“做第二名几乎毫无价值”——长线运营如何将游戏变成争夺头名的 Battle Royale（分析）

Before there was Warzone, Fortnite, or even PUBG: Battlegrounds, there was Minecraft Survival Games. While the exact origin is nebulous, Norwegian YouTuber Dennis Vaeride is credited as launching the first Survival Games server in April 2012, just one month after The Hunger Games’ film adaptation had opened in cinemas. The concept followed the rules outlined in Katniss’ harrowing ordeal: dozens of players would sprint into the middle of a starting circle, gather supplies, and then hunt until the last one standing.

Little did Vaeride know, he’d just fired the starting pistol on an industry-wide battle royale. Many studios would try to replicate this formula. Few would survive. Those that did would grow fat on microtransactions and spiralling player counts.

The Past, Present, and Future of Live-Service

Live-service is one of the biggest issues in gaming. Is it a curse destined to destroy studios, or the key to the industry's survival? With expert insight from veteran developers, including Overwatch's Jeff Kaplan and Anthem's Mark Darrah, IGN exlores the long timeline of live-service games across three detailed articles. Combining interviews, analysis, and opinion, this is the past, present, and future of gaming's most divisive trend.

• The 2000s: How MMORPGs Built (and Lost) the Live-Service Throne
• The 2010s: How Live-Service Turned Gaming Into a Bloody Battle Royale
• The 2020s: Is It the Beginning of the End for Live-Service Games?

Last year the market for the battle royale sub-genre was valued at $11.2 billion. It is expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2035. Everyone’s chasing the money and almost all of them are discovering just how difficult it is to carve out their own piece of the pie – even heavyweights like Halo Studios and monied companies like Amazon Games have failed miserably. It’s a financial frenzy that can be traced all the way back to those Hunger Games-inspired Minecraft servers… although the true spark that set the industry ablaze came a year later, from a single developer living in Brazil.

In early 2013, Brendan Greene had an idea for a DayZ mod (the zombie survival game that was itself a mod of mil-sim ARMA, and was already responsible for whipping the survival genre into a frenzy on PC). Inspired not by The Hunger Games but by Kinji Fukasaku’s similarly themed 2000 thriller, Battle Royale, Greene’s idea was a last-player-standing multiplayer mode that took place on a large map scattered with weapons and restricted by a shrinking circular safe area. He developed what became PlayerUnknown's Battle Royale over a number of years, and his association with the format became so significant that Sony brought him on as a consultant whilst developing the competing H1Z1.

But Sony wasn’t the only major studio that took notice of Greene’s rise. South Korean studio Bluehole offered him the chance to create his own project. That game was PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds – a 100-player last-man-standing shooter with random loot drops and an ever-decreasing map size. The game launched on Steam Early Access in March 2017. By December, it had over three million concurrent players. Everyone took notice of Greene’s success – including Epic Games.

Fortnite was not always the battle royale you know today. When it launched in July 2017, it was a struggling tower defence game where a quartet of players scavenged and built fortifications to defend against waves of nocturnal monsters. PUBG’s meteoric success convinced Epic’s CEO and CCO, Tim Sweeney and Donald Mustard, to take a gamble on improving Fortnite’s future: they quickly tasked the team to develop their own equivalent of PlayerUnknown’s formula.

By September, the mode was released. It was barebones, practically ramshackle, with minimal assets and a bizarre application of the building systems from the original fort-crafting mode. But it had one secret weapon. Unlike PUBG, Fortnite: Battle Royale was free-to-play. The most popular video game idea in the world was suddenly free for all. Within 2 weeks, it hit 10 million players. Within a year, it was home to 125 million. Today, the number of registered Fortnite players sits at 650 million.

The battle royale pivot changed Fortnite forever. It isn’t even a game anymore – it’s become a platform, one where Ariana Grande and Eminem have performed virtually, previews of Star Wars movies have played, and servers worldwide were shut down to emulate a world-ending event.

It’s Happened Before, It Will Happen Again

PUBG and Fortnite’s dual success created a video games arms race: nearly 2,000 games have been assigned the “battle royale” tag on Steam, while hundreds more exist in the mobile gaming market. When you have a game that made $9 billion within two years and likely over $20 billion by now, it’s clear to see why so many publishers have tried to replicate its formula.

