A generation ago a video game was a finished object: bought once, owned indefinitely, the same on its last day as its first. The biggest games today are none of those things. They are services, patched weekly, reshaped seasonally, free to start and engineered to be difficult to leave. Understanding the model explains both why modern games are generous in ways old ones never were, and why they can feel like obligations.
The economics inverted first. When a game is free or cheap to enter, the initial sale stops being the business, and revenue moves to what players spend inside: cosmetic items, character unlocks and, most importantly, the battle pass, a seasonal ladder of rewards that players buy and then earn through hours of play. The pass is a small masterpiece of behavioural design. It costs little, expires on a deadline, and converts money spent into time owed, since an unfinished pass wastes the purchase. Each season's end resets the ladder and the reason to return.
Design follows the money. A product game optimised for a strong forty hours; a service game optimises for a reason to log in on an ordinary Wednesday. Daily challenges, login streaks, limited-time modes and rotating shops all exist to make absence costly and presence habitual. Done well, this yields games that genuinely improve for years, with communities and living worlds a boxed product could never sustain. Done cynically, it yields engagement machinery wearing a game as a costume.
What players give up
The service model's fine print bites in two places. The first is ownership. Purchases are licences to content on someone else's servers, and when a live-service game closes, as dozens have, everything bought inside it evaporates. Campaigns by players have pushed some publishers toward offline modes at end-of-life, but the default remains that the arcade eventually demolishes itself, taking the tokens with it.
The second is spending visibility, particularly for households with young players. Intermediate currencies, gems bought with pounds and spent on items, are priced in bundles that never quite match item costs, obscuring real prices by design. Several countries now regulate loot boxes, the randomised version, as a gambling-adjacent mechanic, and platform-level spending controls have improved. The practical defence at home is unchanged: cards not stored on accounts, spending limits set at the platform level, and the recognition that a free game a child plays nightly is a shop they visit nightly.
The model is not going away, because when the loop is honest, players are demonstrably happy to fund years of new content for a game they love. The useful question for any player has simply changed from "is it worth the price" to "is this service still serving me".
