There is no question on how important online multiplayer games have become. Whole genres like FPS have all but dropped the single-player story mode. Even if added, a lot of the time it feels like an after thought. Granted there have been some great exceptions like Wolfenstein: The New Order but games like Rainbow Six have all but left behind a cohesive campaign mode.
Aside from FPS, there are whole genres of arena shooters, card games, and MOBAs that rely on an online community to make them work. A bad release or a bad patch can cripple a game. Then again Rainbow Six: Siege has taught us the opposite can be true. While the game had a really rough launch and people had thought it dead in the water, it pulled together and has created a pretty strong online player base. It has around 45k daily concurrent players on Steam at the time I am writing this.
Developers who create these games are taking a huge gamble. They walk into the market believing people will like what they created but can get severally burned by something as simple as timing. Battlborn by Gearbox Software was a victim of this and perception. It now has something around 100 daily players and is near death. It came out around the same time as Overwatch and while the gameplay is significantly different it was hit with the unfortunate comparison and suffered greatly for it both in rating and in players. The game was not bad but when you are starving for players in a game that is meant to be enjoyed through multiplayer modes you run into problems. Once you begin the death spiral it's hard to pull out.
I think one of the best examples of a multiplayer dependent game that failed was The Flock by Vogelsap. This game was a multiplayer game that had a hard end date. There was a server that was keeping track of the population and when the game was played enough, lives would be used, and the population would fall to zero ending the game forever. This in concept sounds interesting but you are asking someone to spend money on a game that they know won't be around forever. While this should be an understanding of most any multiplayer game they explicitly stated it, turning off a large number of players. So much to the point, they could not continue funding the server that counted the lives and the game went under. I also heard the game wasn't great. Why it is still for sale is beyond me.
On the other hand, you have games that are unstoppable forces like Counter Strike. There are still over sixteen thousand daily players. While the game was originally a mod for Half-Life it was acquired by Valve in 2000.(Wikipedia) Over 17 years later it has a player base that many games wish they could have. This is even with several iterations of the game coming out. Even with Counter Strike Go being so popular, the original has not disappeared. This is largely attributed to the use private servers. This means the company does not have to worry about the cost of maintenance and can leave it up to the community how the game should be played. This helped spawn different and unique game modes like "gun game", which was later adapted to a full game mode in CS: GO.
I think one of the best examples of a multiplayer dependent game that failed was The Flock by Vogelsap. This game was a multiplayer game that had a hard end date. There was a server that was keeping track of the population and when the game was played enough, lives would be used, and the population would fall to zero ending the game forever. This in concept sounds interesting but you are asking someone to spend money on a game that they know won't be around forever. While this should be an understanding of most any multiplayer game they explicitly stated it, turning off a large number of players. So much to the point, they could not continue funding the server that counted the lives and the game went under. I also heard the game wasn't great. Why it is still for sale is beyond me.
On the other hand, you have games that are unstoppable forces like Counter Strike. There are still over sixteen thousand daily players. While the game was originally a mod for Half-Life it was acquired by Valve in 2000.(Wikipedia) Over 17 years later it has a player base that many games wish they could have. This is even with several iterations of the game coming out. Even with Counter Strike Go being so popular, the original has not disappeared. This is largely attributed to the use private servers. This means the company does not have to worry about the cost of maintenance and can leave it up to the community how the game should be played. This helped spawn different and unique game modes like "gun game", which was later adapted to a full game mode in CS: GO.
As a gamer, you have to weigh the risk and reward of jumping into an online multiplayer. Most importantly, you have to hope that enough people find the game as interesting as you do to make the gameplay worth the cost of entry.
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