This is, of course, an echo of one of the original live-service booms from half a decade earlier: the MOBA. Another genre that grew out of a mod, the industry was captivated by the 5v5 “battle arena”, with dozens of studios attempting to replicate the success of Riot’s League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2. Dozens of MOBAs were quickly developed and died almost as fast, and the same cycle could be seen with battle royale. Ubisoft’s Hyper Scape, Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier, Fallout 76’s Nuclear Winter expansion – even Epic itself couldn’t emulate its own success, with wrestling battle royale Rumbleverse flatlining less than a year after launch.

Some may claim the widespread failure to truly compete with PUBG and Fortnite is down to studios failing to innovate on Greene’s original concepts. But, as with the MOBA craze, a massively over-saturated marketplace may be the stronger prevailing reason. It’s a situation ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah, who worked on looter shooter Anthem, knows well.

“You have to believe that you can actually dethrone one of the top two players in that genre, or you shouldn’t be doing it,” he says. For Darrah, that meant stealing the crown from Destiny – a task that the single-player RPG experts at BioWare weren’t suited to. Anthem struggled right from the moment it launched. Destiny remained on the throne.

But there’s more to that story. BioWare wasn’t just competing with Destiny – it was going up against a Destiny that had enjoyed half a decade of development, refinement, and a sequel. That’s an issue facing any developer getting into the live-service space in 2026 – the table stakes for new video games are radically different to even just 10 years ago. As Overwatch’s original lead director Jeff Kaplan puts it: “If someone wanted to make a MOBA today, they’re not competing with the likes of League of Legends five years in. They’re competing with League up to today.”

The Poisoned Chalice of Live-Service Success

Overwatch, the live-service game that triggered the hero shooter craze, was not planned. Kaplan was given an ultimatum after his previous MMORPG project fell apart: give us an idea within a month or the team gets disbanded.

Kaplan feels that pressure created an intense creativity boost amongst the team, both during the initial concepting and development of the 6v6 hero shooter, and beyond into its live years. The game “caught and rode the [audience] wave”, describes Kaplan, who compares it to World of Warcraft’s similar success.

“[The launch and first year’s success] was all because of improvisation, of just knowing and feeling what felt cool in the moment,” Kaplan explains.

You have to believe that you can actually dethrone one of the top two players in that genre, or you shouldn’t be doing it.

Seven million people played Overwatch in its first week, entranced by its smart melding of heroes and abilities with FPS arena action. This wasn’t another contender to the fading MOBA trend, but something fresh and new and worth spending hundreds of hours with. Within five months, that number ballooned to 20 million. By the end of Overwatch’s first year, 30 million players were High Nooning and Dragonstriking one another across the hero shooter’s maps. Kaplan attributes his team’s success to their fluidity when it came to devising the game’s future, describing their development style as akin to an improvisational jazz band. A successful launch is the peak for a single-player game, but for live-service it’s just the beginning. Keeping Overwatch in peak condition was the key to ensuring it remained the live service shooter to play – something Blizzard achieved… until it didn’t.

Overwatch’s success created a loop: the development team would expand to make new and interesting updates, making the game more expensive to run, giving upper management an in-road to question the core fundamentals of that success, and how profit margins can be not only rebalanced, but perhaps outsized.

“People would say, ‘League of Legends is free-to-play, look at that. Why don’t you switch Overwatch? We could do it next month.’” recalls Kaplan. “It’s that one-size-fits-all mentality that is poison for development teams.”

And here we reach what many would perceive as both the promise and the problem at the heart of live-service games: there’s always more money to be made. This format isn’t about selling copies at launch, it's about continual profit, day after day, month after month, year after year. Kaplan eventually left Blizzard in 2021 following his disagreement with executive plans – management wanted to aggressively monetize his vision of Overwatch 2 in order to fund the game’s external esports league. Clashing viewpoints meant Blizzard lost Kaplan. When something becomes a monster success, it seems that those who own the monster may be willing to sacrifice the people who tamed it in the first place, if the price is right.

“They didn’t let the team really focus on what they wanted to focus on,” Kaplan remembers. He notes that the Overwatch 2 that eventually released was very different to his own sequel concept, although he praises the team for their efforts in continuing the franchise.

