TL;DR:
Over the past decade, we’ve seen a massive rise in live-service games with huge AAA budgets that close after failing to find an audience. […] Some studios are finally learning that live service is not always a guaranteed cash cow, and in retrospect Anthem feels like an early symptom of the carnage we’re seeing now. […] Too often, as we’ve seen from the staggering number of layoffs already in 2024, it’s the ordinary people, the rank-and-file developers, who are paying the price. Anthem may have been a warning, but unfortunately, it seems to have gone unheeded.
“How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?”
The industry should’ve already learned this lesson from the MMO crash, of everyone trying to replicate WoW’s success and then later realizing that a business model of investing a ton of money to try and compete for both consumers’ time and money is a bad idea.