Cliff Bleszinski Talks About Live Service Challenges Amid Palworld And Helldivers 2 Success

Given the meteoric success of several newly released live service games, some developers will probably be tempted to take a stab at a live service title of their own. Cliff Bleszinski, however, offers a word of caution, saying that it’s an extremely daunting task with no assurance of success and that the likes of Palworld and Helldivers 2 are exceptions.

Bleszinski, a.k.a. CliffyB, is no stranger to live service operations, having co-founded Boss Key Productions which churned out online arena shooter Radical Heights. He’s best-known for his work on the Unreal first-person shooter series and the Gears of War trilogy.

LawBreakers unfortunately didn’t enjoy the same popularity as the aforementioned franchises and was shut down a little over a year after its launch while Radical Heights didn’t even make it out of early access before Boss Key pulled the plug just a month after its release. The studio itself followed suit shortly after.

“For the first short while with LawBreakers it was tough,” Bleszinksi told PCGamesN. “Then we just hit a brick wall with our player base, just a lot of [them] being leaky, and it just [became] less and less and less as opposed to growing.”

“It’s so hard to make a live-service game. If the game dies, and the servers go dark, the game is just gone. It’s like, ‘poof’, into the ether. For every World of Warcraft, there are other ones that just do not do it well, with microtransactions nickel and diming the consumer. But it’s necessary, unfortunately, because games these days […] $60 isn’t enough to justify it,” he added.

He also commented on the explosive successes of Palworld and Helldivers 2, saying that a good gameplay pitch will only get you so far. “We live in a world where, you know, things need to go viral,” he said. “If you’re not on the front page of Twitch, you’re dead in the f***ing water. If a game is like $100 million to make, you have to allocate at least $50 million plus for marketing alone. You need to hit people over the head with a hammer. And then you know, if you’ve made something good, and it goes viral and sticks, there it is.”

Palworld and Helldivers 2, however, are apparently exceptions to the marketing rule as both games went viral post-launch without a big marketing push before then. On the flip side, Skull and Bones has gone viral for all the wrong reasons after Ubisoft undoubtedly spent a boatload of money on marketing and even getting actress Michelle Rodriguez to plug the game. Nightingale isn’t doing too good either.