That 60% of all console/PC game time going to older live service games story is kind of scary for gamers like me

There's a story making the rounds (originally from a place called Newzoo) that market research shows that 60% of console and PC game time is being spent on live service games that have been around for more than half a decade, and in general gametime has consolidated around a small number of releases, making the gaming industry even more of a feast or famine proposition than it ever was before. Only 8% of game time is being spent on non-annualized (i.e. not Madden or Call of Duty) new release games, meaning that companies making the kinds of games that I'm excited to play are competing for a relatively tiny slice of an already stagnating pie.

Now game time doesn't translate directly to revenue, so it's probably true that your average Fortnite player spends much less per hour than someone who picked up Alan Wake II, so the numbers aren't quite as gloomy as they look, but it's clear that the gaming model has shifted substantially and that to some degree publishers are right that the future is in live services, even if their approach to the style of game is often terrible and counterproductive. There's a certain logic that it makes sense to make 10 live service games hoping that 1 will hit big and provide revenue for the next decade, vs 10 single player games where even if you get 6 hits you might make less money than a single Apex Legends or Destiny 2 might throw off.

From my perspective...these just aren't the games I want to play. I don't really like multiplayer games, I often don't like playing games at release, and barring my time with EverQuest and to some extent WoW, I almost never want to play the same game exclusively for months on end. I like variety and exploration and new worlds. I like playing both Spider-Man 2 and Tears of the Kingdom, and having them be extremely different experiences. I played a lot of Destiny and at the end hated my time with it because of how grindy and repetitive it was. I want to play stuff and move on to the next.

Of course single player games will keep being made. If nothing else there are hundreds of incredibly talented indie teams out there making great stuff. And you can still make money in the single player space. But the big publishers have seen the writing on the wall and the times are changing. To some extent they have changed. Gaming is my main media hobby and like a lot of aging people I'm starting to see my tastes a little marginalized. It'll be fine; my backlog will last longer than my lifetime anyway at this point (especially if you count games I want to play but don't own), but a lot of my favorite games of all time have come out recently and I like playing new stuff.

At least Nintendo seems to continue to have success with the older model. It has relatively few live service games (I guess Splatoon sort of counts?) and it is still doing fantastically, though of course a lot of Switch playtime is spent in Minecraft and Fortnite. I do love some Nintendo games. But I love other games too and to see their numbers dwindle is a little upsetting.

What I'm saying is...THE KIDS PLAY TOO MUCH DAMN FORTNITE!

I agree with this and also newer games for whichever existing franchises like Tekken, got live service since Tekken 8, which ruins every fan's nostalgia.

Gerstmann brings this up every week and it's true, i think the only thing to add would be the failure rate of publishers trying to push out a live service game only to find there's already too many.

Ubisoft, WB, EA and Square have all had spectacular failures chasing the easy money in recent years, the market was swamped immediately and it seems people are content to carry on playing what's already popular, we saw Sony back away from the idea allowing Naughty Dog to give up on their attempt and i'm sure they're not the only ones. There will be more attempts and some will succeed, but if you don't have the right stuff to pull people away from games they've sunk thousands of hours into your time would be better spent making a regular game.

@cikame: The thing is...I think a lot of these companies see it like a lottery ticket. Yes, many of these games will fail and be immediately shuttered. Some others will have a certain amount of success and do okay (like Sea of Thieves.) And then once in a while you get a huge hit you can build your whole company around.

And if the hits are big enough, then the failures don't matter so much and are worth it. Meanwhile budgets for single player games are so high that even a big hit like Spider-Man 2 can have companies saying "we need to scale back" so it's not like making "regular" games is a safe bet right now.

I think and hope that companies are learning that there are right ways to make live service games and wrong ways, and shoehorning live services into everything isn't ever going to produce massive hits, but that just means they'll re-evaluate how they make those games more than that they'll go back to making standalone experiences.

What these numbers show is that to a certain degree Fortnite and to a lesser degree CoD and Madden ARE the video game market for the majority of players (and we're not even talking about mobile here, just console and PC) and the games that a lot of us like are a smaller part than they appear to us. It's just that people who only play a few games don't bother going on what we think of as "mainstream" gaming media because they don't care about Dave the Diver or even Baldur's Gate 3. Now "our" niche still has huge and profitable hits, and companies like Capcom are thriving while producing games like Resident Evil and Dragon's Dogma, so it's not all doom and gloom, but the bean counters aren't wrong in seeing that the future of games looks less like the past than it has for a long time.

