Is The Era Of The Live Looter Shooter Over?

If there’s one thing I’m known for in the industry when it comes to my coverage, it’s that I’m the “robber guy alive.” This has been, basically, Destiny 1 and 2, but I’ve also been stuck with games that tried the concept and died a slow or quick death. And that was most of them.

But now the genre I love seems to be completely drying up and I’m wondering what the future holds for both existing titles and future efforts. If there will be too many, that is. The long and short of it is that it seems like the industry has judged outright rip-offs as:

1) Extremely expensive to do with incessant demand for seasonal content.

2) Extremely risky in a market where we have seen many extremely high profile failures.

3) Declining demand for long-standing genre staples.

When the shooter tank robbers, they tank TOUGH. It’s true that we’ve seen a number of multiplayer PvP games fail in recent years, but these AAA rip-off projects that take huge stakes from big developers and now the industry fear being one of those cautionary tales. Large-scale examples are Anthem being BioWare’s first new IP failure in ages, and its massive investment of resources and time pushing new Dragon Age and Mass Effect games. The same goes for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which lost $200 million and wiped out a potential Arkham superhero/single player game that could have been done differently.

This has been like touching a hot stove. Both BioWare and Rocksteady are returning to their old bread and butter of single player games now. The same thing happened to Crystal Dynamics after the slow death of Marvel’s Avengers, a marauder that had no place to be a marauder in the first place.

My main game, Destiny, has survived 10 years and is the main reason everyone jumped into this genre in the first place. But it’s in a very, very difficult place right now, and its declining interest and revenue compared to extremely high costs has led to large-scale layoffs at Bungie. There’s also no doubt why they paid $3.6 billion for the developer, which is now showing top executives now walking away, jumping out of a plane with bags of cash in tow. .

Destiny 2 has gone from one of its highest player numbers with the release of The Final Shape to its lowest, and its future is much smaller content, stuck in a spiral of player motivation from which it seems hard to pull off and no complete follow up. the horizon. But instead of retreating to single-player like these other studios, Bungie is returning to pure PvP with Marathon, and a separate incubating project, Gummy Bears, a MOBA/Smash Bros. hybrid.

If there’s a single beacon of stability in this entire genre, it’s Warframe, which sees player peaks and valleys but effectively has the same player count averages as it did in 2017. As I write this, it has 74,000 players. simultaneously to Destiny 2 25,000. Destiny 2’s Act 3 launch this week peaked at 36,000 concurrents on Steam. Warframe is the model that the industry largely ignores, for whatever reason, despite being arguably the most successful and consistent.

The future looks bleak for new direct shooters. Really the only big one that comes to mind is The Division 3, a project that has been announced but also exists under… Ubisoft, a company in somewhat dire straits and it’s a little hard to fully believe that this game will make it to launch, or if Ubisoft will be the same company by the time it comes out.

For me, the future of looters might be closer to Borderlands 4. A game to be very proud of NO being a live service game, adding more traditional expansions instead, and not having to churn out constant content every few weeks/months. Borderlands is the original heist shooter, after all, and against all odds, it hasn’t followed the trends that its successors like Destiny set. That said, it remains to be seen if the appetite for Borderlands as a whole has waned since 3’s release in 2019.

It’s also not easy trying to launch a new heist shooter in this direction. Outriders tried this a lot, not being a straight game, but a game with a built-in ending at the beginning and then an expansion later on. It was actually pretty good once you got into it, but it also wasn’t considered a success despite a positive start, and the IP seems dead, even though Square Enix once sang its praises. So even giving up the “live” aspect is not a recipe for a predatory attacker to succeed.

Robbers in general? ARPGs like Diablo 4 and now especially Path of Exile 2 have performed well, the latter extremely well for still being in very unfinished early access. But these are decades-old series and a genre in their own right, despite the fact that loot is involved.

I’m upset about all of this like this IS my genre but it’s shrinking fast and my main game seems to be on a spiral. Borderlands 4 is actually what I’m looking forward to the most in the space, and it’s actually going to be something relieved that it’s not live. But as far as new attempts at AAA games in this space go, I’m not holding my breath for many serious contenders in the near future or maybe even the long term, as that era seems to be fading very quickly.

Except Warframe. Warframe lives forever.

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