Is the End Nigh for Single-Player Games?

Megalith

Megalith

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An opinion piece, and food for thought: while we can't extrapolate from one studio’s shutdown (Visceral) that an entire genre is doomed, single-player games are clearly less popular than they were 20 years ago, if you take a look at the different formats of gaming that are available nowadays. One argument is that the death of the old-school single-player game you grew up with is pretty much inevitable, as multiplayer elements eventually trickle in one way or the other to help extend longevity.

The issue is that there is a need for new content all the time, which can't always be fulfilled with single-player games. People get bored of multiplayer games a lot slower, because there is always something new around the corner, thanks to new opponents and new morsels of challenge. There are a couple of ways of injecting this fresh content into single-player games without breaking the bank: capitalizing on online play; or making game series entries flow into each other. Metal Gear Solid V (which is taking up all my free time at the minute) does the first one really well, by supplying online challenges with rewards, even if you're not in multiplayer mode.
 
The market is there for them...the problem is, companies are having a harder time figuring out how to further monetize SP games with bullshit like microtransactions without coming off as complete assholes. Easier to just force MP/online elements to justify their greed, I guess.
 
They already said it wasn't shut down because it was single player so the whole article is baseless.
I got bored with multiplayer games 15 years ago. All I care to play today is single player. If they won't offer that I'll simply do something else than gaming.
 
I think we're spoiled by AAA single player titles. For single player games to be great they must have tons of content, amazing graphics, fantastic music etc., basically only the biggest developers can afford making those titles. Consumers don't usually care if the game is made by small or big developers they just appreciate the best game in the same genre. Not saying it's a bad thing, I love big budget SP games. It's just very hard for indie developers to compete in the traditional genres, like open world RPG. But for multiplayer games, lesser details/graphics will be forgiven if it's really fun to play. And big part of the fun can come from interaction between players.
 
Wolfenstein New Order cares to disagree with this headline.

A couple years old now, but one of the best games I've ever played single player - and I'm closing in on 30 years of PC gaming.

I'm looking forward to the new one coming out soon!


Witcher 3 is another example, although it's just too big a game for my tastes. I enjoyed it, but it feels never ending. At my age and with my other interests I'd like a single player game to be able to be defeated in about 4-6 hours front to end - get rid of all the nonsense - just a nice tight story and keep the best levels - scrap the rest. I think that's why I liked New Order so much. There was barely any filler in there. The game felt intense and story driven. By contrast a great deal of Witcher 3 feels like filler. The main quests are epic, and I get that some people like the infinite side quests - but not so much to me. I don't want my game to become my job -- I don't have time for that.

Nevertheless, two different incredible single player games that both came out in the last couple years, and bested most anything in their genre's before.
 
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A lot of the [H] news feels like bait though, don't it? I still like it.

Yes, some of us like single player games. I'm one of them. I play single player almost every day.
 
If there is still a market for single player games, developers will still make single players.

MP games were great when I was young, single and in school. Now that I'm older and married with a job I just can't devote enough time to get good at them. Hell, I don't even want to dedicate enough time to get good at them anymore.
 
I just don't think this is accurate. Fallout 4 is a single player game, is it not, and it sold like hotcakes, 12 million copies sold within 24h. I still play that game.
Skyrim, also crazy successful. Prey (the newer one) as well. Hitman series. Deus Ex (I think that's SP only?)
Alien Isolation, Amnesia series,
A lot of good indie games are single player. FTL, SpaceChem, various survival games like The Long Dark and Subnautica. INSIDE and LIMBO. The Penumbra series.

I could go on and on. Single Player is FAR from dead.
 
I didn't know Visceral had been shut down or rather absorbed into EA. I guess all studios will eventually be EA. That really sucks.. I was hoping for a Dead Space 4. I'm sure EA will probably try to roll one out one day but I'm equally sure it'll be about as worthy a successor as Mass Effect: Andromeda.

That's what I think the biggest problem is, not so much the death of single player games but the death of all the studios that create the great single player games. They all get swallowed by EA who seems only interested in multi-player/microtransaction cash registers.
 
Companies wish, but that's not how gaming works. Multiplayer games are multiplayer, while singleplayer is singleplayer. For as long as greed has existed in games, companies have been trying to marry the two. How long has single player games come with multiplayer functionality that's actually fun? Half Life had it, but it was fun when you could install Counter Strike.

But these are probably the same people that told us that cloud gaming was the future, and look where that went. Blizzard's entire business model is making sure every game they make is multiplayer, cause it's harder to pirate and easier to monetize. Even that's starting to fail with Nostalrius which was Elysium and is now Light's Hope. And that's just one of many private servers running. Just wait until people realize that OverWatch is a pretty version of TF2 where you can't make custom maps and modding.