@cikame: The failure rate of traditional titles isn't really any different, for every Suicide Squad you equally have a Immortals of Aveum, Avatar & Callisto Protocol. Weather your making a traditional or service game your still competing against Fortnite, EAFC & COD.

As someone who plays Apex Legends daily, I can only apologize. I think it's interesting how little mainstream games media actually covers the games people play in the mainstream. If it's not a new release, it might as well not exist in the news cycle until there's some investor call for everyone to misinterpret.

Isn't that all game development? It's a high risk, high reward industry. Has been for a while.

@bogard: I mean play what makes you happy.

To some degree it's all game development but it's been hypercharged with live service games. In the past a company would have a big hit and that would pay for the costs of all the misses and set them up for the next few years, but they would need to keep producing new games to keep the cash rolling in. Grand Theft Auto III made Rockster very rich, but they then had to make Vice City and San Andreas and then GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption etc...

Then they made GTA V and....over a decade later we're getting a sequel because GTA online just spit out money for years and years and years. And yes they kept developing that and adding stuff, but not nearly as much as when they made full new games every few years (and I didn't even list them all.) They did make Red Dead 2 in that time, but it was probably in the pipeline and it was also another shot at a big live service that didn't really pan out.

Fortnite turned Epic from a big company into a mega company to the point where they've burned hundreds of millions trying to build a Steam competitor just because they could.

It's turned from "You need 1 game to hit for every few flops, and you can also get by with some moderate hits" to "it's a lottery ticket and if one game hits it can pay for 30 flops, and moderate hits are worthless because they're all rounding errors compared to the big hits."

Gaming is bigger than it's ever been. If you take 8% out of a very big number, you might still have more than you need. I think the reality is that you have these types of players who play literally one game, and unless you are that one game, that's a sale that you were never going to get so it's pointless to worry over it.

The live service gold rush seems to me a lot like the mobile game market was some years ago. Everybody wants to make the next Candy Crush, and from a certain perspective it would be foolish not to try. But I think what developers found out that there is very little correlation between skill and success. You can put talented developers working on a mobile game but their talent means nothing because the next big hit could come out from some amateur who's never shipped a game before.

I see the logic of putting out x number of games and hoping that just one of them hits. But what if it doesn't? It's the same logic that gamblers use when they think that they can't possibly lose 5 bets in a row, expect that they can and very often will. Just because your last three games flopped doesn't mean that you're "due" for a hit.

You can look at the case of two traditional gaming companies, Capcom and Konami. Capcom found tremendous success in just doing the thing that they've always done. And Konami is a joke that's coming crawling back to traditional gaming with new entries in Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid and Contra, and nobody cares about any of those any more.

@apewins: Capcom have done exactly what every other publisher has done and coalesced its games into a handful of IP, typically open world and crammed then with mtx, they've done exactly what Ubisoft have done yet don't get knocked for it nearly as much.

How does Tekken 8 being live service ruin nostalgia?

@apewins: Gaming is bigger but PC and console have stagnated. It's clear that the business is not going great for a lot of publishers right now, both by the extent of layoffs and their financials. That being said, things aren't exactly crashing at the moment and, as I said, 8% of playtime does not mean 8% of revenue. It could be much higher.

I don't agree that quality has nothing to do with the success of live service games (or at least big budget ones with a marketing budget). Most of the games that have flopped hard have been seen as extremely bad. And usually they were ill conceived in some way, often because a non-live service studio made it, like with Anthem and Suicide Squad.

The games that have been good (again, as long as they have marketing) have generally done pretty well. Now the huge hits are, indeed, harder to predict, but there have been enough of them, and enough have been games you would expect (like GTA V and Apex Legends) that it's worth trying to replicate. You may not be due for a hit, but you can set yourself up in a position to try to get one. And there have been more hits than you'd think if you include Call of Duty and EA Football as live service games even though they are also annualized.

Capcom has done very well in a more traditional model, but its market cap is about $10 billion. Roblox's is more than double that, and they started much more recently and only have 1 game. That's what the big companies are chasing.

@thepanzini: Capcom's games are better and its microtransactions less egregious. Plus it isn't nearly so formulaic. Street Fighter and Resident Evil are very different games.

@bigsocrates: Capcom's games are hitting atm which gives them more rope, but I'd argue their mtx are far more aggressive than what Ubisoft does or anyone else really. Dragon's Dogma & Resident Evil 4 Remake both have mtx for in-game consumables like health, ammo, in-game money, weapon upgrades, fast traval and revives which goes much further than most, I'm not sure what Ubisoft does that Capcom doesn't they even turn on the mtx just after the reviews drop for extra fun.

