Navigating the Live Service Market in 2025 and Beyond

Live service games, ranging from mobile hyper-casuals to massive AAA experiences, have seen their challenges over the past couple of years. Live service can be a lucrative market, especially in the free-to-play space. However, in a rush to create the next Fortnite, several publishers pushed for live service games that they're now retracting. For example, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier recently reported that an MMORPG project from ZeniMax Online Studios (the team behind Elder Scrolls Online) was canceled as part of Microsoft's mass layoffs push.

We chatted exclusively with industry expert Scott Hartsman on why things are so tough for live service studios, what developers can do to stand out in the live service market, and which monetization models are succeeding and failing. To learn more about the biggest trends in live service from GDC 2025, download our free GDC Trends Report.

The Current State of Live Service Games: Market Saturation and Player Retention

GDC: You are an expert in live service, as games and as an industry. What does the live service market look right now?

Scott Hartsman: This has been a very interesting past few years. As more games come out, we've really hit this point of saturation where, if you're going to be launching a live game, it needs to be good enough to be able to take players from another live game. There has to have something super compelling about it, because people essentially have an infinite number of choices for what to do with their free time.

What is the average life cycle of a live service game right now?

Scott: The problem with averages is that it's not exactly a winner-takes-all market, but it's definitely the biggest-winners-take-most. I was just looking at a couple of different genres for some stuff for a friend, and if you look across some of these different segments in gaming, the top two or three titles end up getting 66%, 80% of the activity and the revenue in a given genre.

When you have a market that isn't winner takes all, it's really hard to talk about averages, right? Because, sure, the median is zero because there are more that don't succeed than do succeed. So you end up in this situation where the ones that are succeeding are pulling people in for hundreds to thousands of hours. The ones that disappear the week after they launch, the average player plays 30 minutes and then never comes back again. It's so feast or famine, it's really hard to talk in terms of averages or medias.

Navigating the Live Service Jobs Market

So... where are the jobs? Who's hiring?

Scott: I think that's an excellent question. If you look backward to 2020, 2021, COVID-era, when money was essentially free for founders. You had all the venture firms competing for who can give more money to different startups, because everybody felt like they were missing out and everybody felt like, well, COVID gameplay styles are the new normal. I guess everybody's now going to play 50% more games for the rest of their lives.

Anybody who was a little more reasoned realized wasn't going to happen.

We're still in the hangover from that. There are still startups being founded, there are still startups being funded. However, the order of magnitude of funding has gone down and the size of the initial checks have gotten more reasonable.

For a lot of the companies I've been working with, I've been advising what I call cockroach mode, which is "go be unkillable," right? You ship the best game you possibly can on the money that you have in-house. I think that there's going to be a lot more of that entrepreneurial style startup hustle kind of activity going on in games.

This is the area that I'm most optimistic about, where people have a clear picture in mind of what they want to make. They understand that being a startup is very different than being in a large-scale, highly paid, 5,000 to 10,000-person company where you've got traditionally more stability.

The startups are going to be where I think people are going to be more likely to have the ability to have more impact. And there will be, I think, more of them looking for people over the coming years.

What can candidates do to stand out in the market, especially since it's so competitive now?

Scott: I think having a track record of actually getting the job done is the best thing a person can possibly do.

One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that the skills that it can take to succeed in a 10,000, 100,000-person mega-scale company can be very different than the skills it takes to succeed in a 5, 10, 20-person startup, even a 100-person independent studio.

Everything is much more results oriented, everything is much more ownership oriented, everything is much more "Did I go above and beyond to help somebody else get the job done?" In a bigger company, it can be all about: "Am I an expert at building consensus among 10 disparate warring entities that don't want anything to do with each other?"

Being able to highlight the skills of yours that fit the environment you're walking into is probably a big help. I would be absolutely horrible, for instance, at any environment that required me to find peace and truce between 10 different warring factions that didn't want anything to do with each other. But put me in a studio of a few hundred people who were all on mission trying to make a great game, yes, I can bust ass and get the work done.

So yeah, know where you're going and try to highlight the right expectations.

Biggest Red Flags When Seeking a Live Service Games Job

When people are looking for a potential job in live service, what red flags would you advise candidates look out for?

