Grinding Gear Games co-founder Chris Wilson once believed in the live-service video game model wholeheartedly, and this conviction undoubtedly helped him be online RPG Path of Exile's fearless leader until he officially left Grinding Gear in 2025. Now, Wilson is a free bird, and he's free to scrutinize the monetization pathway he once thought might redefine video games.
Wilson explains this in a new video on his YouTube channel, in response to a fan's question wondering what strongly held belief he's changed his mind about in the last decade. He says, "10 years ago, I felt that live service was entirely upside in all cases." Because of this, Wilson thinks there was a time when "I would have scoffed at something like Baldur's Gate 3, which isn't getting a sequence of updates."
He says plainly, "I just basically thought that live-service games were the future." It's a monetization model Path of Exile helped perfect, in the sense that neither it nor Early Access sequel Path of Exile 2 ever make you think that hard about its microtransactions or battle passes – unlike other, more cynical live-service titles. Path of Exile, instead, is a forever free-to-play work-in-progress, and its commitment to simply existing without smashing you over the head with a vase full of tantalizing ads makes some players question if it's really a live-service game at all (in a good way).
This relaxed relationship with money is what Wilson appreciated about live-service in the first place, remarking that, "It often meant that a game could be free. It meant that a game had variable monetization, so people who didn't want to spend money didn't need to spend very much money – it kind of scaled to the amount that someone was willing to spend.
"It meant that, because a game was getting constant updates, there was always more to the game. It was kind of a relationship that a player could have with the game, that would span potentially a lifetime as the game gets updated over and over, and these all seemed like incredibly good things," Wilson says.
But then time passed, and while live-service games like Fortnite fulfilled Wilson's prophecy of "the future" by becoming some of the most popular titles in history, they also became more associated with parasitic microtransactions – and increasingly demanding players wanting more for all those dollars they've dropped here or there.
"You get situations where you have to make certain changes, even if you do not believe that is the right thing for the game, because otherwise your release will get boycotted, or you'll get review bombed," Wilson says, "and games that do not have any changes because they're just finished and complete often don't have these pressures."
In that sense, Wilson can now see that a clean, complete experience like Baldur's Gate 3 helps create "a far more nuanced field" when placed next to the live-service games he's used to.
"There are so many different ways to monetize a game," he admits. "Every one of them has drawbacks."