@thepanzini: Most people who play the Capcom games don't feel any need to spend money on the microtransactions. Jeff Gerstmann did a whole bit about how the Dragon's Dogma MTX feel unnecessary. Ubisoft seems to balance its games around microtransactions, with XP boosters and other stuff that cut down on what can be a brutal grind.

The one exception for Capcom is probably Street Fighter, which has a TON of MTX (though almost all fighting games do.)

But really it's about game quality, and especially game quality without spending on mtx. Resident Evil is a great experience with no MTX so fewer care that they exist, and they feel they got their money's worth. Ubi games have been much more mediocre and seemed more tuned around MTX. And of course Ubi also has true live service games like For Honor and Rainbow Six Siege.

Yeah, it would be one thing if Capcom was purposefully making their games a slog without microtransactions, but they don't do that. I play Monster Hunter games, most recently Rise. Rise has something like 250 different listed DLC entries on Steam available. In the few dozen hours of Rise I've played, I have yet to run into a single situation where I would need to spend money. In fact, from what I've seen, most of the DLC for Monster Hunter: Rise is cosmetic. The one buyable consumable I've run into while playing the game so far is tokens for character redesigns, which is also a cosmetic thing and they include a token or two with the game (you can also get around this by making new characters if changing how your character looks matters that much).

From what I have seen around Dragon's Dogma 2, a lot of the complaints around microtransactions come from people not understanding those games or who haven't played the series (and thus don't understand that these games are deliberately made with a certain amount of friction in mind. They don't want you constantly fast traveling in those games because the intended experience is for you to travel from place to place so you can run into things and see cool stuff. Patrick and Austin talked about this a bunch on a recent episode of Remap Radio). Everyone I've heard talk about this who actually has familiarity with the series (see Austin, Gerstmann, etc.) has pointed out that the microtransactions aren't something you need to even think about if you play through the game normally (which is something people also said for RE4). The microtransactions essentially exist as cheat codes for people who want them but aren't necessary to progress in the game in any way.

@bigsocrates: I've not played a lot of Ubisoft's recent stuff AC Odyssey, Division 1 & 2 and Far Cry 5 none of these were balanced around mtx. I read Eurogamers reviews for Odyssey, Mirage and Valhalla mtx are not even mentioned at all. The notion Ubisoft's balances its games around mtx likely comes from past reputation rather than reality. Valhalla didn't even sell boosters at launch, Dragon's Dogma 2 literally sells skill points. Monster Hunter World is Street Fighter on steroids.

Phil Spencer's recent comments make me wonder what the industry will do at the point where growth just stops. So many games fight for our attention and money these days. There's not a crash coming but this sure feels like a stall.

@thepanzini: I don't know what your personal experience was, but lots of people think that Assassin's Creed Odyssey's progression system was optimized to get you to buy an XP booster. This is not a fringe position and is kind of a famous instance of that happening, where the game gets super grindy towards the end unless you pay to shortcut it.

Valhalla is just famously a slog in general, way too long and bloated. It sold a lot of copies and made a lot of money but it left a sour enough taste in people's mouths that they pivoted back to basics for Mirage.

Ubisoft's games are famously bloated and they sell ways to get around some of the bloat. This is a clear conflict of interest in terms of making good and fun design. Nobody is going to pay to skip something they don't want to skip. Capcom's games tend to have much better pacing, which makes people less drawn to the MTX.

But in the end it comes down to game quality and implementation. If Ubisoft were churning out GOTY contenders people would overlook the MTX as they do for basically every really good game. When people are dissatisfied with their purchases they complain more.

@shindig: I don't think anybody really knows what to do as things are. A crash isn't coming because the games market is too big, but we could see a reshuffling of sorts. We already have in a lot of ways.

@bigsocrates: PUBG was a game that barely worked at all. Same goes for DayZ, there's a ton of these games on Steam from no-name publishers that have more players that they can support. Meanwhile what are the big publishers doing? Remember that Ubisoft extraction shooter that was forgotten about immediately as it came out? With enough of a marketing budget, they can get eyes on these games at launch, but they tend to realize within the first 3 months that the cost of keeping these games alive is more than the revenue they're getting. Even Halo couldn't make it work!

