A lot of people have been talking about how we might be seeing the end of single player games, especially by triple-A titles. On reflex, I rolled my eyes and was sure that this isn't possible. That was till I started to listen to the arguments. I am not fully convinced yet its a problem but I wanted to cover some of the points that are being brought up.
The first and most important is multiplayer in games make a lot of money. While Grand Theft Auto 5 did really well shipping over 80 million copies, they made an incredible amount of money from Shark Cards. (polygon.com) We found out last year that they made around $700 million dollars in 12 months with the online products of GTA.(segmentnext.com) This is largely coming from the once exclusive to mobile market of microtransactions being brought to the console world. People are spending a lot of money on loot boxes and skins.
What really has people worried is EA's move to get rid of the studio Visceral who were working on a single player Star Wars Game. This was covered at the beginning of Boogie2988's video. The game that was rumored to be a stand-alone title that is now going to be broken up into a multiplayer game. Rob Fahey also makes the point that companies like Bioware who use to be known for their single player games have been putting more effort into multiplayer games. (gameindustry.biz) These issues are all raising flags that single player games just might not be making the money multiplayer games are and could be seeing less of a budget in the future.
I will also agree with Rob Fahey in the respect that I believe these worries are overblown. Several IPs are well known and loved for their single-player adventures. Mario is a great example of this. Yes, Odyssey has co-op but it is hardly an example of the single-player story and gameplay being sacrificed for a multiplayer experience. We are also seeing Wolfenstein II coming out, which has completely done away with the multiplayer because they thought it took away from the story. (gameindustry.biz) While we have lost some titles, I don't think its anything more than that. We didn't panic that Starcraft was over when we lost Ghost, so we shouldn't worry now. (I still believe)
There is also hope in the indie game industry as well. Multiplayer games can be complicated to put together. On top of netcode (because fuck netcode) there is a lot of hardware for larger servers. This is an incurred cost that many smaller studios cannot deal with. There are also studios like Ninja Theory showing that it is possible to release a mid-tier title with great graphics and gameplay in Hellblade. Stardew Valley also proved that a single player farming sim was still very much in demand. There are plenty of examples I can go into including the up and coming title Bloodstained that hosted a very successful Kickstarter. The indie industry will very much keep delivering on single player titles. We have also seen these titles excepted into the main console catalogs making them accessible to everyone.
It does suck that we are going to lose a few possible great high budget single player titles. We might see some top companies move away but I don't think it spells the end of strong narrative games. There are still studios putting them out and the indie industry will continue to improve and deliver where the bigger studios fail. In my opinion, games as a service (aka microtransaction game) are going to burn out far sooner than single player games.
Comments
Post a Comment