Games

I've never really been into fighting games; I did some Smash Brothers when I was younger but that's about it. I think fighting games are a fairly different beast entirely; they're a far more "couch friendly" genre.

They also don't tend to have the absolutely massive operating costs where "it costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this map" and server costs of "it cost hundreds per month to run just a few servers (because of the complexity of processing all of the elements of an individual match" that Fortnite, PUBG, and Hunt Showdown have to deal with.

Live Service:

• https://steamcharts.com/app/578080
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1172470
• https://steamcharts.com/app/359550
• https://steamcharts.com/app/440
• https://steamcharts.com/app/230410
• https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570
• https://steamcharts.com/app/594650

Never adopted a live service (but a big name):

• https://steamcharts.com/app/1517290
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238810
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238840
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238860

Live service is worse for the shooter genre on "eventual death" ... but so far none of the popular live service shooter games have really died. Meanwhile games that haven't and are still trying to compete with the "buy the new game for a premium price tag" (like Battlefield) are hurting. Calling of Duty is another big name that almost certainly is suffering from this problem but it can't be charted because they reorganized their game as "everything is under 'Call of Duty'".

The fighting games on steam don't even come close to any of the shooter numbers.

Other big genres like strategy do fine with the big release (in no small part because a big part of their game play is single player or "play with a well known group of friends"), e.g., https://steamcharts.com/app/289070 and https://steamcharts.com/app/413150 (both of those games also have seen almost "live service-like" levels of service via additional content throughout their lifespan).

Live services get a lot of hate on Lemmy ... but there genuinely is something to them when they're done well. They're often better for shooters because the incremental changes allow developers to back off and fix things without totally fragmenting their community.

Battlefield 2042 and Hunt Showdown: 1896 are great examples of this ... They both had rocky launches. Battlefield is a bigger franchise but because they made "extreme changes" vs incremental changes Battlefield 2042 is in much worse shape than Hunt Showdown: 1896 is and Crytek will in all likelihood be able to fix the things that people are upset about and get their numbers higher than they were. Dice/EA's best chance is "try again next year" at this point with their model (which will almost certainly cost players another $70 minimum to get into). Even then the game will remain fragmented with all the different Battlefield games out there and the expense of getting a new one.

If you're frugal you could've played Hunt Showdown from 2018-present for its original price of $29 for the battlefield community for the same time frame to play on release you would've needed to spent $180 minimum.