Apex Legends is probably the only example of a game that broke through despite being late to the party. And what did it take? Perhaps the greatest developer in the West that had made Call of Duty and Titanfall, and a uncharacteristically lenient approach from the publisher. Apex Legends worked because it was ridiculously good on day one. I don't see a lesser developer having any chance to replicate that success.

Sure, Capcom would love to have a Roblox of their own. But they don't have one and they are smart enough to know that they can't will one into existence. Perhaps because they've tried maybe a dozen times to make Resident Evil into a multiplayer experience. The question about microtransactions I think is a little beside the point, I don't like them either but they haven't ruined the experience for me.

Monster Hunter World's DLC is all optional music, emotes, outfits, or otherwise cosmetic-related. What's wrong with that? People play these games with their friends and sometimes want to have fancy outfits. I don't see what the issue is with that. If you don't want any of this stuff you do not have to engage with it at all. I played every bit of content in Monster Hunter World and didn't once buy any of the DLC. If you're gonna pick a game as an example of egregious microtransactions, you should probably pick a different game than this one.

I agree with this, and I might be one of the guilty ones. For the last couple of years, I've played way more Destiny 2 and Genshin Impact than single player story driven games, indie games, etc. This is especially the case with Destiny 2, because you can't really do anything meaningful in that game, unless you spent money on the expansions and the four seasons that follow. Destiny even locked dungeons that used to be free behind a pay wall.

While I think AAA story driven games will continue to be made, many people are still in awe that Spider-Man 2 took 300 million dollars to make and will likely not turn a profit, despite its positive reception and millions of units sold already, which might also be the reason the game has yet to go on sale. And many gaming developers are seeing this and are trying to create a live service game that stick. Because for them, the money to labor ratio is just better profit wise. Spend millions on top of millions of dollars on a high budget single player experience that might flop, or make a live service game that is additive enough, and then introduce stuff people who enjoy the game can buy.

@apewins: There's a lot of value in being a first mover, but we're talking about live service in general, not just the saturated battle royale genre. It's worth noting that in addition to Apex, CoD had some success there for a time,

The games that failed all had significant issues. Halo had very bad live service support, as has Diablo IV. Both games did alright for a time but fell off because they just weren't producing the content to update the games. There aren't a lot of examples of really good live service games that crashed and burned (with enough marketing to get noticed) though there are lots of examples of such games that did alright but have not broken through. Breaking through is a much harder proposition and Apex got lucky in a number of ways.

I don't think Capcom is trying to make a Roblox. The Japanese companies in general do not seem nearly as interested in live services, except for Square Enix, which chases trends constantly in the worst possible ways. But my point is that when the reward for conventional success with a huge variety of games over decades is half of that for one big breakout hit in the right genre it's easy to see why the big companies keep taking shots at the brass ring.

@ben_h: Monster Hunter World sells some items you can't unlock in-game which were free or unlockable in past games, even Destiny had the bright dust option, now I don't really care but this does cause some friction with the community and mtx often crop up on the subreddit. My original point was Capcom is no different than any other publisher with mtx sometimes worse.

without reading the whole thread just the op i'm just gonna say ... i agree . those are games ijust have zero interest , i've long since started ignoring MMOs for the same reason as wanting to play more than 1-2 games and things have definately shifted towards a mp centric thing for a while now .

that said i agree it'll be fine , i think we'll slowly se another shift sooner than later , i mean it could be argued that those numbers are like that cause big companies and increasingly slow at putting out the sort of games We look for , those single player heavy hitters are just harder to come by cause they keep trying and Mostly failing to piviot to MP , and the ones that do just take too dambn long to make it seems ... i think thing'll eventually even out tho, and if not well... indies sure do put out some great little things

Not surprised at all. I haven't followed the entire games industry through it's lifespan, but afaik starting from 2004 with WoW there's always this pattern where game developers bandwagon on the hottest craze:

- First there was WoW and every game developer wanted to make MMORPGs.

- Then we had COD MW, and everyone wanted to make a modern military shooter.

- Then there was League of Legends and everyone wanted to make a MOBA.

- After that there was PUBG and Battle Royal games.

- I think the new hotness is going to be Anime or Anime-adjacent games, like your Genshin Impact and the upcoming Project Mugen.

The common theme with most of these trends is live service, online and multiplayer which means a guaranteed flow of income. Other companies are still surviving but are making money through microtransactions, DLC, merchandising or re-releasing the same game again with more content (SquareEnix and Atlus are especially guilty of doing this).

I also have zero interest in those types of games but... I mean... that's fine? I really can't complain about the dearth of single-player games to occupy my time. My feeling is that it's been an embarrassment of riches lately, and I can't (and don't need to) keep up.

