According to a new study from the company Midia, most gamers prefer single player gameseven if the gap with those who prefer multiplayer games is not huge. We are talking about 53% and 47% of the total respectively.
The result is nevertheless interesting, given that currently the bulk of the video game market is made up of mobile titles, live services or any other genre you can think of that is full of microtransactions.
In particular, live services seem to have compressed the market of all the others, due to the investment of time they require to be played. Therefore the space available is increasingly limited, as has become dramatically evident in recent years.
Return to single player
Be that as it may, Placing a live serve is considered like winning the lotterygiven that it guarantees continuous revenues for years. However, it is precisely the difficulty of success that is making financing single player games become attractive again. Indeed, the study underlines precisely how the studios that have dealt with single player for years have had enormous difficulties in launching successful live services and have not managed to make a dent in giants such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Roblox, Minecraft and others.
Midia cites failures like that of Creative Assembly’s Hyenas and The Last of Us Online by Naughty Dogboth canceled before their release, especially after years of development. He then makes a list of other software houses that have had disastrous results: Crystal Dynamics (Marvel’s Avengers), BioWare (Anthem), Platinum Games (Babylon’s Fall) and Arkane (Redfall).
For Midia these are bad investments, given that the single player games of these studios have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenuea heritage that was lost with the transition to live services, which now live in a space defined as “oversaturated”.
So publishers must try to reduce costs to face an increasingly challenging market. The way to do it would be to go back to single playera model that has achieved several successes in recent years. Let’s think about the various Zeldas, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Elden Ring (25 million copies sold), Black Myth: Wukong (more than 20 million copies sold) and many others. After all, half of the players prefer them, so why not try to please them?
But for what reason? Meanwhile, there is the fact that the players are growing. The study finds that around the age of 25, life starts to get more demanding for everyone and the time to dedicate to video games decreases, making live services an investment that is too expensive for many (it should be noted that with increasing age the preference for for single players). In short, with the entire attention economy becoming saturated, single players appear to be safe havens for many. Furthermore, despite the increasing production costs of AAA single player games in recent years, However, many projects are less expensive than larger live serviceswhich have enormous costs of acquiring players and maintaining infrastructure.
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