The Failure of Second Place

During the hero shooter explosion of the mid-2010s, many studios tried to create their own Overwatch. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege, launched a year before Blizzard’s behemoth, successfully kept its head above water, largely thanks to its unique niche of lethal action and destructible environments. But those who tried to ape Overwatch’s stylish characters and snappy arcade action were doomed to wither in its shadow. Amazon Games’ Crucible, EA’s Rocket Arena, Boss Key’s LawBreakers, and First Watch’s Rogue Company are all examples of hero shooters that have come and gone. None of them stuck for one defining reason: lack of innovation.

Number one controls so much of the attention that it’s almost not worth being number two.

“Number one [in sales/player count] controls so much of the attention in a space that it’s almost not worth being number two, let alone five or six”, says Darrah. The PvP hero shooter mold has hardly been touched since Overwatch defined it. Instead, publishers have provided the illusion of innovation through marketing. “Oftentime the marketing spend for a triple-A game can dwarf the development cost”, Kaplan notes.

The high-profile case of Sony and Firewalk Studios’ 2024 hero shooter Concord was an unfortunate trifecta of these issues: despite a $400 million budget, it lacked innovation, and its attempts to promote itself through inclusion in Amazon’s Secret Level TV series weeks ahead of launch felt premature and overly-confident. But above all else, it came far too late. Concord began development in 2016, the same year Overwatch released. Had it released in 2019, or even 2020, perhaps it may have found its audience. But eight years on, you’re not competing with the Overwatch of 2016, you’re competing with Overwatch bolstered by almost a decade of development. On top of that, you’re also facing all the bodies on the road that tried to follow it… and the fact that the world has largely moved on from hero shooters, onto battle royale, and is hungry for the next big live shooter trend.

The Curse of Trend-Chasing

The fates of Anthem and Concord are a bleak reflection of the growing do or die mentality many publishers have begun to operate with when faced with the challenge of their assumed heavy-hitter opening to a softer-than-expected launch. We’ve already noted how BioWare was naturally going to struggle going toe-to-toe with Destiny, considering Bungie’s spiritual successor to the MMORPG had made over $325 million in five days back in 2014, becoming the biggest new franchise launch of all time. But, like Concord, Anthem suffered a protracted development that contributed to its poor chances: When it was released in 2019, many decried Anthem for ripping Destiny off. In actuality, it began life way back in 2012, before Destiny had been revealed to the world.

Darrah remembers the corporate shift that lit the fuse on Anthem’s downfall, which began shortly after EA’s success with FIFA Ultimate Team. “They wanted every franchise to be a billion-dollar franchise”, he said, recalling internal goals for every franchise to hit minimum 40% profit margins, and making minimum $50 million in profit. BioWare was very much not primed to achieve such financial results – even its beloved Mass Effect series was not the kind of dollar-raking blockbuster that EA demanded. The studio’s approach had to change to appease its masters. BioWare had to go live-service.

Darrah remembers the way Anthem was sold to EA: “What if we said it’s still BioWare, but it’s completely not BioWare?” That confusing elevator pitch was the start of what would be a painful journey for BioWare’s RPG artists. Anthem was pitched internally as ‘the future of storytelling’ by director Casey Hudeon, but no one at BioWare, including Darrah, understood what that meant, even as the project approached its launch.

While the very people making Anthem were concerned about its heading, Darrah believes EA’s interest in the project aligned with the same reasons why the publisher’s favourite BioWare game was its second set in Thedas: “[Dragon Age 2] wasn’t well received, didn’t sell as well as other BioWare games – but it was the balance of math in terms of finances that made their line go up,” he says. Anthem, with its live-service design, presented the opportunity for BioWare to push a line up.

The realization that this type of game was a lottery ticket that could pay off really big shifted our industry around so much.

Darrah wasn’t one of the original Anthem developers, but in October 2017 he was moved from working on Dragon Age: The Veilguard to shepherd (and essentially save) Anthem’s development. Many credit his leadership as the reason why Anthem even made it out of the door. It launched in February 2019 to poor review scores and significant technical issues, an unsurprising result given the game was essentially redeveloped within a year.

And yet Anthem became BioWare’s second fastest-selling game behind Mass Effect 3, earning over $100 million in digital revenue in the first month. As a pure product of commerce, Anthem ticked all of EA’s boxes. But live-service is not about those initial sales – it’s about the marathon that lies beyond. And while attempts were made to improve Anthem, its sub-standard design failed to hold player interest long enough to allow the improvements to flourish. All development ceased in 2021. As of this year, it’s totally unplayable.

