But they’re not going to disappear, nobody panic.
At every video game event I’ve been to for the past six months, including this year’s E3, I’ve asked a wide variety of game Developers about the future of single-player games. Even though we’re still getting enormous single-player successes like God of War, it’s undeniably easier to monetize multiplayer experiences, and I think that’s how this fear of the “death of single player games” has shown up in pockets of the gaming community. The notion even goes back to 2011, with Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PlayStation 4, saying: “Right now you sit in your living room and you’re playing a game by yourself – we call it the sp mission or the single-player campaign. In a world with Facebook I just don’t think that’s going to last.”
The fear of a decrease of single-player games isn’t too irrational, and many developers – from indies to Triple As – told me Twitch is having a really significant impact on what games studios are choosing to make. One person I spoke to is Rami Ismail from Vlambeer, who said, “One of the most under-discussed effects of Twitch, YouTube, Let’s Play – the whole content creator ecosystem – on the games industry is how the marketing impact of those platforms has affected what kind of games developers make. Why would any major studio outside of a first party trying to sell consoles, or a studio with a reputation for single-player games, bother with an immersive, single-player campaign?”
Rami’s point about first parties is an important one to get out of the way – of course Sony is going to keep funding single-player, narrative-based experiences when those experiences are selling hardware, maintaining platform loyalty, and encouraging revenue from ongoing subscription services like PlayStation Plus. They’re likely to continue selling well, too, with people who own that hardware using those games to justify purchasing decisions. God of War sold well, Horizon Zero Dawn sold well.
Microsoft is approaching this slightly differently with ‘Play Anywhere’, but they’re still making Windows Store games designed to attract players to their services on Xbox and PC. It’s third-party studios like Ubisoft, Bethesda, and Square Enix that are the bigger question mark, and it’s worth mentioning that every game in the top 10 selling games of 2017 was multiplayer-focused, with the exception The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn, which have that aforementioned ‘exclusives’ pull.
For those third-party publishers, the relationship between content creators and game development is an interesting one, in that grabbing the attention of content creators is one of the easiest, cheapest ways to market games right now, according to two anonymous sources from Ubisoft and three independent developers. According to Rami, if studios want to take advantage of those content creators, and thus thrive, the best way to do it is to just make a game that has never-ending content. Make a Sea of Thieves, make a No Man’s Sky, make a Destiny, and even if it’s bare-bones at launch, keep updating it and people will keep on advertising it for you. Frankly, even if the devs don’t update it, a lot of people will keep playing if the core of the game is solid – PUBG has never-ending content just because each match is totally different, by virtue of other players.
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In April of this year alone, over 33,000 videos about Fortnite were uploaded.
We do see waves of people streaming single-player games when they first come out, like God of War peaking at nearly 300,000 viewers on Twitch in its first week. It quickly became one of the most viewed games on YouTube, too, but it’s still behind older games like Fortnite and Minecraft that have evolving content and multiplayer components. The reason multiplayer dominates on those services is really just because, once a content creator has finished a single-player game, there’s no reason for audiences to watch them play the same thing again. In April of this year alone, over 33,000 videos about Fortnite were uploaded, and the fastest growing YouTube channels are focused entirely on that game. The more content created about Fortnite, repeatedly, the more people end up playing Fortnite, and while Epic told IGN that they actually didn’t design Fortnite with content creators in mind, other developers assured me that they noticed.
We’re also just seeing more and more people look to Twitch and YouTube to get their first glimpses of games, potentially ruining the stories and making them not feel the need to buy them as a result. Persona 5 had strict streaming restrictions to prevent this exact thing, with threats of content ID claims, channel strikes, and account suspensions if players didn’t adhere to the following guidelines:
Numinous Games, the studio who made a 2016 game called That Dragon Cancer, wrote a blog post about how they believe let’s play culture really, really hurt their revenue, saying: “for a short, relatively linear experience like ours, for millions of viewers, Let’s Play recordings of our content satisfy their interest and they never go on to interact with the game in the personal way that we intended for it to be experienced. If you compare the millions of views of the entirety of our game on YouTube to our sales as estimated on SteamSpy, you can hopefully see the disparity.” There’s no doubt that Twitch streams and let’s plays, which are free to watch, prevent some people from wanting to buy narrative-driven games, which in turn prevents some developers from wanting to make them.
Gamers are statistically deciding to play more of the same game for longer, too, according to industry analyst Michael Pachter. He told IGN, “The problem is that as more people play the same games longer, they necessarily buy fewer new games, and that’s where the desire for more revenue arises.” People are playing more Fornite, more Sea of Thieves, and buying fewer games overall, which encourages developers to make Games as Service-style games, where it’s easier to find means of ongoing profit. Adding in microtransactions or loot boxes basically alleviates the concerns surrounding gamers buying fewer games, meaning the challenge now isn’t ‘how do we sell these games’, it’s ‘how do we sell this one game and keep people playing it forever, and get them to be so loyal that they’ll keep spending money?’
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With all of that said, I want to reiterate that single-player games are still selling incredibly well.
That said, this shift in focus could mean we get fewer, but higher quality single-player experiences. As more publishers move toward online experiences – Ubisoft being a really great example, with games like For Honor, Siege, and Wildlands – the appeal and importance of the single-player games that do pop up is higher. Sony’s clearly using that logic to sell hardware, and it’s working for them, with Rami saying, “I expect that as single-player games die out, the attention for games like that outside of those video content platforms is going to rise exponentially, and they’ll do fine… but for now, expect most of your streamlined single-player epics to turn into open sandbox worlds with procedural content and multiplayer. In a way, that’s the only way those IPs and franchises are likely to survive, so maybe it’s for the best for now.”
Now, none of this means single-player games are dead – this is only meant to highlight the business decisions behind the industry’s current trend, which isn’t necessarily permanent. It just might be the reason why Anthem is a largely multiplayer experience, which is a huge departure from BioWare’s legacy, and it might the reason why Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is set to release without a single-player campaign. In reality, it’s just really hard for publishers who have investors they need to please to argue that a single-player game is going to be more profitable overall than something that’s likely to get thousands of hours of free marketing on Twitch, and more hours played from individual players, a lot of whom are also, you know, on Twitch.
Alanah Pearce is a producer at IGN and has particular interest in this subject since she pretty much exclusively plays single-player games. You can find her on Twitter @Charalanahzard.
