12/8/2022

The idea of changing a game after it has been released seems like a pretty powerful ability, and this arrived in the form of online updates around the 2000s. A bug in the game that keeps you stuck at the loading screen? Fixed with an update. A particular weapon in the game dealing too much damage? Fixed with another update. Unlike a movie, the shipped video game does not have to be perfect, the game developers can always fix it after release. Taken to an extreme and you get poorly functioning games like Cyberpunk 2077, but overall updating is a great tool. However, most of the leading video game companies such as EA (Electronic Arts) and Capcom have taken to creating a new type of game as a result, the “live service” game. With this kind of game, instead of just getting bug fixes and quality of life updates, new content, free or paid (usually both), is continually added to the game. The game itself can either be free, notable examples are Fortnite and Apex Legends, or paid, such as Rainbow Six Siege. But it is more likely that it would be free, as the addition of content, especially paid content, is how the game would make up the revenue lost from lacking an entry fee. Regardless of how well the developers execute this, it is a fundamentally different type of game, and it is overtaking the industry.

Take for example a game I have played, Monster Hunter World. Developed by Capcom for computers and consoles, it is exactly what the title says, you hunt monsters. However, this game received a total of four years of free live service content, roughly estimating, from new quests to completely new monsters to hunt, with the addition of some paid cosmetic additions. Many players viewed the continual addition of content as a good thing. But after spending over one-thousand hours on this one game, who exactly does this benefit? Historically, you would purchase a game and be able to play it from start to finish from the get-go. You would not miss anything by doing so. Yet with a game like Monster Hunter World, you would be missing a lot from the product you purchased if you did not dedicate yourself to following the game’s monthly updates, assuming you had the time to do so. This is especially true for updates introducing limited time content, in which certain quests are only playable on a specific date or come and go on a certain interval. What about the players who like to enjoy a variety of games? You could go back and forth between games, but with certain games that demand you to learn how to play them, such as again with Monster Hunter World, it doesn’t sound that enjoyable. The thing is, this isn’t even the start of it. Nearly three billion people play video games worldwide, as estimated by Video Game Demographics – Who Plays Games in 2022? by Victor Yanev of TechJury, with the United States having the second largest population of gamers, the first belonging to China, according to Number of Gamers Worldwide 2022/2023: Demographics, Statistics, and Predictions by Nestor Gilbert of FinancesOnline. Undoubtedly, each one of those three billion people have their own preferences and varying amounts of free time. So, with games as a service being adopted by many triple A companies, what demographic is being ignored?

For one, players with a lot of free time already have a foot in the door of live service gaming, and usually the younger the player, the more free time there is. We can set this demographic to below 18 since it is usually at that point when life responsibilities truly begin to cut in, such as with higher education and working towards a career. According to Distribution of video gamers in the United States in 2022, by Age Group by J. Clement of Statista, a survey found that 76% of players in the United States alone are potentially excluded by the live service model. The graph itself also shows that players from 18 to 34 years make up the highest percentage of gamers in the United States, that percentage being at around 36%. Naturally gaming itself is an leisurely activity, with the exception of the few who make their living by gaming on websites like YouTube and Twitch. So someone who plays games would have some free time available, and hopefully isn’t making all time free time. The issue comes down to how much free time one has, and based of this data, most players may not have enough free time.

However, mobile gaming, despite being live service, caters to this shortage. Being able to play a game on your smartphone means being able to play it anywhere at any time, and this is heavily reflected in the gaming demographics reported by Video Game Demographics – Who Plays Games in 2022? by Victor Yanev of TechJury, where “54% of gamers [in the U.S.] in 2022 use their smartphones…Mobile games revenue is expected to surpass the $100 billion mark by 2023.” However, mobile gaming seems to attract more women than men as Video Game Demographics 2022: Who Plays Video Games? by Jason Wise of EarthWeb suggests with “…77% of women between 18 and 34 use their phones to play video games. Men in this age group prefer to play via a gaming console….” Naturally, someone can play on both their smartphone and other platforms, yet we are left with about half of gamers in the U.S. alone who do not play on their smartphones, with this group potentially consisting of more young adult men than women. Maybe they are being excluded under the live service model.

When it comes to consoles and personal computers (referred to in short as PC), live service games still exist, and are still quite popular. The game I played, Monster Hunter World, was one of these games, selling around sixteen million copies before the game stopped receiving updates. However, that game has nothing on the most popular live service games, which like mobile gaming, tend to be free. One of the most popular examples would be Fortnite. Fortnite Usage and Revenue Statistics (2022) by Mansoor Iqbal of BusinessOfApps found that this game had a total of 350 million players in May 2020, with 80 million or so actively playing the game. They also found that 62.7% of players were aged 18 to 24 and that 89.7% of players were male in 2022. Considering that males from 18 to 34 prefer to game on console, then the gender disparity in the mobile sphere may not be due to games as a service. A less popular, but still very active game would be the recently released Warzone 2, which How many people play Warzone 2 & Modern Warfare 2? 2022 player count by Hamza Khalid of Charlie Intel states has “reached a total of 25 million players just five days after it launched.” Both Fortnite and Warzone 2 are multiplayer shooter games, which is no coincidence as “56% of the most frequent gamers play multiplayer games…35% of multiplayer gamers prefer shooter games.” (Video Game Demographics – Who Plays Games in 2022? Victor Yanev) and 42% of U.S. adults play shooters according to Younger men play video games, but so do a diverse group of other Americans by Anna Brown of Pew Research Center.

