Not too long ago, it felt like there was no escape from live-service games. Bethesda’s unveiling of Fallout 76 in 2018 felt like an ominous bellwether – was every iconic franchise now fated to transform into a forever game? Was ever-evolving multiplayer with seasonal content updates the way forward for our favourite RPGs and shooters?

Fast forward eight years and the landscape is looking very different. Major gaming publishers are cancelling live-service games left, right and centre, while many newcomers arrive on the scene only to pack up their bags and disappear within a few short months.

Some will, understandably, celebrate the apparent downturn of the live-service model. Others, meanwhile, will see this as cause for concern. The battle pass era has been a veritable financial feast for the video games industry’s revenue growth – if it disappears, does that profitable growth disappear along with it? For some, the problem is not the disappearance of “forever games”, but the reasons why the sector is contracting. And another group will even challenge the assertion that live-service is even disappearing at all.

Above all else, one thing is clear: there’s change on the horizon.

By the end of January this year, 15 of the 19 major new live-service games launched in 2025 had lost over 80% of their initial playerbase. Among them were big, recognisable, popular names, including Persona 5: The Phantom X, Runescape: Dragonwilds and Dune: Awakening. Leveraging known, beloved IP is no longer a surefire ticket to success, something Sega learned this year following weak performance of its free-to-play push, including the likes of mobile battle royale Sonic Rumble Party. This significant stall lead to Sega cancelling its mysterious ‘Super Game’.

PlayStation has found itself in a similar situation. According to a recent Bloomberg report, the company has either halted or outright cancelled the development of over a dozen live-service games over the last decade. Many of these were linked to marquee IP like Spider-Man and God of War. Most recently, the controversial Horizon Hunters Gathering has been rebooted, with the aim of essentially ‘unmaking’ the live-service aspects and turning it into a traditional co-op game. This determination to make live-service work for Horizon means a new entry in the series’ core single-player series is reportedly still years away from release. It’s a similar story for gaming stalwart Naughty Dog, whose years spent on the ill-fated The Last of Us Online meant progress on its next major cinematic narrative game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, was slowed. TLOU Online was ultimately cancelled to prevent Naughty Dog transforming into a live-service studio, and the majority of that game’s developers moved over onto Intergalactic to allow for full-scale production.

It’s not just live-service newcomers that’re suffering, though; even the heavyweights are beginning to feel the squeeze. Newzoo’s latest gaming report showed a 27% decline in the battle royale sub-genre, with live-service heavyweights Fortnite and Apex Legends both suffering a drop in playtime growth of almost a quarter. Despite Marvel Rivals’ immense success, many of the top shooters also saw a drop-off of at least 15%, including Overwatch, Call of Duty, and Valorant. An even broader overview of the market reveals that the free-to-play model itself is in decline, with playtime on PC down 8%, PlayStation down 4% and Xbox down 11% in 2025 compared to 2024. It’s a small drop, but if it’s the start of a larger trend, the live-service model may be beginning to flatline.

So why the downturn? Ex-BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah, who helped guide the ill-fated Anthem to the finish line, thinks people may be finally realizing the gold rush is over. “I think there’s a glimmer of understanding that if you’re making a looter shooter and it’ll be a ‘decent’ looter shooter, that’s not enough anymore,” he says.

The original director of MMORPG pioneer Ultima Online, Starr Long, notes that it’s difficult to hook players into the classic live-service play cycle if they don’t trust that the game will even be online next month. “Enough games have been cancelled and shut down, so at this point people have a trust issue,” he says. “Players are asking ‘Why should I commit myself?’ That betrayal has long-term ramifications.”

For publishers, part of the allure of live-service games are the measurable metrics. Darrah notes that publishers can predict a player’s individual financial input into live-service games based on many minute actions. What someone did on their first day can inform the company of that person’s playstyle and, consequently, how much money they may be willing to part with. But if people are logging off your game and not coming back – or not even picking it up in the first place – that number is a big, fat zero.

But the explanation may be far simpler: perhaps the live-service cycle is simply just ending. That’s how Kat Osman, team director at British video games communication agency Lick PR, sees it: “There was a time when it felt like the focus was entirely on FPS games, a time when dance and music-based games were popular – we’ve all got those dusty peripherals hidden away in cupboards.” She doesn’t believe the live-service model will ever fade away – Just Dance still releases a new game year-on-year, after all – but thinks the format’s shiny allure has finally faded.

But what is the next cycle, if not more live-service? The answer may be the indie game marketplace, which has exploded in such a way that it makes the previous indie boom look quaint. R.E.P.O., Peak and Schedule I sold over 40 million copies in 2025. This year’s mega-hit Meccha Chameleon has sold 20 million copies since June 2026 and is close to cracking the 50 best-selling games of all time.

“I think the space between triple-As and indies is actually smaller than it used to be,” says Osman. “The success of these heavy hitting indies means developers don’t always need a publisher now.”

