12 Stupid Gaming Moments That Unwittingly Defined The Last Generation

4. Online Modes Become More Important Than Single Player, Thanks To Call of Duty

Just as the Call of Duty franchise ensured that every game had to reward players with XP for everything they did, it also announced the importance of a multiplayer mode as far as sales were concerned. Without an online offering, many gamers would have played through the six hour single player, sold the game and moved on, but the online kept players glued to their consoles, and as such, they didn't sell their copies, and so sales essentially skyrocketed as a result. Other developers took notice, and it wasn't long before games of a wide variety of genres began introducing online modes to try and sustain the financial viability of their product. Perhaps the most absurd entry in recent memory is Mass Effect 3 (a game we'll be coming back to soon), which included a relatively benign squad-type mode, in a rather vain attempt to keep people from selling the game. It's got to the point now that, especially in the FPS genre, a strong multiplayer suite is more important than the single player, and we need look no further than Call of Duty's increasing apathy to its campaign mode (Ghosts' campaign runs a mere 4 hours), and also Battlefield 4's short solo offering. It's something we can only expect to get worse.