When Ubisoft announced that Hyper Scape, its ambitious battle royale game, would be shutting down on April 28, news articles were blunt. “Forgotten,” “failure,” and “massive flop” were common descriptors, and the general conclusion was that the game hadn’t done enough to differentiate itself from established competitors in a crowded genre.
Hyper Scape is just the latest live service game to meet an ignominious end. Battleborn, LawBreakers, Crucible, and PlanetSide Arena are a few notable titles to go under in the last few years, the latter surviving a mere four months. And once the servers for these games go down, they’re gone forever.
Maybe this is the natural result of an overcrowded marketplace intent on chasing trends. But how do developers feel about working for years on games that fail and vanish for reasons beyond their control? And how do they feel about continuing to work in a medium where, as more games turn to the live service model, their creative efforts become increasingly precarious?
Working on a FlopTaylor (a pseudonym), who worked on Hyper Scape, said via email they “try not to get too attached to anything in game development, as its nature is fleeting and things often get cut or reworked. That being said, this was the first game I was on where a lot of my work remained intact, and it does suck that none of it will survive.”
Games fail for all sorts of reasons, many of them beyond the control of developers. But a failed single-player game still exists to potentially be stumbled across by new fans. A dead online game is just gone, millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work up in smoke.
Game writer Mikko Rautalahti, whose credits include Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and numerous dead or canceled titles, said during a phone conversation that the death of an online game is unique. “If you write a book, you can count on that being around, people can experience it later,” Rautalahti said. “Once those servers go down, what’s left is just a bunch of random YouTube videos where you can catch glimpses of the work we did. It feels like a shame to just let it slip past our fingers.”
That doesn’t mean these games aren’t worth making. Game designer Chris Morris, who worked on Lawbreakers, tells WIRED, “I don’t consider that work to have been wasted, it was a valuable experience and a fun project. It would have been great if things had gone differently and the game found an audience. I do wish it was still available to play today in some form.”
