It’s no secret that the bulk of AAA games market revenues come from in-game purchases , mostlyfrom live-service games. It’s also impossible to ignore that the live-service market is fiercely competitive....
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
PVE
Couch co-op
Online PVP
Single player
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year’s unanimous game of the year was largely considered a “single player game”, but while it’s definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn’t want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Single-player games are a safer bet for new games…Make no mistake: the costs to make AAA single-player, non-live service games have inflated to astronomic levels. Leaks from Insomniac showed that PlayStation’s AAA flagship games, like Spider-Man 2, have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is a growing opportunity for AAA studios to make leaner single-player games.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it’s correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year’s unanimous game of the year was largely considered a “single player game”, but while it’s definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn’t want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it’s correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.