Scott: There are a couple of questions that are really worth asking [potential employers]. Number one: How do you handle on-call emergencies? The concept of having an on-call list and a rotation, or however a given company does it, is pretty well-established at this point. And I think there are healthy ways to do it and ridiculously unhealthy ways to do it.

Who is setting your company goals? What are your company goals this year? What do you think your goals are to be next year? Do you feel like as you're working here that the company goals are reasonable quarter over quarter, month over month, year over year?

Get a handle on who is really calling the shots, how independent versus dependent is a given company. Because you have companies that are truly independent, profitable on their own, beholden to nobody. They are able to grow by a healthy rate if they choose to grow at all.

On the other hand, there are companies that are on the more traditional public market route, which is growth at all costs, everything must grow all the time. You know what else needs to grow all the time? Cancer. It's not a healthy thing right? Forced growth at all costs is one of the most harmful things to really happen to businesses like games.

Those are honest conversations that, I think, candidates should be truthfully unafraid to ask about them. It's a mature, rational adult conversation and companies should be transparent about that. People should know what they're signing up for.

Strategic Planning for Live Service Development: Why Timing Matters

If a studio wanted to get into the live service market, what direction would you steer them in?

Scott: "What direction" is a good question, but I also want to address "what timing." I think the most important thing is to have that conversation at the point of considering it, right? Not at the point of having greenlit titles, not at the point of having titles in pre-production, not at the point of having a studio that doesn't really care about live games being told to work on a live game.

The biggest issue that we run into is that people want to have that conversation, they're just tending to do it at the wrong time. They're doing it when they've already dug themselves a hole.

Let's assume that we're talking about actually having that conversation with somebody at the correct time. My number one piece of advice is: Tell me why this game can't exist without the online component. Because it's not a component, it's a foundational element, right? How is it the core of this game being a success? Why is it integral to the fun that you expect people to have? If you can actually have that conversation and list off the ways that the specific thing you're doing is hyper compelling, I think that's a good start.

Understanding Mobile vs. Core Market Differences

How does that work with mobile vs. core? Mobile tends to be more accessible for players, easier to pick up. Do the same rules apply for studios wanting to join the market?

Scott: I think that's a great question. So Owen Mahoney, who used to run Nexon, has recently started a blog and he did a post where he talks about how it's actually not one games industry, there's four. Think of it as a two-by-two grid. You've got single-player casual, you've got single-player core, you have mobile and casual live, and then core live. When you're talking about mobile vs. core games like PC and console, you really are essentially talking about two different industries.

The reason I say that is the way not just what you build, but what determines if you succeed or fail.

Succeeding on a core game for PC and console these days, sure, there is advertising and, yes, there's awareness and, yes, there's branding—but it's also so much more word-of-mouth and influencer-driven. But if you look down in the other corner, where you're talking about mobile and casual, these businesses are so driven by how cheaply they can acquire users and how much lifetime value they can extract from each of them. It's a math business, much more than core gaming is.

And so those two approaches are really, really different ways of not just thinking about your game, but also how your company is built.

Monetization Strategies: Mobile vs. PC/Console Models

What do you feel are the top monetization models for live service right now, for mobile and core?

Scott: If you look at mobile, the games that tend to top the charts—there is generally some type of gacha or some type of pulse mechanic where you want the latest, greatest hero and you need to go spend a hundred tokens, spend a hundred tokens, and you're getting a random shot at do you get the thing or not. And then when you finally get the thing, it's only about an eighth as strong as it could be. I need to repeat that seven more times to try to get that hero to feed it into the other hero, right? If you did that on a PC core gamer game, you would be run out of town.

When I talk about that example in particular, I was thinking of Genshin Impact, which obviously phenomenal success in the business model and fits its audience very perfectly. And, the thing is, it's a fantastic game. Forget the business model for a second. It's just an extremely well-done game with some of the best writing, deepest lore, best characters that I would say are comparable to what you would find in any AAA game. But that game is primarily mobile, even though it's playable on PC—and it does tremendously well there.

