If there’s one thing I’m known for in the industry in terms of my coverage, it’s that I am the “live looter shooter guy.” That has been, at baseline, Destiny 1 and 2, but I’ve also stuck with games that attempted the concept and died a slow or quick death. And that was most of them.
But now the genre I love appears to be fully drying up, and I’m wondering what the future holds for both existing titles and future attempts. If there will be many, that is. The long and short of it is that it seems like the industry has judged live looter shooters as:
1) Extremely expensive to make with non-stop demands for seasonal content.
2) Extremely risky in a market where we have seen many hugely high-profile failures.
3) Decreasing demand for long-term staples of the genre.
When looter shooters tank, they tank hard. It’s true that we’ve seen a number of multiplayer PvP games flop as well the last few years, but these AAA looters projects that take huge chunks out of big developers and now the industry is scared to be one of those cautionary tales. The large-scale examples are Anthem being the failure of BioWare’s first new IP in ages, and its huge resource and time investment pushed back new Dragon Age and Mass Effect games. The same goes for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which lost $200 million and erased a possible Arkham/single player superhero game that might have otherwise been made.
This has been like touching a hot stove. Both BioWare and Rocksteady are going back to their old bread and butter of single player games now. The same happened for Crystal Dynamics after the slow death of Marvel’s Avengers, a looter shooter than had no place being a looter in the first place.
My main game, Destiny, has survived 10 years, and is the main reason that everyone leapt toward this genre in the first place. But it’s in a very, very tough spot now, and its declining interest and revenue juxtaposed against extremely high costs has led to large-scale layoffs at Bungie. There’s also no doubt some measure of soul-searching at Sony as to why they paid $3.6 billion for the developer, which is now showing to be funneled into top executives who are now leaving themselves, jumping out of a plane with bags of cash in tow.
Destiny 2 has gone from one of its highest playercounts with the release of The Final Shape to its lowest, and its future is much smaller scale content, stuck in a player motivation spiral that it seems hard to pull out of and there’s no full sequel on the horizon. But rather being pulled into single player like these other studios, Bungie is going back to pure PvP with Marathon, and a separate incubated project, Gummy Bears, a MOBA/Smash Bros. hybrid.
If there is a single beacon of consistency in this entire genre, it is Warframe, which sees player spikes and valleys, but it effectively has the same playercount averages as it did back in 2017, As I write this, it has 74,000 concurrent players to Destiny 2’s 25,000. Destiny 2’s Act 3 launch this very week peaked at 36,000 concurrents on Steam. Warframe is the model that the industry largely ignores, for whatever reason, despite being arguably the most successful and stable.
The future looks bleak in terms of new live shooters. Really the only major one that comes to mind is The Division 3, a project that has been announced but also exists under…Ubisoft, a company in somewhat dire straits, and it is a little bit difficult to fully trust this game will make it to launch, or if Ubisoft will even be the same company by the time it would be coming out.
To me, the future of looter shooters may be closer to Borderlands 4. A game that is very proud of not being a live service game, adding more traditional expansions instead, and not needing to crank out ongoing content every few weeks/months. Borderlands is the original looter shooter, after all, and against all odds, has not followed the trends its successors like Destiny created. That said, it remains to be seen if the appetite for Borderlands as a whole has decreased since 3’s release way back in 2019.
It is also not easy to try to launch a new looter shooter in this vein either. Outriders very much attempted this, not being a live game but one with a built-in endgame at launch and then an expansion later. It was actually very good, once you got into it, but it was also not considered a success despite an initially positive launch, and the IP seems dead, even though Square Enix once sung its praises. So even ditching the “live” aspect is no recipe for a looter shooter to succeed.
Looters more generally? ARPGs like Diablo 4 and now especially Path of Exile 2 have performed well, the latter extremely well for still being in very much unfinished Early Access. But those are decade(s) old series and a separate genre, despite loot being involved.
I’m bummed about all of this as this is my genre, but it’s shrinking quickly and my main game seems like it’s in something of a spiral. Borderlands 4 is in fact what I’m looking forward to the most in the space, and it will actually be something of a relief that it’s not live. But in terms of new attempts at AAA games in this space, I am not holding my breath for many serious contenders in the near-term or maybe even long-term future, as this era feels like it’s sunsetting rather quickly.
Except Warframe. Warframe lives forever.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
