No medium is invulnerable-countless movies, for example, have been lost-but the gaming industry feels uniquely indifferent to its own fate. I think it’s inevitable that not every live service game is going to be successful, but a lot more could’ve been done to set Hyper Scape up for success, and it just didn’t happen. We had gotten praise post-launch about a playable character being a hijab-wearing Malaysian woman, praise I felt conflicted about because we couldn’t even be bothered to hire a voice actress who could actually speak Malay. “There were so many unrealistic expectations, a lack of planning, and way too many last-minute decisions. “I constantly felt like management treated us like we were working on a single-player game,” Taylor says. Sometimes they aren’t given the chance to succeed in the first place. If the game had been able to stick around, I could see a future where the team would have continued to learn the game alongside players and found new ways to keep it fresh and interesting.”īut in an industry that’s always keeping one eye on the next quarterly report, struggling games rarely receive the time they need to turn around. “I feel like there was a lot of untapped potential and depth. “I think LawBreakers’ levels, movement, gunplay, and character abilities worked together in interesting ways,” Morris says. 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? Maybe this is the natural result of an overcrowded marketplace intent on chasing trends. And once the servers for these games go down, they’re gone forever. 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. Hyper Scape is just the latest live service game to meet an ignominious end. “ 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. When Ubisoft announced that Hyper Scape, its ambitious battle royale game, would be shutting down on April 28, news articles were blunt.
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