Gamescom report: can the ‘forever game’ endure?

Live service games that try to monopolise attention put immense pressure on developers to keep pace with players

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One of the only announcements at this year's Gamescom, an event replete with games to play but usually light on news (as Keith wrote in last week's newsletter), was that the demon-killing, time-deleting action RPG Diablo IV's second season" would start on 17 October. That means new stuff for its 12 million players to do - vampiric powers feature heavily. But given that this game only came out in June and its first season of new content started in late July, it also means that its developers will have been working nonstop since its launch to get yet more game content ready to go.

I have often wondered how the makers of live service games - forever games" that essentially wish to monopolise a player's attention over an extended period of time, a still relatively new genre and business model that's emerged in the last 10 years - manage these brutal schedules. Twenty years ago, studios would release a game and that would be it; 10 years ago, they'd be on the hook for a patch or maybe a downloadable expansion, but not such an endless stream of content. So I asked Diablo's GM, Rod Fergusson - who has been running games teams for more than two decades, most famously with Epic Games on Gears of War - how they manage it.