General Gaming The Game Awards 2021 Discussion Thread

[skillzdadirecta]

Single player gaming isn't dead at all... I don't know how anyone could say it is. My backlong WISHES there weren't so many awesome single player games to play. We just got Guardians of The Galaxy, Returnal, Ratchet and Clank, Halo campaign. Resident Evil Village and a bunch of others I'm sure I'm forgetting about and that's just this year. How is multiplayer gaming "dominating the industry?" 

[Biggie]

1 minute ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Single player gaming isn't dead at all... I don't know how anyone could say it is. My backlong WISHES there weren't so many awesome single player games to play. We just got Guardians of The Galaxy, Returnal, Ratchet and Clank, Halo campaign. Resident Evil Village and a bunch of others I'm sure I'm forgetting about and that's just this year. How is multiplayer gaming "dominating the industry?" 

I love my PvP multiplayer games but sometimes its nice to just kick back and go on a single player adventure and explore.

[skillzdadirecta]

1 minute ago, Biggie said:

I love my PvP multiplayer games but sometimes its nice to just kick back and go on a single player adventure and explore.

Sure, same with me. And there's plenty of games out there to do that. Don't know where this notion that single player games are dead is coming from.

[stepee]

2 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Sure, same with me. And there's plenty of games out there to do that. Don't know where this notion that single player games are dead is coming from.

 

I don’t think anyone said that really? If you are referring to my post, I made it clear that there are more quality single player games coming out still than I have time to play within the post. It’s just that multiplayer/coop focused is overall more mainstream popular now than single player. It’s still where the industry seems to want to focus the most. But either way it’s at least like 50/50 now.

 

And it turns out that isn’t a problem because that 50% is larger than the 100% used to be so there’s room for everything. It’s just that now if there is a show about video games, half of that timeframe will now be devoted to things i don’t care about whereas that used to not be the case. Not a big deal, just a thing.

[skillzdadirecta]

37 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

I don’t think anyone said that really? If you are referring to my post, I made it clear that there are more quality single player games coming out still than I have time to play within the post. It’s just that multiplayer/coop focused is overall more mainstream popular now than single player. It’s still where the industry seems to want to focus the most. But either way it’s at least like 50/50 now.

 

And it turns out that isn’t a problem because that 50% is larger than the 100% used to be so there’s room for everything. It’s just that now if there is a show about video games, half of that timeframe will now be devoted to things i don’t care about whereas that used to not be the case. Not a big deal, just a thing.

I was more responding to what @Phaseknox typed but the impression I got was that the industry seems to be more multiplayer focused and that single player experiences are being left behind by the big developers. i think someone said only Indie developers are doing single player games and that's just not factually true.  I didn't tag anyone in my initial post deliberately so if what i typed did't apply to you... cool.

[stepee]

Well I think the indie part was me, but I just meant especially with those now there are just more than ever!

[Phaseknox]

11 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I was more responding to what @Phaseknox typed but the impression I got was that the industry seems to be more multiplayer focused and that single player experiences are being left behind by the big developers.

I was simply agreeing with @stepee that multiplayer games (battle royale, competitive, co-op, MMO) are more popular with the mainstream than single player games are. There’s still a good amount of single player games, but they’re not quite as popular with the masses as multiplayer games are.

 

One style of single player game that hasn’t been being made as much lately are RPGs, which is a shame since they’re one of my favorite genres. They were somewhat popular for a while, but don’t seem to be as much now for some reason.

[SaysWho?]

On a related note, I remember this being a big topic in I wanna say 2017 when some big developer said they may be focusing more on multiplayer. And even though there were a ton of single player games coming out that year, there were some doom and gloom people telling me that yeah but those games are already in development, wait till we see what comes out in three or four years and how much multiplayer is in all of it.

 

Now I look at the games I’ve bought this year (Ace Attorney, Deathloop, Returnal, Ratchet, RE8, Hades, Two-Point Hospital, Mass Effect Collection) and some I’ve not gotten to (Hitman 3, Psychonauts 2) and lol. Even stuff like Deathloop has an easy way to enjoy either single or multi, with its multi feeling like another layer to its single player.

 

The issue with multiplayer from a publisher standpoint is it’s high risk, high reward. If you make it big, holy crap are you printing money. But if you don’t, you’re going to tank and likely start tanked; people are unlikely to eventually come to party that never started. And you can only have so many big multiplayer games in a specific genre because of the need for a consistent audience. 

 

That’s why there’s always room for single player. You can wait 20 years and join the conversation, so there’s always an audience for it. Multi is lucrative and while I do play some multi, I’ve not felt it’s been at the expense of how many single player experiences are available.