10 Reasons The Video Game Industry Is Heading For Another Crash
5. There Is Too Much Of An Emphasis On Multiplayer Gaming
To a lot of gamers, multiplayer is all there is. But crucially, that's not for everyone.
Games that are predominantly sold on their online component - mainly the FPS genre - have been testing for years how little single-player content can be put into a game and still legitimately be called a “campaign”.
Call of Duty: Ghosts was so derided for its insulting single-player offering that the next game went completely the other way and gave the world a Kevin Spacey film masquerading as an FPS. Other big AAA titles like Titanfall, Evolve and Destiny didn’t even bother with little things like plot or a single-player mode - and they suffered for it.
But much worse than this are the games from franchises that built their fanbase on a strong single-player experience, only to now do their best to alienate them. I’m talking about franchises like Fable and, yes, Assassin’s Creed. Many introduce multiplayer modes that don't always negatively affect the single-player experience, before then going all-in with online-only multiplayer games. For example, despite the recent failure of countless MMOs, Bethesda followed up the phenomenal success of the single-player Skyrim with... an MMO.
Who could have predicted that it wouldn’t be the monster hit the follow-up to Skyrim should have been?
This pushes casual players towards mobile and indy titles, spelling big trouble for the AAA studios who rely on sales from a smaller and smaller, more disenfranchised group.