equipment will help out, but there's enough room for skillful play and plenty of healing to make it through encounters with worse equipment.'

@onemanarmyy: That sounds like a pretty big loophole. Almost no video games are pure games of chance. There are always skill components even if it's setting your team or whatever. In fact pay to win relies on the skill component because if it was pure chance it wouldn't be possible to make it easier or harder.