FBC: Firebreak bombed. The multiplayer spin-off of Remedy’s hit game Control, which imagines players as squads of gun-toting supernatural janitors meant to clean up the messes inside its eerie and magical setting, did not find the audience that the original game did. If the readily available Steam charts are any indication, it missed the mark by a sizable margin and Remedy itself has since confirmed that the title underperformed. And yet, the multiplayer title, which Remedy has spent the better part of a year tuning up and molding into something more appealing to players, isn’t just disappearing from the face of the Earth after failing to connect with audiences. With its dying breath, it is actually setting a standard that the rest of the games industry ought to rise to meet.
When Remedy announced that it would be sunsetting FBC: Firebreak after one final update, I was prepared to see an expiration date: a finish line or resignation of sorts. Instead, I found this: “FBC: Firebreak will stay online and continue to be playable for years to come. We have done engineering work to ensure we can sustain the upkeep of the relay servers when the player volume is lower.” This move, and the addition of a friend pass system–allowing one person to own the game and share it with others who don’t–has assured that FBC: Firebreak will have legs for some time to come.
This is a shocking, and very welcome, development at a perilous time for multiplayer games. While titles like Marathon try to find an audience (let alone one the size of its most immediate competition, the viral sensation Arc Raiders), others, like Highguard, have come and gone seemingly in the blink of an eye. And when a game like these is deemed dead, the industry all but assures it stays that way. Like Concord, games are ripped off of physical and digital store shelves. They are delisted and pulled from libraries. Teams are laid off and studios are outright shuttered. The servers powering these games are given an end date and, before long, they are shut down and all we’re left with is memories of them.
And yet here is Remedy, a studio with far fewer resources than most of the developers and publishers behind many of the aforementioned titles–and which self-published FBC: Firebreak, its first multiplayer game–accomplishing what should be the bare minimum. Even if it is only ever around for a few dozen players over the next several years, it’s admirable to see Remedy make sure that FBC: Firebreak is sticking around for anyone who cares to try and/or already loves it.
An FBC: Firebreak squad fleeing from very obviously signposted danger.
There are some obvious differences between FBC: Firebreak and, say, a live-service game like Highguard. Remedy made it a point that its title was not designed around the content treadmill that defines the latter. It would not have seasons, battle passes, microtransactions, or much of the infrastructure–like in-game activities and playlists built explicitly for large-scale multiplayer experiences–that sustains their ilk. As such, FBC: Firebreak’s limited scope and size likely made it easier, perhaps even feasible, for Remedy to consider such a contingency in the face of redundancy. After all, I’m not oblivious to the fact that keeping a game online, especially one that is not actively generating profits, can be a drain on resources.
Live-service games are not built to bleed resources; they’re made to extract them. When they don’t succeed in that regard, often meaning that these titles are not generating unfathomable profits or crossing preposterous milestones that very few games ever manage–Fortnite and Roblox are two of the best examples of these exceptions–they are cut down by merciless c-suites before they can find an audience or become modest successes.
That makes it all the more impressive that Remedy has, seemingly through good management and engineering, found a manner in which to hold off death’s embrace, which has often come swiftly for failed online games in the past. It has proven there is something else that can be done to ensure that more games stand the test of time rather than bite the dust. And though FBC: Firebreak’s death defiance is the latest development, history has shown there to be at least a few alternatives other than simply packing everything up and calling it quits.
For years, even decades now, online games have come and gone. At times, they pop back up in the most unlikely of ways, like fan-run private servers. City of Heroes, an MMO from the mid-aughts, ran until late 2012 under its publisher NCSoft, and yet years later, it was discovered that there was at least one rogue private server running it still. Since then, the team that hosted the server has been granted a license to officially host City of Heroes, and a once-dead game now sustains itself independently.
In the case of Knockout City, a live-service multiplayer dodgeball game, the studio behind it spun things down and willingly handed over the game to its community. Though you cannot enjoy the original vision of the game, there is now a version of it on Steam where all of its live-service bloat has been cut away and all cosmetics are readily available, showing that such a move is, in fact, possible.
I wish that Highguard could’ve enjoyed a similar fate, if only for the folks who did love it, flaws and all. I wish that we still had unique titles like Rumbleverse. And it is my hope that future multiplayer games might take a lesson or two from Remedy’s planning and execution. It is certainly preferable to the overwhelming losses this medium has been made to endure due to the bursting of the live-service bubble.