 
I'd argue any game worth the price of admission needs both single player and multiplayer. All we can do is vote with our dollars.
 
Guy doesn't know what he is talking about. It's a clickbait article for sure.

1) "Multiplayer games players get tired of much slower..." Bullshit. 9 out of 10 multiplayer games are basically dead a few months after launch. Few have staying power like Quake3, Counterstrike, TF2, and lately PubG. As far as single player games go, you know what you are getting when you buy it. Another single player Doom game is coming out? Sign me up for a pre-order. South Park Fractured But Whole? It's on the way. Wolfenstein, can't wait for that, think its coming out next week. The next Call of Duty? Couldn't tell you when the next clone "here buy this. its the same game as last year but this year we added a gold painted ak-47, red bandana, and changed the names of the bad guys. only $60!" No thanks...
 
Argument is flawed, and written from a console-centric perspective. Multiplayer required to keep the game alive? How about when the matchmaking server gets shut down in a couple of years, then the game's irrecoverably dead.
Meanwhile, people are still making crazy mods for the original DooM…
 
I really don't even remotely see what is so hard here, you make a single player game, you release and SDK, you allow modders to make more levels and content and charge for it. You take a piece of that profit. You don't even have to work hard. All you have to do is have a good single player game to base it off of. I would even suggest that its entirely reasonable that some company could just give a single player game away for free and cash in on community work alone like steam workshop style.
 
Archaea said:
Wolfenstein New Order cares to disagree with this headline.

A couple years old now, but one of the best games I've ever played single player - and I'm closing in on 30 years of PC gaming.

I'm looking forward to the new one coming out soon!


Witcher 3 is another example, although it's just too big a game for my tastes. I enjoyed it, but it feels never ending. At my age and with my other interests I'd like a single player game to be able to be defeated in about 4-6 hours front to end - get rid of all the nonsense - just a nice tight story and keep the best levels - scrap the rest. I think that's why I liked New Order so much. There was barely any filler in there. The game felt intense and story driven. By contrast a great deal of Witcher 3 feels like filler. The main quests are epic, and I get that some people like the infinite side quests - but not so much to me. I don't want my game to become my job -- I don't have time for that.

Nevertheless, two different incredible single player games that both came out in the last couple years, and bested most anything in their genre's before.
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Sometimes I feel the same way about open world games, The Witcher 3 was enormous. But that's the great thing about those games, you can play the content you want to, and if you ever have an itch to play it, there's always something new to find or a story arch to discover. The entire Witcher series of games are gems. Most of the Filler or side quests in W3 are to level up your character & find better weapons or armor ect. especially if you're playing Death March.I'd say they are well done, atleast they aren't fetch quests.

It took me over a year to beat the first one & I still haven't beaten Blood & Wine DLC, I pretty much play it whenever I get the urge to do some Witcher's work :)
 
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meh, most triple a titles these days suck. There is plenty outside the big studios to keep me occupied.
 
I don't care, I'm getting to old to really get into games, so as long as there is one that knocks my socks off every couple years, something along the lines of GTA V, I'll be happy.
 
I hope not. I rarely play multiplayer unless it's with a few friends, but we are spread out across the world and it's hard to time. I occasionally play D3, but rarely group with anyone I don't know in RL. I also rarely play the game for more than a few days before uninstalling it again...
 
Extend Longevity? If anything, they actually make them last less long because every one and their grandma releases new versions of their online clones (See CoD and BF) every 2 or 3 years and those games die a slow death when new releases are out and everyone moves to it.

An SP game is sellable and playable 5~10 years after its release, an MP only game is completely unsellable after the same period, and their 'longevity' is much shorter.

Case in point, I have seen many more people talking about TW3 than I have heard BF1, and BF1 is more recent. Hell, even Star Wars BF didn't even last long.

This is why I don't buy MP only games, because I know I won't be able to play them in 5 years time, and that's not discounting any DRM servers shutting down their services which will render your games unplayable anyway. I was extremely disappointed in the length of some of the SP campaigns in those games. I completed GoW1 campaign in a day and GoW4 in a weekend.
 
