Modern games development is all about building momentum: creating a roadmap of content patches and releases that keep players coming back again and again over months and (potentially) years.
On one hand, you can argue this is an improvement on the more static experience of gaming in the past.
Where once gameplay was limited to the defined narratives and characters programmed onto a disk or cartridge, now fans of a game have access to a practically endless stream of evolving content. They get cool new weapons, levels, and characters. Developers are constantly honing the experience – creating novel game-modes, tweaking over-powered builds, and fixing any bugs that might get in the way.
It's a ‘living’ gaming experience – one where gamers will jump back into their favourite universes every few months to see what’s changed and, perhaps, sink some time into getting the latest gear.
Overwatch 2, Season 5 Announcement - Source: PlayOverwatch, YouTube
But this drumbeat of content has also created new challenges for the gaming ecosystem as well. While a constantly evolving game feels fresh and exciting, it can take a toll on developers (and, in some cases, even on streamers and players).
With the gaming hamster wheel always spinning, it can be hard to pause and catch your breath.
Given its importance in the modern gaming environment – we thought we’d take some time to look at this space, shine a light on what audiences seem to expect from a ‘good’ season, and explore how the desire for ‘infinite’ content is shaping the gaming landscape.
What are Seasons and Battle Passes?
Let’s start with a bit of terminology.
Fortnite has them, Call of Duty too. As does Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, Destiny 2, Halo, Overwatch 2, Genshin Impact… the list goes on.
We’re talking about Seasons and Battle Passes – the mechanics at the heart of the modern, ‘living’ gaming ecosystem.
These words often get bandied about when talking about this space and it can all get a bit confusing if you’re not aware of the differences.
Seasons are defined periods of time in a multiplayer game (generally spanning a few months IRL), that are often heavily themed – such as Fortnite’s snowy winter theme in Season 7. There are often story beats or challenges associated with these themes that gamers can pursue – and each season can deliver new characters, skins, and gameplay modes.
A Battle Pass is a progression bar, of sorts, that is generally active over the course of a single season – restarting once a new Season begins. These are often composed of multiple levels or ‘tiers’, which can be unlocked by completing activities or gaining XP. The rewards for completing these tiers? Increasingly interesting gear, skins, or emotes – with the most exciting items generally locked behind higher tiers. Gamers often pay to tap-into these Battle Passes – and, on top of this, can sometimes pay additional amounts to unlock different tiers (rather than accessing them through gameplay).
Genshin Impact Battle Pass - Source: Polygon
Why are we talking about Seasons?
If you’ve been following the updates around the release of this summer’s AAA action RPG Diablo 4, you may have seen that interest in the game has taken a bit of a beating – recent Twitch streams and Google Trends data seems to match the media narrative that audiences are cooling on this once hotly-anticipated game.
Part of the reason for this drop-off can probably attributed to competition – with some critics pointing out that the success of games like Larian Studio’s Baldur’s Gate 3, and Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom are eating into their time with the game.
However, the launch of Diablo 4’s Season 1 in mid-July seems to have been a big contributor to this decline – with critics and audiences generally panning the update across the board.
It’s clearly important for developers to get seasonal content right when thinking about how to engage with audiences in the long-run. But what does a great season look like?
What makes a great, new video game season?
To try and answer that big question, we took advantage of the recent ‘TierMaker’ trend on social media to explore how different seasons across some of the biggest multiplayer games were being ranked by streamers – and why commentators felt they deserved these rankings.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6, TierMaker - Source: Jynxzi, Twitch
To sum it all up, reviewers scored seasons highly when they delivered in three key areas:
1. Opening up new ways to play
2. Giving players something to aspire towards
3. Making the experience feel special and important
Opening up new ways to play
The best video game seasons are felt to unlock the ability for audiences to play the games they love in different, complementary ways.
This could be unlocking new characters that offer new play styles and strategies (such as the operators that are included in each new season of Rainbow Six Siege), introducing maps (such as Apex Legend’s Season 3 World’s Edge), or opening-up different game modes (like Apex Legend’s Season 9 which is generally ranked highly because of its introduction of the 3x3 Arena game mode).
Commentators are generally most critical of seasons when they feel like they’re making gameplay more difficult (such as the Fortnite’s flooded map in Chapter 2, Season 3 – which was felt to be too difficult to traverse) or filling space with unnecessary grind (Destiny 2’s ‘Season of the Drifter’ is sometimes criticised for being “too repetitive and unrewarding”).
Destiny 2, Season of the Drifter - Source: Bungie
Giving players something to aspire towards
New Seasons – and the accompanying Battle Passes – need to give reasons for players to jump back in again, and the most tangible reward that games can provide is powerful loot and cool ‘skins’ (in-game cosmetic appearances for your character).
Gamers are being asked to spend real money and sink hours of time into playing – and want to be rewarded for their effort with appearances that proclaim their skill level, such as the Battle Pass-topping Tier 100 skins in Fortnite.
