Last week, I wrote that while I understood the potential human cost of shutting down a God of War live-service game before it had even finished development, it was ultimately a good thing to do. That, given the unsuitability of Kratos' story to be stretched out into an online battle pass fest, the game could never have matched the greatness of the single-player series, and was an expensive waste of time from an industry that had put all of its chips on black only to discover it had misread the roll so much they were actually playing craps, not roulette.

I want you to go back and re-read that article, but substitute 'Horizon' every time I write 'God of War' and 'Aloy' every time I write 'Kratos'. Yes, just days after it was revealed the then-unknown God of War live-service game had been cancelled came news that the previously-leaked Horizon MMO live-service game had also been cancelled. Once more, it's good news.

Live-Service Isn't Working

There will unfortunately be some short term pain for the industry as it finally realises it's time to course correct. It's important not to be callous about this - there has been 'short term' pain in one way or another this entire console generation as protracted studio buyouts leave devs with fewer opportunities, layoffs mount to offset losses caused by executive-driven decision making, and harassment has risen at an alarming rate. Game development has not been a healthy field for a while now, but these live-service games represent perhaps the biggest diseased abscess growing across its flesh.

God of War and Horizon are not the only failures of this era, a column which far outweighs the few success stories of Marvel Rivals and Helldivers 2. Hyenas is another high profile game cancelled before ever seeing the light of day, and there are dozens more like it, and probably dozens of dozens we never even got to hear about. Concord was barely given a week to live, and spent the whole time writhing in agony in a million dollar hospital bed, gasping for players that no money in the world could buy. Suicide Squad was left to drift for a year in what felt like an act of cruelty, before it was put out of its misery for good just last week.

I don't have much more to say on the matter. Seriously, it would just be the God of War article again. The landscape of gaming has not changed in the past six days, which is more than 50 percent of Concord's lifespan. But what has become apparent is that everyone in gaming speaks in one voice on this issue - it is a rare unifying cause.

Horizon's Fans Don't Want This

This is not a case of Very Smart Journalist says 'thing is bad, I am of superior intellect because I think so' while Dummy Dumdum Gamer says 'no, thing is good, you are bad and [expletive]'. A few years ago, when many of these now failed live-service games were being developed, I think these would have been an easier sell. But once bitten, twice not bothering to play these games any more.

Between 2018's God of War and 2022's Ragnarok, the audience at large would have been far more receptive to a God of War multiplayer. We see evidence of this in the way Spider-Man's cancelled multiplayer experience is discussed. Even the nomenclature is part of this - 'multiplayer' suggests playing with your friends, going back to the good old days when you got home from school and played video games for hours. 'Live-service' sounds colder, more corporate, less bashful about the cash extraction machine that it is, whose primary function is to be an obligation draining your free time with the power of monotony and FOMO.

We can still have successful multiplayer games in this environment - again, Helldivers 2 came out just last year - but we can't have every game be a successful multiplayer game. Studios need to shift focus back to the single-player games that earn a base audience, relying on shorter, cheaper to make games to plug the gaps between the ever-increasing development cycles of cutting edge projects, not reckless (and often wastefully expensive) live-service cash grabs. Executives need to realise literally nobody wants this but you - and unless you are actually 300,000 concurrent Steam players in a trench coat, just you wanting this isn't enough.