General Gaming Polygon: Single-player games might be safer bets than live games in 2019

[SaysWho?]

42 minutes ago, JPDunks4 said:

 

I agree with this.  As someone that plays a lot of these games, trying to keep up with the "Season Passes" and stuff is a lot.  It's why Fortnite has tweaked itself season to season to perfect its formula.  You can essentially play one day a week and still unlock essentially all the Seasons worth of content.  Apex Season 1 was 100% time based.  You had to play hundreds of games doing well to level up, it was bad.  Apex has already stated they will be using Fortnites approach.  Regardless though, I do understand the idea that, you can only commit yourself to so many of these types of games at a time.

 

I didn't read the entire article, I read the initial quotes in the OP.  I just disagree with the premise that because numbers may dip, a game isn't considered successful.  So because Apex's numbers fell off from their crazy high numbers they are not as successful as a decent selling single player game?  If you want to bring up Fallout and Anthem, okay, I can kind of get maybe they cost a ton to make and didn't sell nearly as well or maintain player numbers for long term revenue like they'd hope, but Apex? Apex is not a good game to bring up for this topic.

 

On another note though, its why I find those that go overboard complaining about content in some of those games to be excessive.  Anthem obviously completely floundered at this point, but when I ran out of new compelling content, I moved onto Division 2 while i waited .  When I ran out of content for that, I moved onto another game until they deliver something new I want to play.  I still jump in and play Fallout 76 when updates hit.  Where as Breathe of the Wild, one of my favorite games the past 5 years, I beat it and never touched it again.  So why is that better?  If I love a game, I love to have reasons to keep revisiting it.  I don't have to play those games non stop with each update, just a few days depending on the quality of the updates.  

 

 

 

Apex makes sense in that it tumbled in a way that other games didn't, part of the reason being that it's competing with Fortnite. It's more to the point that Fortnite took over people's time, not that it's a Fallout failure. Alone, it opened spectacularly; as a long-term game, the jury's still out, and its steep drop hurts it when it's a game that's supposed to be based around continuous play.  But putting aside Apex, the reasons you've stated for liking buying multiplayer Day 1 is why I feel it's a bigger risk to do in the current climate.

 

All games are risky, so let's get that out of the way: games like God of War or Horizon Zero Dawn or Days Gone weren't guaranteed hits. Assassin's Creed wasn't destined to always do well after its 2016 hiatus, especially due to the sheer size of the team behind it.

 

But for multiplayer, I've felt that you have the potential to be the biggest thing around (Fortnite/CoD) or can bomb in spectacular ways (Battleborn/Lawbreakers). You could have a single-player game slowly accumulate sales by word-of-mouth and turn around its fortunes if it releases to low sales because the game is there to play by itself. If you're making a game like Lawbreakers and don't hit the ground running, and a month later it's hard to find a game online, it's a fast spiral down as existing players leave and prospective players decide against trying it. So I think the premise that there's an opening in the market for more single-player games after the success of many of AAA and indie ones in the past year makes sense; it's just a saturated market at this point.

[JPDunks4]

36 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

 

Apex makes sense in that it tumbled in a way that other games didn't, part of the reason being that it's competing with Fortnite. It's more to the point that Fortnite took over people's time, not that it's a Fallout failure. Alone, it opened spectacularly; as a long-term game, the jury's still out, and its steep drop hurts it when it's a game that's supposed to be based around continuous play.  But putting aside Apex, the reasons you've stated for liking buying multiplayer Day 1 is why I feel it's a bigger risk to do in the current climate.

Again though, having played Apex a lot, and understanding how much it blew up initially, a huge drop off doesn't really mean anything.  Without knowing their numbers, lets say they made 300 million in Apex Coins sales for people to buy Apex Packs when the game first hit.  If that dropped off 75%, they still could be making 75 million a month.  Now these are obviously just random numbers, but with how HUGE it was initially, people eager to spend huge when it first dropped, seeing the numbers drop isn't a surprise.  Fortnite and PUBG both didnt blow up like this Day 1.  Fortnite took 6+ months to truly blow up, and PUBG grew overtime cause it was largely the first hugely popular BR.  