The indie game industry accounted for $4.5 billion last year, and 25% of Steam’s $17.7 billion revenue. It’s only expected to expand; games analytics agency Mordor Intelligence predicts the market will grow to $10.8 billion by 2031. However, this is only part of the picture; How To Market A Game’s 2025 study showed that of 20,282 games released, only 608 achieved a significant success benchmark. That’s just 2.99%. And, like triple-A studios, indie development teams have been subject to significant restructuring due to the wider state of the industry, with a third of indie developers reporting layoffs in the 2026 GDC State of Gaming report.

One thing is clear when viewing this picture as a whole: while the ability for indies to succeed on a similar level to triple-A titles feels more tangible than ever, the “double-A” space – those smaller budget games made by more traditionally-structured studios – feels more empty than ever. But perhaps that space is where the industry’s next big thing will be born.

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on the industry, you’ll have noticed that there’s a silver lining to the market over-indexing on live-service games and suffering the consequences. Several veteran triple-A developers have struck out on their own to create something brand-new. There’s Black Pony Immersive, formed of many former Arkane Austin developers and headed by Harvey Smith and Ben Horne; Hundred Star Games led by Rocksteady co-founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker; Studio Reset comprised of former BioWare, Inflexion Games, and Timbre Games staff, plus many more. One thing connects all of these new studios: they’re all founded by staff who once worked on critically-acclaimed single-player games, were pushed into live-service projects by their publishers, and are now trying to return the genres that they cut their teeth on. Should these games all prove successful, the next “cycle” may well be a series of double-A single-player projects that take us back to a time before daily challenges and battle passes.

But that potential double-A renaissance doesn’t need to totally reject its live-service past. There’s room for ever-evolving multiplayer projects at this scale, too, and that’s exactly what former Overwatch lead director Jeff Kaplan is working on. After a 19-year-long stint at Blizzard, Kaplan set up a new studio, Kintsugiyama, alongside his former colleague, Overwatch associate tech director Tim Ford. Their first game, The Legend of California is a multiplayer open world game set in the Californian gold rush of the 1800s. It’s a difficult game, inspired by Elden Ring’s interesting challenges, and adapts key features from some of the more prominent live-service games of the past decade, including procedurally generated maps that reset each month in a nod to Kaplan’s love of Rust.

The team’s mission statement is simple: get back to the open-world roots Kaplan put down during his days working on World of Warcraft. But this open world will look very different to Azeroth. Part survival crafter, part first-person-shooter, part action-RPG, The Legend of California hopes to be a home for a community of players who can shape its future. There is no clear roadmap – quite what it will look like in one, five, or even 10 years time will be informed by the playerbase. As with the entire history of live-service games, from the MMOs of the early 2000s to the battle royale behemoths of today, the future of the format – even at a much smaller scale than the triple-A beasts that have defined the past decade – will rely on a strong, healthy relationship between players and developers. And so Kaplan and his 30-person team at Kintsugiyama are determined to work with their players to create something satisfying, because, in his own words: “This environment is succeed or we don’t get to exist anymore.”

Regardless of what the next cycle proves to be, there’s reason to be optimistic that the next five years will see the industry move past the ‘dark times’ of publishers trying in vain to make the next Fortnite.

“I am a believer that from bad, some good can come, and from some tough times, the industry will once again flourish”, says Osman.

The incredible success of brand-new titles from first-time developers is seen by Darrah as a positive sign that things will improve. “What gives me hope is games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, where it feels like they’re answering the question of: ‘What if we take a $200 million budget and make four $50 million games?’” he says, noting developer Sandfall Interactive’s willingness to re-use sets and recycle assets from pre-existing kits to create something new as something that separates it from modern triple-A studios.

Kaplan feels that the pieces are slowly aligning for a reinvigoration of the industry, buoyed by these newly created studios born during a pressurized ‘succeed or die’ era. “You’re going to see extreme innovation,” he says. “You’ll see some mega hits come out of indie, and you’ll see some knock it out of the park moments with triple-A. It’s going to take a while for the reset to happen, but when the right things align, we’ll absolutely see the return of blockbuster triple-A-level games again.”

As I outlined at the start of this article, live-service is starting to dip. And if that dip is the beginning of the end, is this the start of a catastrophic crash? So much money has been pumped into live-service, can failure really be a good thing for the industry? But instead of asking whether or not the video games industry can continue without live-service games, perhaps the better question we should be asking is: can video games heal from what live-service has inflicted upon it? When the industry crashed in 1983, with revenue falling from $3.2 billion to just $100 million, an over-saturation of weak-quality, under-developed and derivative games eroded players’ trust and lacerated the market. It didn’t end the industry, but it did scar it. Some may say the live-service model has left its own scar on the modern industry. But the influx of new independent studios could be a sign that the wound is closing, the scar slowly healing. If nothing else, it appears there are investors confident enough to fund games that don’t chase the live-service trend.

The next question, then, is will the industry remember how we got the scar in the first place? And will players embrace these new independent studios in the way they did live-service? In an age when fresh new ideas made on a micro-budget can dominate Steam, where new players have been raised on a diet of Roblox experiments, it really does feel like the future of games is anything but the rules established by the live-service giants.

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