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Say you’ve taken a few months off from your regular play of Diablo IV. When you come to reinstall it again, do you experience a strange sort of dissonance?
The character’s still yours. The buttons do what you remember—mostly. But then, you open the menu, and there are three new currencies, an event tab, another progression track, and a mysterious NPC everybody else apparently met last week.
That’s becoming standard for big games now.
We still talk about them as individual titles — Diablo IV, Fortnite, GTA Online, Warframe — but that’s not always a particularly accurate description of what players are actually logging into anymore. These things keep growing sideways! New systems sit on top of old ones, entirely different activities occupy the same client, and the account you’ve been carrying around for years starts to feel more permanent than whatever you happen to be playing inside it that evening.
Somewhere along the way, keeping a live service game alive stopped being about simply adding more game…
How Much Diablo Can You Fit Inside Diablo?
Blizzard’s action RPG is having a time of that right now. September brought Season of Hell’s Legacy into the mix, complete with returning Prime Evils, new progressions, Charms, and another fresh layer of things to chase around Sanctuary.
The funny thing about this game is that its core pitch remains beautifully uncomplicated. There are demons, and they have loot. You’d like the loot, and would therefore appreciate it if the demons became considerably more dead.
Why is Blizzard so intent on making it so much more? Because it can, for starters! The underlying loop is already strong, so it can support a lot of extra baggage without collapsing under it. This gives Blizzard room to keep layering on things like seasonal quests and new progression systems without having to reinvent Sanctuary every few months.
Diablo IV feels less and less like one fixed game and more like a space Blizzard can keep repopulating. Sure, you still come back to kill demons, but what that session is feeding into can look completely different depending on when you last logged in.
Games within games: is this where the future’s headed?
The Ecosystem Idea Isn’t Exactly New
Headed? Probably. But it’s also where some gaming spaces have already been for a good while now. It’s pretty obvious to us that there’s a clear parallel here between where our AAA+ live service games are going and what online casino platforms have been doing for decades.
Open up any digital casino right now, say the Sportaza online casino, and you’re not going to see one central game waiting behind the front door. You’re looking at a gaming ecosystem built around the wider casino experience, and that’s dispersed across slots, live dealer games, table formats, jackpots, and all sorts of digital play, all gathered behind the same account and interface.
This setup changes what a player returns to. Yes, there’s the overarching appeal of playing a casino game online—which is much more accessible than having to physically go to a gaming venue, for one—and players in this space have their own ride-or-die, much in the same way that a Fortnite nut has a favourite mode. But the wider platform isn’t dependent on everyone logging in to play exactly the same thing.
If one part of the library gets stale, there’s another vertical sitting a few clicks away. Plus, new games can arrive without having to rebuild a brand-new infrastructure around them because everything’s already there. Like the mainstream titles we’re talking about in this article, the individual activity becomes interchangeable in ways it couldn’t when every game was a separate box, download, or login.
Fortnite Basically Turned Its Front Door Into A Games Platform
Then there’s Fortnite, which is honestly a whole category of its own! Calling it a battle royale still isn’t technically wrong, but it’s a bit like describing your phone as the thing you occasionally make calls on.
Battle Royale is there, and so is Zero Build. It doesn’t end there, though. That very same client now opens out into LEGO experiences, rhythm games, racing, social spaces, and a ludicrous number of creator-made islands covering genres that have absolutely nothing to do with dropping out of a Battle Bus and shooting somebody.
Again, we ask the question: why? Because Epic isn’t just trying to keep one mode alive anymore. UEFN has turned Fortnite into a place where other developers can build, publish, and even monetize their own games without asking players to leave the wider platform.
Even if Battle Royale's having a quiet week, Fortnite itself still has plenty going on within the same ecosystem.
GTA Online Was Supposed To Be The Multiplayer Bit
Even Rockstar Games is at it! GTA Online might be the best example of how far this can go without anybody necessarily setting out to build a massive digital ecosystem in the first place.
It started as the online component of Grand Theft Auto V. Reasonable enough. Then, Rockstar started adding things… and kept adding things… and now there are heists, businesses, property portfolios and nightclubs, races, car meets, casinos, and an increasingly ridiculous fleet of vehicles all found inside the same virtual city.
Like a digital casino, two different players can log in on the same night and leave having had wildly different experiences.
It may not have been intentional during the design stage, but the sheer breadth of GTA Online might just be why the game has survived for so long. Rockstar isn’t out here needing to persuade every returning player to enjoy the same activity. Los Santos has accumulated enough stuff to give players completely different reasons to keep coming back.