 

After you buy up a ton of packs and get a huge array of skins, most aren't gonna keep buying them without new skins being added.  Overwatch has the same exact approach to skins, but they do seasonal skins for the Holidays, which in turns gets people to buy packs to try to unlock those limited time skins.  Now Apex does suck with its monetization, but that's probably because they didn't have the team for it, they wanted to get the game out and see its success, and it's also probably the easiest thing ever to solve.  Hire peoples who's jobs are to design skins, emotes, cosmetics.  They already started to show that in the past month at E3.  They are also adding other cosmetic categories, just like Fortnite has been doing.  

 

Apex launched a great game, had huge initial success with it, but clearly didn't have the back end hired to support a game that huge.  That's pretty easy to fix for now that they have the base game and gameplay down.

[JPDunks4]

51 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

But for multiplayer, I've felt that you have the potential to be the biggest thing around (Fortnite/CoD) or can bomb in spectacular ways (Battleborn/Lawbreakers). You could have a single-player game slowly accumulate sales by word-of-mouth and turn around its fortunes if it releases to low sales because the game is there to play by itself. If you're making a game like Lawbreakers and don't hit the ground running, and a month later it's hard to find a game online, it's a fast spiral down as existing players leave and prospective players decide against trying it. So I think the premise that there's an opening in the market for more single-player games after the success of many of AAA and indie ones in the past year makes sense; it's just a saturated market at this point.

This I can agree with, and I can imagine it is scary to dive into these categories.  Many said Lawbreakers was actually a really good game, but it crashed and burned quick.  Was it Cliffy B?  Was it their launch strategy (wasn't it initially sold as it was going to be a F2P then they ended up charging for it?).  

 

It's definitely a hit or miss type of market.

[SaysWho?]

15 minutes ago, JPDunks4 said:

Again though, having played Apex a lot, and understanding how much it blew up initially, a huge drop off doesn't really mean anything.  Without knowing their numbers, lets say they made 300 million in Apex Coins sales for people to buy Apex Packs when the game first hit.  If that dropped off 75%, they still could be making 75 million a month.  Now these are obviously just random numbers, but with how HUGE it was initially, people eager to spend huge when it first dropped, seeing the numbers drop isn't a surprise.  Fortnite and PUBG both didnt blow up like this Day 1.  Fortnite took 6+ months to truly blow up, and PUBG grew overtime cause it was largely the first hugely popular BR.  

 

After you buy up a ton of packs and get a huge array of skins, most aren't gonna keep buying them without new skins being added.  Overwatch has the same exact approach to skins, but they do seasonal skins for the Holidays, which in turns gets people to buy packs to try to unlock those limited time skins.  Now Apex does suck with its monetization, but that's probably because they didn't have the team for it, they wanted to get the game out and see its success, and it's also probably the easiest thing ever to solve.  Hire peoples who's jobs are to design skins, emotes, cosmetics.  They already started to show that in the past month at E3.  They are also adding other cosmetic categories, just like Fortnite has been doing.  

 

Apex launched a great game, had huge initial success with it, but clearly didn't have the back end hired to support a game that huge.  That's pretty easy to fix for now that they have the base game and gameplay down.

 

This is probably getting away from the main topic, but for Apex, this is my understanding: EA has a responsibility to it shareholders, not to gamers (I hate how that works). The expectation is that this will continually bring in revenue, and they tried to get this game hot from the get-go by paying streamers to play it. Most games don't drop like this, even if they come down from their peak. So yes, they did extremely well shortly after its release, but the issue will be being able to sustain it. A single-player game just has to be profitable and the team is off to the next game. There's no expectation that it has to sell boatloads for years. Something like Fortnite or Apex Legends have to be continually profitable to appease shareholders. That's why, even if it made money prior to its revenue plummeting, it can't just coast off of that.

 

I'm just pointing out the reasons behind Apex being talked about in this light; I don't have anything against the game or the team. Considering I hear it's great and considering I've played Titanfall 2 and thought it was a ton of fun, AND considering I hear they're slower on updates because they're trying not to wear out the developers with insane crunch times which is a fantastic thing if I heard right, I hope they are successful as it's a new IP and from a talented developer whose previous game was released at a really competitive time that hurt its initial sales IIRC. 

 

12 minutes ago, JPDunks4 said:

This I can agree with, and I can imagine it is scary to dive into these categories.  Many said Lawbreakers was actually a really good game, but it crashed and burned quick.  Was it Cliffy B?  Was it their launch strategy (wasn't it initially sold as it was going to be a F2P then they ended up charging for it?).  

 

It's definitely a hit or miss type of market.

 

IIRC, they marketed it as a $30 game because they said they didn't want to charge $60 for something that multi-player only.