Back in January, an article came out that swept up book-focused social media in controversy. The premise of this article was simple: The rise of this social media subgenre had led to the books that come out, well… getting worse.
This isn’t Seasoned Reading, so I won’t bore you with all the details of the drama that followed. That’s not the point. The reason I decided to write about this isn’t to do with books at all, except drawing parallels. See, the discussion of BookTok leading to worse books seems to my mind to mirror a certain facet of the discussion around gaming.
Play Longer, Not Better
I would hazard a guess that live services generate far more controversy among gamers than BookTok does among readers. After all, if a book you would have really liked gets canceled for a book you find mediocre, you probably didn’t know about the canceled book anyway. But games are announced much earlier, and hype starts rising much faster. And every game cancellation and studio closure draws headlines in a way that books just don’t mirror at all.
In the end, though, whether it’s books or games, the most popular get the money and attention regardless of whether they’re the best. And for games, the demon being pilloried for dragging quality down to feed more popularity isn’t BookTok. It’s the dreaded “live service.”
The live service model comes with an inherent problem and a practical problem. The inherent problem is that the market is self-sabotaging. Players have a finite amount of time to dedicate to any game, and if they’re putting that time into one live service they can’t put it into another. It’s a zero-sum game. The practical problem is that most live service games aren’t very, well, good. It’s no small feat to pump out quality content month after month, year after year. The companies that do it deserve credit, because it’s much easier to just plug habit-forming mechanics into mediocre content and collect the money from people who find the mediocrity enjoyable, or who become habitual players and make it part of their routine or even identity. Mediocrity, one could say, is on the rise in games, and one could directly point to live-services as the cause.
A Place For Everything
Look, I can rant against live services as much as the next guy. I hate being told when and how to play a game, I hate timed battle passes, I hate the pressure to log in every day and do something I may not want to do. I also enjoy some live service games, just like I enjoy some of BookTok’s most mediocre favorites.
The way I see it, the world would be very boring if everything strove to be perfection incarnate. Imagine a world with only Oscar bait films. No B movies, no campy horror flicks, no summer action blockbusters. Doesn’t that sound boring?
In the same vein, I like a fun piece of mediocre writing and I like an enjoyable live service. Not every book or game has to be a masterpiece. The problem isn’t the mediocrity; it’s when that mediocrity becomes the norm and gets treated as being on the same level as a masterpiece. Evil Dead Rise is no Avatar, and Destiny 2 is no Elden Ring. That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve some of our time.
Money Talks
I’ll admit, I’m being uncharacteristically optimistic about this. I’m expecting the market to self-correct if mediocrity gets too pervasive. Like I said above, the live-service market is a self-sabotaging one. If there are too many, the ones that rise will be the ones people like best. And in the long term, I don’t think that will be the mediocre-but-fun ones. I think that will be the really good ones. And if there aren’t good enough ones, then I think more and more mediocre ones will flounder and fall apart as players leave for really good games that aren’t live-services.
At the end of the day, the oldest live-service games on the market are still young, just like the biggest BookTok publisher is still a baby. I don’t find it particularly useful to throw blame around for a trend that in the long run may turn out to be an outlier lasting only a few years. But I understand the fear. When Red Tower sends out copies of Iron Flame with missing pages and the people who receive them say “that makes it more special”, or Destiny 2 says they’re going to vault content and people leap to defend them, it’s hard not to see it as a sign of disaster to come. Maybe it is. But I’ll tell you one thing. If book five of that series comes out from Red Tower and people don’t get the ending, they’re not going to be so generous. And if AAA live services can’t keep up with AA, triple-I, or straight indie titles, gamers won’t either.