While both Concord and Anthem would find themselves victims of a similar fate, the journey to that fate differs significantly. Anthem was afforded six years to find an audience. Concord was given less than two weeks. If Concord had released in 2019, perhaps it may have eventually found its footing and carved out its own niche, similar to Hello Games’ own journey with No Man’s Sky. But if Anthem had been released in 2024, can anyone imagine it truly lasting longer than Concord did?

In an ironic twist of fate, Anthem’s initial success only caused more friction between BioWare and EA. Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s development was directly impacted. Its initial concept contained live-service elements based on Anthem’s code per EA’s direction, only for it all to change course following Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s success as a single-player only game and Anthem’s ultimately short lifespan. Similar to Anthem, The Veilguard’s final shape was a confusing abstraction, a BioWare game in appearance only, lacking the studio’s key pillars of narrative depth and player choice. EA CEO Andrew Wilson’s comments that Veilguard may have fared better if it had stuck to the original live-service plans consequently not only feels like a kick in the teeth to BioWare, but casts a spotlight on the publisher’s fundamental misunderstanding of what creates the value of its franchises.

“Dragon Age has great games you can get 30, 40 hours from,” observes Kaplan. “But if you try to stretch an experience like that out to 100 hours or 1,000 hours, that game wasn’t designed to do that.”.

The battle scars worn by Anthem and Veilguard’s staff are reflective of an increasingly pervasive trend of major publishers assigning prestige single-player developers like BioWare or Rocksteady to replicate the profits of live-service studios.

“The realization that this type of game was a lottery ticket that could pay off really big shifted our industry around so much”, Darrah muses. That shift, of course, has often been in the form of mass restructuring and layoffs following an attempt to compete in the live-service arena.

It’s clear that live-service is perhaps the biggest challenge that video games have faced in a long time. Demanding huge amounts of development on never-ending timelines, they understandably encourage copycat designs as publishers attempt to create their money-printing machines. But, as we’ve seen in the format’s popularity cycles, it’s the early innovators that tend to reign… and the throne only allows for a temporary tenancy. The age of the MMO, MOBA, and hero shooter have all come and gone, and soon the sun will set on the battle royale. One of gaming market research company NewZoo’s latest reports showed a 27% decline in the battle royale sub-genre, with Fortnite and Apex Legends both suffering nearly a quarter drop in playtime growth themselves.

However, while battle royale may be the ultimate showcase for just how big live-service can be, its waning popularity is no indication of the end of live-service. We’ve been playing microtransaction-funded multiplayer games since the ‘90s, and while there are reports that free-to-play is facing decline, the revenue stream shows no sign of going away any time soon. PlayStation CEO Hidaeki Nishino’s recent recommitment to to live-service shows that even a disaster like Concord can’t deter the famously prestige single-player platform from forcing its way to success in the field. Meanwhile, Ubisoft has claimed the single-player model is outdated and EA’s Andrew Wilson proclaimed the future of single-player is live-service, all attitudes worthy of significant concern.

“I don’t think anyone wants to live in a world where there are only seven games - but that’s kind of where we’re headed if we keep pushing down this road”, Darrah laments.

Live-service isn’t an inherently bad thing. But, as with so many issues in the industry, there’s a friction between the people who make games and the people who profit from them.

“I always talk about games in terms of a pyramid,” says Kaplan. “They’re art, then entertainment, then business. If something’s not entertaining, there’s no business there. It fails. You can’t invert the pyramid.”

Like Ultima Online, EverQuest and World of Warcraft, Destiny, Fortnite and Overwatch became the three pioneering pillars of what modern live-service games could be, following Kaplan’s pyramid of creativity. It’s difficult to argue against those games offering high-quality levels of innovation, be that Destiny’s unrivaled gunplay and phenomenal raid design, Overwatch’s exceptional hero interplay, or Fortnite’s unrivalled ability to reinvent itself on a seemingly monthly basis.

But that pyramid has so often been inverted, with many chasing the money-printing success of these three titles while failing to learn from many of the valuable lessons the trio all had to overcome to ensure their success. And with so many of the industry’s major players chasing the same trends in broadly similar ways, it feels like the sky is falling all around us.

The pyramid has become inverted. And so the big question is: can it be realigned before it's too late?

Next: Is it the beginning of the end for live-service games?

Sab Astley is a freelance writer who has written for IGN, Polygon, TotalFilm, Rolling Stone, Radio Times, and Metro UK.