The Planetside franchise, especially the latest entry Planetside 2, is a fascinating experiment in the realm of MMOs. It’s one of very few titles that has managed to capture the chaos and havoc of an ongoing, never-ending war in real time. Fighting the enemy in PS2 for the glory of your faction isn’t just a single quest line or DLC, it’s the entire game. There are very few true MMOFPS (Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter) games out there, and Planetside 2 is certainly a contender for the best performing one.
The hit shooter by Rogue Planet Games (a subsidiary of their publishers, the Daybreak Game Company) is a technical marvel. At the time of press, Planetside 2 still holds the world record for the largest FPS battle in gaming history. The game supports a massive open world complete with ground and air vehicles, player-led clans, custom base building, and three factions fighting across five sprawling maps for dominance over the sci-fi earth-like world of Auraxis.
But almost 11 years since its launch, Planetside 2 is beginning to show its age. The game is visually beautiful, though its graphical textures simply don’t hold up. The developers continue to pump out new updates and seasonal events, but the game’s player count is in decline— bad news for a free-to-play title that relies on an active player base to make in-game purchases. Planetside 2’s average monthly player count dipped under 1000 for the first time ever in September 2023 according to the Steam charts.
MMO war games are definitely hot right now. From a business perspective, now would be the perfect time for Rogue Planet and Daybreak to announce Planetside 3. So why haven’t we heard anything?
The Development Story So Far
Planetside Arena was a gamble that didn’t pay off for Daybreak.
Before diving into The Planetside 3 Question, it’s worth giving Daybreak their due credit. In 2019, they released Planetside Arena into early access. Arena was a battle royale-style entry into the series, pitting teams against each other in an attempt to capitalize on a trend that had arguably already died. Less than four months after launch, the game was shut down in January 2020 due to low player counts and poor in-game microtransaction sales.
Arena was a far cry from its predecessors. Planetside 2 is a game about persistent ongoing war, not quick scraps between teams fighting to be the last ones standing.
Internet speculation of a proper third game was rampant in the mid-late 2010s, but Planetside 3 received no official acknowledgment from Daybreak until 2019, a month after Arena’s early access launch. In a letter to the community, Planetside 2 and Arena Executive Producer Andy Sites laid out ambitious plans for Planetside 3, saying:
“PlanetSide Arena is intended to be the stepping stone to PlanetSide 3, which we envision expanding from the current battlefields of Auraxis, to full-fledged galactic war with empires exploring, colonizing and conquering one another within an expansive galaxy.”
Sites did not give a timeline for Planetside 3’s production or release, but this letter led to a media frenzy about the potential of another true MMOFPS entry into the series.
Issues at Rogue Planet
When speculating on current and future games, it’s important to remember that game studios aren’t just faceless entities. They are organizations of real people. Daybreak Game Company and its subsidiaries are responsible for many video games, including many MMOs. When resources are stretched, the teams running individual games are small. Andy Sites told Wccftech in 2020 that Planetside 2 had a team of only six developers. So when key people leave the company, it can put entire communities at risk.
Michael “Wrel” Henderson has been an icon in the Planetside 2 community for years. Image: Cwagungood via Wikia (CC BY-SA)
Michael Henderson, known in the Planetside community as Wrel, is a content creator and game designer. Wrel was an early influencer in Planetside 2, making tutorials and weapon analyses on his YouTube channel. By late 2015, Daybreak had hired Wrel to become a designer for Planetside 2, a position that he carried alongside his personal content creation.
Wrel became a figurehead for Planetside, a sort of hybrid community ambassador and lead designer. He gained something of a cult following; players didn’t ask Daybreak to nerf weapons or add features, they asked Wrel. This dynamic became a core pillar of the community. Carto, PS2’s lead level designer, stated as recently as 2021 that “if it wasn’t for Wrel, Planetside 2 would have died years ago”.
All this is to say that when Wrel announced his departure from Rogue Planet Games in May 2023, it created a great deal of uncertainty about the status of Planetside 3. Wrel cited burnout as a primary driver for this move. His service to the Planetside community cannot be understated, and he is absolutely due for a break from the industry. That said, if Wrel truly was the single pillar keeping a decade-old MMO alive, is it reasonable to believe that Daybreak has any interest at all in producing Planetside 3?
Cold Hard Numbers
Video games are expensive to build. While we don’t have a precise figure for Planetside 2’s production cost, then-President of Daybreak told Gamesindustry.biz that the game’s port to the Playstation 4 alone cost some $30 million.
When Planetside 2 was released in 2012, Daybreak was a subsidiary of Sony known as Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). Planetside 2’s business model was predicated on the idea that Sony, a multi-billion dollar company, could afford to invest millions into developing and hosting a free-to-play MMO that would pay for itself through microtransactions in the following years. This is not the kind of investment that most companies can make.
Since Sony sold SOE/Daybreak to outside investors in 2015, it’s been passed around to several owners. Currently, Daybreak is owned by Swedish company Enad Global 7 AB (EG7). The holding company owns numerous other game developers including Big Blue Bubble and Piranha Games. EG7’s October 2023 market cap was some $150 million according to Yahoo Finance— they’re hardly broke, but this relatively low valuation is incompatible with Sony’s original business plan with Planetside 2’s free-to-play model.
This raises an interesting clash between business incentives and game design. If Planetside 3 had a fixed cost or subscription model, it’s hard to imagine that it would have as many players at launch as Planetside 2 did. But the entire value proposition of an MMOFPS is arguably rooted in the huge player count. A Planetside game that’s not widely accessible could never deliver the epic battles that the IP has come to be known for.
The Future of Planetside
Daybreak is in a unique position with the Planetside franchise. The game’s fanbase is shrinking, but extremely dedicated. Planetside 2 fans congregate in spaces like Reddit, sharing their love for the game and endlessly debating whether Planetside 3 will ever be announced. But so long as EG7 continues to hold the rights to Planetside, it’s hard to imagine Daybreak coming up with the capital to produce another free-to-play installment in the series— certainly not after the commercial failure of Planetside Arena. And given the departure of key developers such as Wrel from Rogue Planet Games, perhaps the motivation at Daybreak to produce another Planetside just isn’t there.
All that being said, even if Planetside 3 won’t become a reality, that hardly means the end for the IP. Daybreak Game Company has a very strong track record of supporting MMORPGs with small-player communities. In addition to Rogue Planet Games, Daybreak also runs a number of development studios that maintain excellent MMOs like The Lord of the Rings Online by Standing Stone Games, EverQuest II by Darkpaw games, and DC Universe Online by Dimension Ink Games. These titles continue to host tight-knit communities over a decade after launch, thanks to small but attentive teams creating new content and keeping the lights on. So if the past is any indication of the future, Planetside 2 players can almost at the very least count on being able to play the legendary MMOFPS for years to come.
