With the recent cancellation of Visceral’s single-player Star Wars game, shifting focus of big publishers on multiplayer games and more than stellar success of cooperative multiplayer games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, gamers are starting to ask questions.
Are single-player story-driven games dead? Do players want them contrary to what some big publishers say? Do they have big commercial potential? Is multiplayer the only future of gaming?Different strokes
Multiplayer and single-player games are two quite different things, two quite distinct experiences. For the most part, they each cater to a different target group. You go for multiplayer games when you feel like competing, to get a quick buzz of some action, or to wake up your reflexes. You reach for a single-player game when you want a more immersive experience. Exploring new worlds, getting deeply involved in the adventure story of some interesting character, solving complex tasks, and getting not just your reflexes but the rest of your senses primed and honed. It’s arguably something like the difference between going to see the football match and going to the theater.
Which, of course, doesn’t mean that you can’t be a fan of both. You get to see some theatrical performances on the football pitch, or a drama on stage about football, but they remain two quite distinct worlds. They can interweave of course, and there’s no hard and fast boundary line. Likewise, you can have a multiplayer game with some crossover (Destiny), or a single-player game with multiplayer elements (Dark Souls).
But is interest in single-player games really in decline? Do all players want fast, repetitive, action-packed experiences, and nothing else? When you look at the recent charts of the most sought-after and best-selling games, the answer is clear; no way. Uncharted 4, Dishonored 2, The Last of Us, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Hitman, Nier: Automata… Just a quick roundup of some of the most successful, most acclaimed, and most keenly awaited single player games of recent times. Their bigger open world relatives like Assassins Creed, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTAV, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Divinity: Original Sin 2 are also doing quite fine. I don’t see how something so supposedly ‘dead’ could be so successful at the same time. Folks that want to play single-player haven’t just vanished.
So, where’s the problem? Why do some of us feel that single-player games are on the wane? Why do publishers argue that players are looking for other things?
Publishers are chasing the biggest hits
I’ve come across similar jitters several times in the past. After the massive success of the first MMORPG games, most notably World of Warcraft, it seemed for a moment that no one would be making anything except MMOs. After that, almost all the attempts to emulate WoW crashed and burned and the big publishers have come back to single-player games, while WoW is still with us to this day.
A few years later, after the success of DOTA and League of Legends, there was once again the huge boom of MOBA games. And once again, almost all of them have failed. And there sure were plenty out there.
So, when in 2009 or so I was going round looking for investors and publishers to raise money for Kingdom Come, which is a single-player story-based RPG, everyone wanted Facebook games and they were tapping their foreheads asking why on earth I wanted to do something with no future. The publishers were in panic mode, because for some unfathomable reason they were scared the new console games wouldn’t sell and everyone would be playing nothing but Candy Crush Saga on smartphones. It was like they thought that all those people that flood into E3 and Gamescom every year and spend huge sums on hardware would suddenly vanish or start playing pay-to-win things on their iPhones. Which had nothing to do with reality, of course. The new consoles went on to sell better than ever before.
Why is that? What makes online playing so appealing to publishers and why do so many of them end up paying the cost of their ambitious folly? And what’s the impact on the single-player story games? What is their main advantage over any multiplayer games? The answer is very simple. Long-term regular income and relatively low initial investment.
When that works out, your…
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