So far, the players who have not been accounted for are those who prefer playing alone and do not game on mobile devices. This group may be most women and men older than 65 as the data from Number of Gamers Worldwide 2022/2023: Demographics, Statistics, and Predictions by Nestor Gilbert of Finances Online suggests. For adults older than 65, 68% of men and 60% of women play on PC, about half of men having played for more than 10 years as opposed to less than half of women. It also reports that about 80% of this group prefers to play alone. Since live service games on non-mobile platforms tend to involve multiplayer, then the growing presence of games as a service may be working against this demographic. This is not too surprising considering that the idea of updating games originated long after their youth, which is usually the point where you start dabbling with video games. It may not be the case that they do not have the means to play a live service game, but that they just wouldn’t prefer it.

Since around 60% of players play multiplayer games, then that leaves 40% who do not, and so that implies that two-fifths of players prefer single-player titles, games that are not designed around playing with other players. The Witcher series, Read Dead Redemption 2, Elden Ring, and the recently released PlayStation title Ragnarök are among the most popular titles of this kind as ranked by The best single-player games to play right now by Alex Avard of GamesRadar. What all of these games share, outside of game mechanics, is that they have a strong narrative focus. A game like Fortnite does not, and even for a game like Monster Hunter World that has a story, that aspect serves to complement the live service model instead of delivering a full-fledged story to explore. Now the single-player games I listed do have a lot of content to go through, they do not work to keep feeding the player base with new content to do, instead providing the player with a narrative to follow alongside the already present content. This in not an issue, but we can assume that the players who do not engage with multiplayer titles that are usually live service prefer a story driven experience, and so the players who engage with the former (with the exception of some overlap of players who play both types of games) do not look for that experience. Thus, the games as a service model also ignores player who prefer to follow a narrative.

Despite this, it is difficult to isolate any demographic of players, whether sorted by age or gaming habits. For one, there are players who prefer console to PCs and vice versa, and I could say that a percentage of the PC gamers choose that platform because they want to have a wider library of games to choose from outside of live service games. Unlike a console, anyone could develop and release a game on PC independently from corporations, leading to the category of games known as ‘indie’ games. Some indie games make it to console, but many of them do not. This might be the case, but players might also have other reasons such as wanting the ability to modify hardware, which is possible on PC and not a console, or that most if not all of their friends only play on one of these platforms, in which many games, even some Triple-A titles, do not allow two players from different platforms to game with each other.  Extending this to the gender disparity in mobile gaming suggested by TechJury, some the 77% of women who use their smartphone to play video games may also play on other platforms, with the remaining 23% possibly including women who avoid mobile gaming or do not play video games at all. For the men in the same age group, it’s probably the case that not all of them avoid mobile gaming. Alongside the men who prefer console/PC could be women, albeit a relatively smaller percentage, who share the same preference. What is clear is that there is a significant portion of players that is not being considered by live service gaming, and that group is leaning towards a more male-oriented, older-generation of players in addition to players who prefer narrative-driven games. For the gaming companies pushing for live service gaming, they are missing out by not marketing to this audience as well. For the gaming community, a chunk of them are being phased out by the dominance of the live service model, and for a medium that helps bring together millions of people from different backgrounds through shared interests, this is not a loss worth taking.

Works Cited

Avard, Alex. “The Best Single-Player Games to Play Right Now.” Gamesradar, GamesRadar+, 4 Oct. 2022, https://www.gamesradar.com/best-single-player-games/.

Brown, Anna. “Younger Men Play Video Games, but so Do a Diverse Group of Other Americans.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 7 Aug. 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/11/younger-men-play-video-games-but-so-do-a-diverse-group-of-other-americans/.

Clement, J. “U.S. Video Gamers Age 2022.” Statista, 17 Oct. 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/189582/age-of-us-video-game-players/.

Gilbert, Nestor. “Number of Gamers Worldwide 2022/2023: Demographics, Statistics, and Predictions.” Financesonline.com, FinancesOnline.com, 6 Nov. 2022, https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/.

Iqbal, Mansoor. “Fortnite Usage and Revenue Statistics (2022).” Business of Apps, 6 Sept. 2022, https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/.

Khalid, Hamza. “How Many People Play Warzone 2 & Modern Warfare 2? 2022 Player Count.” Charlie INTEL, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.charlieintel.com/how-many-people-play-warzone-2-modern-warfare-2-2022-player-count/212737/.

Rissanen, Elisa. “Live Service Games : Changes in Videogame Production.” Theseus, 2021, https://www.theseus.fi/handle/10024/506252.

Wise, Jason. “Video Game Demographics 2022: Who Plays Video Games?” EarthWeb, 1 Dec. 2022, https://earthweb.com/video-game-demographics/.

Yanev, Victor. “Video Game Demographics – Who Plays Games in 2022?” Techjury, 26 Nov. 2022, https://techjury.net/blog/video-game-demographics/#gref.