We might get less single player games, but I don't see them going away. As long as they are profitable, they will make them. Eventually, you get too many multiplayer games and sales won't be as lucrative.
At this point, my Steam collection is large enough to last me until well beyond death. I'm not worried.
 
steakman1971 said:
We might get less single player games, but I don't see them going away. As long as they are profitable, they will make them. Eventually, you get too many multiplayer games and sales won't be as lucrative.
At this point, my Steam collection is large enough to last me until well beyond death. I'm not worried.
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It's a bit like tv stations once you get more stations then viewers or in this case more games then players things fall apart, look at battleborn or that ubigame for honor I think? lawbreakers is another example, the market atm is saturated and you would need to come with something very special to actually get an audience
 
End of single-player at EA? Probably. Across the industry? No and anyone that says otherwise is a complete moron that doesn't know a damn thing about the game industry. Single-player games still sell well and they will continue to get made. EA is just filled with blithering idiots that can't figure out why their games keep failing and refusing to admit how moronic 90% of their recent decisions are. An Uncharted-esque Star Wars game would have sold buttloads and EA could have easily have found ways to further monetize it but these are the same retards that decided to spend $120 flipping million on Dead Space 2 making it impossible to make its money back.
 
What exactly qualifies as a "single-player" game, anyway? Are we talking about games with no multi-player elements whatsoever, or do games with single-player and multi-player elements count?
 
I quite literally will put 100 plus hours each into SP games like the Fallout/Elder Scrolls/Witcher/ series games. I think I am in the 40 hour range with Lords Of The Fallen, and after that I will likely move on to Elix. Then again, I suppose that is an issue for them. I am putting a lot of hours into a title, that either, really don't lend themselves to DLC or micro transactions, or I wait until a GOTY or some other complete version of the game is available, often at a discount, so I don't feel like a chump for paying $150 total for a game. With MP games, people tend to go all in a bit sooner because they don't want to be left behind. I can see a publishers reasoning for thinking SP games are a riskier bet financially than MP games. I just don't see that meaning the death of SP games.
 
scojer said:
They've been claiming this for years.
years! and years.

Singleplayer gaming isn't going anywhere.

Even [H] is aware!
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There is will always be a market for it. If everyone leaves it will be a huge empty area and it will be easy to fill even if you release a medicore game. So it won't be completely abandoned, but it is getting less favorable to develop. Lots of games that started out as strong SP games have had MP only sequels. Games that were excellent SP games got medicore MP components tacked on (Mass Effect). And lots of SP games (Watch Dogs, Assassin's Creed, Dead Space 3) have some MP component tied into it.

And now the rage these days are these crappy SP/co-op hybrid games like Destiny and GR Wildlands. This is what will likely become of the Star Wars game, which sounded like it was following a structure similar to Wolfenstien or Tomb Raider 2013.
 
All games should have a Multiplayer component to them, how else are we going to add Micro-transactions and Loot Boxes !!!?

Kappa
 
You know who brought longevity to games long ago? Modders. Those awesome development teams generally made games so much better than the original developer intended. That also applies to single and multiplayer...

Today though I am seeing half released games with day 0 or pre launch DLC combined single player micro transactions... Yep single player is dying off due their listed reasons.....
 
I think the Hype-Machine of late has really made it worse. Instead of releasing a good game, we get over-hyped promotions and low-quality buggy fucking releases. You basically pay AAA prices to be a beta tester, or games release with promises of more but are just extended early access garbage.
 
Give the backlash EA received for not having a single player game attached to Star Wars Battlefront (2015), I don't think this is true. I think companies have a harder time monetizing single player games and gravitate towards multiplayer games where they can tempt people into minimizing their grind by spending money, or keeping up with all their online friends. When you look at reasons for any given trend in product design, you probably won't discover the true reason for a given trend until you've found a reason that involves money. Single player games sell, but they lack the replay value to keep people sinking money into them months or years down the line for cosmetic or other items. However, MMO's and other multiplayer games can keep people coming back weeks, months and sometimes years after a game's release.
 
TripleAgent77 said:
Much like movies and music and TV, put out quality product instead of shovelware crap, and you'll do fine.
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2017 is turning out to be a terrible year for gaming. I can't think of a single game I've liked that came out. The games I've remotely gave a slight shit about are from Indie games like CupHead, but that's not like 2015 where you had back to back great games like Undertale, Fallout 4, and Witcher3. Even Rise of the Tomb Raider was released that year and I don't consider it a game of the year type game. Then you have Bloodborne, a game still not released on PC, and Rocket League, and Mario Maker. The only game close to that epicness in 2017 is Zelda Breath of the Wild, which thankfully PC gamers got to play.

So it wouldn't shock me that in 2017 there's a decline in game sales so ideas like the end of single player games is there solution.
 
DukenukemX said:
2017 is turning out to be a terrible year for gaming.
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Horizon Zero Dawn was highly praised. Resident Evil 7 was a great leap for the series. Prey wasn't perfect but at least it was trying something interesting. South Park: The Fractured but Whole, The Evil Within 2, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, Gravity Rush 2.

2017 is turning out to be a good year for me.
 
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