it's so funny to me that live service free to play games specifically blew up so much the market is completely oversaturated. When a genre is "saturated", aka has so much new entries being made in a short period of time that people feel like the quantity of them surpasses the quality of most of the entries, causing a reaction of "of course this is just another [saturated genre]" with rolling eyes, it can affect the reputation and success of a piece of media negatively, be it a book, a game or whatever. But the genre will often stay saturated nonetheless because while the breakout successes will be few, your average creator will still be able to make a decent profit or at worst cut their losses.
Taking another genre you often hear as oversaturated, someone who makes a deckbuilder roguelike or even just a roguelike will probably have to fight a bit of an uphill battle with people who groan loudly when seeing the tag "roguelike" on an indie game before putting it on their do not recommend list. But unless the budget for making it was REALLY high, you can likely secure enough earnings that this will not be a purely negative endeavour, as hardcore fans of the genre will often go out of their way to test things out, not everyone is tired of that genre yet, and people who played one or two games like this might want to experience more of it and will test out your game rather than another. Once they buy the game, they can refund it sure, but most of the times even if they have a mediocre experience with it the money's yours. You can afford to make mistakes, you can afford to be mid and forgettable, a thousand people will have downloaded your 10$ game. The few breakout sucesses will be hard-carried by fans of the genre recommending them as shiny examples of what the genre can achieve and will often be hailed as "a fresh new take on [genre]".
But you very much CANNOT do that with live service games.
If your game is live service, free-to-play or not, you need a constant stream of cash coming in to support the servers. Since even if you make your game a paid one a stagnating playerbase would be the death of you, you need to have ways to get people who stay in the game to want to spend money. You cannot succeed based on the player that'll touch your game a few times and never again. So, your game will push for constant investment in both time and money. Your goal is to create a sizeable core of players that will choose to spend their money on your game because they choose to spend their time on your game.
Now imagine if about twenty different games asked for your time at once.
Any negative effect that oversaturation has in a genre is tenfold with live service. Slay the Spire 2, Balatro, Cursed Words, Slay the Obelisk, World of Horror, Luck be a Landlord, Down Under, Passant, Usurper, Binding of Isaac, Mewgenics, Scritchy Scratchy, sure you can decide to not play many of them because you have already a good amount of roguelike fun you own, but those games aren't actively trying to ransack each other. Someone can own any number of these games. No one can spend all day on Overwatch and Concord and LoL and WoW and Destiny 2 and Highguard and Apex Legends and Multiversus, and if you only play those games sporadically why would you constantly invest money in them? The live service is a beast that needs preys and it needs to be competitive, it needs to be able to hunt for more players that will feed it their money, but it shares its preys with nearly other live service, they need to be THE most attractive to build a core solid enough to even just support them. Live service as a concept is built such that it's either reliant on the idea that every person on earth will choose one game they will pay a regular tax to or is only able to support a few actual successes
But since when it does work, it makes an ungodly amount of money, every big corporation or ambitious CEO wants one, not realising they are introducing a newborn predator in an ecosystem where everyone is already fighting to keep their food source. And they will pump an UNGODLY amount of money in it since it's by far the most expensive type of game possible. So you end up with the one type of games that is affected by saturation the most, being the most saturated one, with the most expensive games, that rely on having people spending money on them rather than their twenty billion competitors with a handful of very well established beasts that don't need to fear the newcomers. As a result, even if the game has most of what it takes to be a solid game that could technically survive in the long run, it can only manage to get a fraction of the core ATM players it needs to function, because people who would be willing to pay regularly for Future Drive are already paying for Frostorama or Deicruxas 2 or Bumbo's Showdown and can't afford to switch side, it'd make everything they've already spent a waste.
The live service craze is a CEO automated humiliation system and honestly if the game industry wasn't disgustingly abusive at every level it'd be insanely funny to watch big companies throw all their penny in the money burning machine like it's a wish granting fountain
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