We Need to Talk About Shooters

During Opening Night Live for Gamescom 2025, no less than 4 live-service shooters were announced. Some were team-based, some were PVP, some were PVPVE. Earlier this year, some were released to lukewarm reception, such as FBC Firebreak, and some were shut down, such as XDefiant. The bottom line is that the market is oversaturated.

There was a period in the 2010s when the MMORPG genre fell victim to the same issue. Does anyone reading this remember Wildstar? It was released in 2014, made free-to-play in 2015 due to poor sales, and ultimately shut down in 2018. This is just an example of a similar problem.

What does this have to do with the oversaturated Shooter market? Around the time Wildstar was released, games such as Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, and Black Desert Online dominated the MMO market, not too dissimilar from the present day, really.

Conversely, at the time many of these shooters are being announced, we have a market already stocked to the brim. Call of Duty, Fortnite, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, Counter Strike, Valorant, Helldivers 2, and a few others dominate an already stuffed gaming space. Where is the room for people to play these newly announced shooters that really don’t have much different going for them?

The only Gamescom shooter that stood out was Project Spectrum, and many casual shooter players may avoid it due to not being horror fans. It will likely catch the spotlight due to a few “screaming YouTubers” and then drift off into obscurity after a while, like the rest.

We talk about how many games get canceled and how many development studios get closed. How many of these studios are set up to fail by crafting games that never really had a chance to succeed? An example that comes to mind is Foamstars, which was a Square Enix project, but also never really found a player base.

Why couldn’t those people have been put on something that would have interested people? It is becoming increasingly obvious that Single-Player games are what people want to play. If these shooters don’t do well, don’t close the studio. Put them in charge of something else and let them try to show their skills in something that isn’t doomed to fail.

Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong about one or more of the ones announced last week. However, I think I can safely say that several of the shooters announced will either A) not release at all, or B) will be closed a year or so after they launch. There just isn’t enough attention to compete with the heavy hitters.

I know this is all down to CEOs and people who aren’t paying attention to the market, thinking that live-service games and multiplayer will make them money. Yet how many studios have to close, and how many games have to fail before these people realize they’re betting on the wrong horse? Only time will tell how long it takes for these market shifts to become obvious, I suppose.