Hey all, I’m back with a look at a business model of video games that are supported after launching with updates and events, and they frequently use monetization strategies for maintaining players over time and generating revenue for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s all about live service games.

Live Service Games?: Live service games are titles that have continual updates, sometimes paid for, and sometimes free. They evolve with new features, events, and content. Destiny, Fortnite, and Warframe are all solid examples of live service games.

What makes them special?: Live service games are very much a huge time commitment for players if they want to advance their characters and then maintain them for a long time. Most gamers only commit to one or two at most because effectively playing more than that at the same time is very difficult. Even for me who makes a lot of my living playing games, juggling multiple live service titles is challenging. I’ve done it in the past, but with too many at once you end up not really enjoying any of them at some point.

For example, I remember splitting my time between Destiny and the other games that I was reviewing. And while some of those were live service, I’d usually go back to Destiny rather than playing more of the other ones after each of those reviews ended.

I had friends who I played Destiny with regularly. I enjoyed doing that for the most part even with my many gripes with the developers and their game design philosophy.

But what if players really want to get into (insert upcoming live service game title here)? Should they do it?: That’s completely up to them, but I’d advise knowing that doing so is a commitment if players want to partake in any true end game activity given the nature of these. FOMO (fear of missing out) is very real and will severely hinder players from getting into these later after release or after being away for a long time. At least that’s what I’ve found.

FOMO?: That’s a topic I’ll cover in an upcoming column.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.