>>718239803
>falling out of favor

Live service games have been the dominant sector of the market for years and continue to do so. Most money and playtime on every single platform except probably Nintendo's is spent on live service games, and even then the Switch/Switch 2 still has stuff like Fortnite and Apex so it's not too far out there. There's a high up-front investment but the biggest players in the space, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Roblox, GTA Online etc. make shitloads back. The problem is that the market basically solidified in 2021. So you have games like Concord, Hyenas, etc. greenlit in 2016, 2017, took 6-7 years to come out trying to chase trends that weren't trends anymore and are dead out of the gate.
It's not that live service games are falling out of favor, it's that the live service audience isn't going to leave their existing live service games. The most popular games on the planet(inasmuch as Black Ops 6 is a continuation of the COD platform that started in 2019) all came out before 2020.

We're basically just seeing a decade worth of development that's basically impossible to pivot away from without just eating the hundreds of millions of dollars(or billions in the case of Bungie) with nothing to show for it. The only winning move was to just not do the thing but it's impossible to tell shareholders "yeah Call of Duty made a billion dollars selling Beavis and Butthead skins but we can't do that cause of market dynamics" unless you're Nintendo where the public shareholder meetings are basically the Japanese art of passive-aggressively calling shareholder suggestions retarded.