When you look at who's succeeding in core game, or PC and console, it's almost an 180-degree difference. If you look at League of Legends, if you look at Path of Exile, if you look at Warframe, if you look at a lot of these other free-to-play core gamer games that are succeeding, they are selling cosmetics, they are selling supporter packs, which are collections of cosmetics, and maybe some currency that you can use in the store to buy more cosmetics.

Meanwhile, any randomness that they include tends to be in the gameplay itself. You can go defeat the boss for a treasure chest that gives you a roll on if you get the item or not. If you didn't get the item you want, well, then you go kill the boss again, and go kill the boss again tomorrow. So, the randomness still exists, it's just built into the gameplay much more.

Creating Sustainable Revenue Models for Different Audience

Are there any monetization models still being used that you'd like to see retired?

Scott: I would be the happiest person in the universe to never sell another loot box ever again.

I was running a free-to-play studio and a free-to-play company in, you know, the early through late 2010s. The monetization models that, unfortunately, were really required to keep the game in business at the scale of audience we had, essentially required that.

One thing that I think, and I'm going to get myself in a little bit of trouble by saying this, is that the reason that even we had to do [loot boxes] back then comes down to the size of the audience. For example, you'll see a lot of core gamer games go out with, "We're going to do purely cosmetics. We're going to do the pure Riot Games ultimate customer-friendly business model, which works for Riot because Riot is Riot-sized. A startup is not.

We've seen multiple of these startups come out with the ultimate friendly monetization with just too small of an audience to support it. So, I think the thing that would actually help, and here's where I'm going get myself in trouble, is that if human beings playing these games were more willing to kick in a couple of bucks for free-to-play game, we would have less of this non-friendly monetization required for these companies to stay in business.

The Future of Live Service Games

Where do you see things by the end of the year?

Scott: I really don't think we're going to see drastic changes. What we have seen over the last year or so is a large number of AAA live service attempts out there. Some of them I would call earnest attempts at making really great, high-quality AAA entertainment. Others I would call more, you know, driven by business theory or business strategy.

The larger companies, they just see the results and go, okay, well we need to get a piece of that, right? We're selling boxes, we're selling downloads, we need some of this live service action. Which as it turns out—as we've seen over the last year or so, and are gonna keep seeing through the end of this year—is that that's really not the winning strategy.

How the Live Service Landscape Will Transform by 2028

What about by the end of 2028?

Scott: I think we're going to be post-fallout of this era. Now, what does that mean? I think that you're going to see a little bit more sanity around the larger companies choosing to go in a live game direction versus not, because there's still plenty of entertainment dollars to be made for non-live games. People are happy to play a 5-hour, a 20-hour, a 40-hour game. They don't necessarily need something that they're going to play for 2,000 hours.

Going forward, you've got all these studios that have been closed down, and a lot of products that have gone away. That's leaving holes in the slates of a lot of these companies. So these companies are to start going, well, crap, we've got to sell something. What can we do? Are they going to be spinning up new smaller projects? Probably not. Are they going to be looking for other outside studios to buy and or work with? I think that's more likely. But you know, we'll see.

Key Takeaways for Live Service Developers in Today's Market (TL;DR)

• Market Saturation Reality: The live service market has reached a saturation point where new games must be compelling enough to pull players away from games they're already playing.
• Timing is Everything: Studios should evaluate their live service strategy before greenlighting titles or entering pre-production, not after they've "dug themselves a hole."
• Different Skills for Different Companies: Success varies dramatically between large corporations and startups. Candidates should highlight skills that match the specific environment they're targeting.
• Divergent Monetization Strategies: Mobile games typically implement gacha mechanics and randomized rewards, while successful PC/console games focus on cosmetics, keeping randomness within the gameplay itself.
• Future Market Correction: By 2028, we'll likely see more strategic decision-making around live service games, with major companies potentially looking to acquire outside studios rather than developing new projects internally.

For More Live Service Insights

Be sure to watch Scott Hartsman's GDC 2025 talk, The Year in Live Service Games, on GDC Vault (subscription required). For an overview of live service trends and topics from GDC 2025, download our free GDC Trends Report.

GDC returns this March 9-13, 2026, and the Call for Submissions is now open! Follow the #GDC2026 hashtag on Bluesky and LinkedIn to stay up-to-date.

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