New weapons that will make a real difference on the battlefield are also appreciated. Destiny 2’s ‘Exotic Catalysts’ - introduced in the ‘Season of Resurgence’ – were seen as a great example of this: items that could be found and used to power-up certain weapons after completing tricky objectives (generally, shooting lots of people).
Fortnite Tier 100 Battlepass Skins - Source: EveryDay FN, YouTube
Making the experience feel special
Live events can also make gameplay feel special – providing a limited window where players can experience their favourite games in a slightly different and fun way. Once these events are over – that’s it, they’re done… at least, for that year (see the plethora of Halloween and Christmas events floating around).
Well-received examples of this include Call of Duty: WarZone’s Season 3 ‘80’s Action Heroes’ event – where audiences could play as Rambo, and wage war in Die Hard’s Nakatomi Plaza – or the ‘Overwatch Archives’, an annual, time-locked PvE experience where players can play through the lore around their favourite heroes.
Warzone’s 80’s Action Heroes event - Source: Activision Blizzard
What can we learn about video game seasons from an absurdist baseball horror simulator?
One game that did seasons particularly well was Blaseball (RIP) - a now-shuttered absurdist ‘baseball simulation horror game’ that took the internet by storm during Covid.
Through each new season of Blaseball, the game’s US-based developer The Game Band was felt to regularly deliver an updated experience that provided fresh, new ways of playing, which in turn kept every season feeling special and unique (and made sure players kept returning).
At its core, the game relied heavily on fan-voting to decide how the experience would transform from season to season – and, by doing this, it created something that felt very real, evolving, and deeply rooted in the game’s community.
Here’s just one example of this: At the end of each season, users voted on different ‘Decrees’ – decisions that had a very real impact on the game and characters within it. After Season 1, there were three such options for players to select from: ‘Relegation’; ‘Redistribute Wealth’; and the ominously titled, ‘Open the Forbidden Book’.
Obviously, the last choice was selected by the chaotic Blaseball community (chosen by 61% of players, in fact) – ultimately resulting in a scorched-earth war between the various teams and a giant, angry peanut known only as ‘The Shelled One’ that would directly cause the death (and eventual resurrection) of many well-loved characters.
As crazy as it sounds - in this game, that’s all par for the course.
Forbidden Book Decree - Source: X (Twitter), @Blaseball
However, while the ever-evolving nature of Blaseball is now celebrated as a beautiful partnership between developer and audience, this relationship came at a clear cost – one which had a hugely negative impact on Blaseball’s creators and which, ultimately, may have led to the closure of the game…
What are the downsides of ‘living’ content?
We’ve spent a great deal of time exploring the positives of the seasonal content space, and what a ‘great’ season looks like, but it’s equally important to consider the negative elements of this new ‘living’ model as well.
In an emotional message to fans on Medium, the creators of Blaseball stopped the game in June 2023 – citing that the experience just “isn’t sustainable to run”.
While the audience-side experience of a constantly evolving and changing game-space was hugely addictive, it just couldn’t be continued with the limited resources of the small development team.
Burnout was the result.
I’m seeing this story play out again and again, across the gaming space as a whole. Where once developers could anticipate a painful ‘crunch’ before a game was released – an all-hands-to-the-pumps period of overtime misery in the lead-up to launch – now there’s a continuous, manic push to create. As a PC Gamer article pointed out a few years ago: “Living games demand a constant stream of content, and only constant work can deliver it.”
And while this fatigue is clearly being felt most acutely in development teams, there are hints that it’s translating into the player base as well.
Critics and audiences are starting to describe some living gaming experiences like a second-job: a constant pressure to meet time-locked requirements in order to unlock Battle Pass tiers, or access new gear.
Streamers too are feeling the heat: they may now have access to practically unlimited content to share with Twitch viewers, but it may also be translating into exhaustion and burnout.
There’s a clear anxiety about falling behind - which may be growing into a form of resentment. As one critic pointed out: "Doesn't the constant, hindering reminder of how far behind you are seem annoying at best and exploitative at worst? It doesn't have to be like this. It wasn't like this."
It certainly wasn’t like this in the past, and it hopefully won’t remain like this moving into the future.
While the season-led content model seems here to stay, better awareness of crunch and industry pushback to this working model (combined with an increase in unionisation) could help shift the dial when it comes to dealing with burnout and stress.
At the same time, other games have shown that this ‘living’ model isn’t necessarily a requirement for attracting players – for instance, Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom has managed to be wildly successful without any promise of future DLC.
Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t plan to release any future DLC - Source: Nintendo
Moving forward, we hope the industry is able to walk the tight-rope between providing consumers with a great, ‘living’ gaming experience – while also respecting the health and needs of their developers at the same time.
And if that includes more malevolent legume Gods floating around and smiting player-characters… well, we wouldn’t be too adverse to that either.