For me, it put into perspective that I’m an outlier in how I engage with games. I describe myself as a gaming locust, or a serial gamer. I play probably two to three games at once, and when I finish one, I immediately start up a new one, constantly moving and leaving a trail of games in my wake. In some ways, I am the kind of consumer companies want, but I seek constant novelty, always anting to see and experience new things or new takes on things, so I rarely engage with long term live service or MMO style games and I never buy micro transactions.

I mostly thought this was how other folks play games, probably because when I saw things like the GB staff, they were laying a constant rotation of new stuff too. But they do due to it be their job, whereas I am just a sicko. Learning that kind of percentage just plays the same thing over and over for years and years is weird to me, but I realize that might mean I’m the weird one. Just playing Fortnite again and again, no matter how good their content flow is, just seems dull to me.

@tartyron: I'm pretty similar except that I tend to pick things up, put them down, and pick them up again to finish them, though once I'm done I almost never go back unless it's something perennial that I can play quickly (like a roguelike I can do a quick run on or an old arcade game like Xevious.)

I do buy DLC and sometimes even play it (I'm not sure if that was included under "microtransactions," but I don't buy consumables, only things like expansions or additional characters for a fighting game.)

I think that this method of engaging with games was more popular until about a decade ago. There were some MMO players and some people who specialized in one or two games, but I think a lot more people treated games like TV series or books. You buy one, you go through it, maybe you return at some point if you really loved it, but mostly you moved on to the next. That's why I think the Giant Bomb cast, which has tended to be older, engaged that way. Certainly Jeff Gerstmann has talked about how he played games as a kid and it was the same way (though I'll note that when arcades were a thing there were a lot more people who played the same arcade games over and over, and there were always Street Fighter fanatics who would only play that.)

The market has shifted and now that model is less common. I think people who only play Fortnite do so not only because it's really the only game they know but because it's the game their social group plays. These games are all based around multiplayer and Fortnite specifically is kind of a "hang out" game with a lot of virtual social spaces. It's a totally different way of engaging with games than someone who wants to play through the campaign of Dragon's Dogma and then move on to something else. And it's the majority of gamers at this point (unless you count mobile gamers, whose motives are even more mysterious to me because so many of those games are just awful and exploitative, while I do understand the appeal of Fortnite.)

@bigsocrates: I did just mean consumables, in-game currencies, and skins and whatnot. If it’s a proper story and content DLC, I do buy those often enough, though not if it’s been too long since I finished the main game and have moved on.

I think a big factor for me as well is that 99% of online multiplayer interactions I have are negative, so I really avoid playing online with a few exceptions. In addition to this, I typically tend to have non-gamer friend groups, so I have never really had a social hang game. I did lose about three months to Destiny 2, but I was unemployed and my partner at the time also played it, so we were in the same house together when we played. In college my roommates and I would play Soul Calibur 2 and Mario Kart on the GameCube, but that was also couch multiplayer, not online.

I think that lack of associating games as social in my brain is a large factor. That and I tend to prefer story content over gameplay loops, and I don’t have the drive to “git gud” at multiplayer exercise C’est either, and same that for Single player SoulsBornes where the summoned players can’t talk.

So yeah, I guess I’m just old. Which is both culturally and mathematically true in my middle age.

Its weird and disappointing to hear but I have to imagine that number doesnt really mean what we think at first glance.

Im just talking out of my ass but I have to assume that the number of people who play the games that "we" like has been slowly increasing since the 80's or whenever videogame were first born.

Its incredibly disproportionate to the mass influx of App-Gamers seen when ipods and smart phones and tablets starting allowing games - but those are just different experiences entirely and attract different types of people with some overlap but not enough to be concerned over.

I've never lasted more then a few minutes in a Candy Crush or Clash of Clans or whatever those phone games are... they're just completely different experiences targeting different audiences.

Multiplayer games have always consumed more time than single player games, so popular multiplayer games are always going to be at the top of playtime lists like this. Even big open world games or lengthy RPGs are typically only going to be 50-100 hours per person in the year they come out. Regular players of multiplayer games are going to average much more than that per year in their chosen games.

I imagine if data like this existed 15-20 years ago you'd see games like Counterstike, Battlefield, and Halo topping the playtime lists while stuff like Half Life 2, MGS3, and Bioshock are nowhere to be found.

I don't think it makes too much sense to try and read into this data too much. We know that plenty of single player games are being well received and selling at a high rate. The nature of multiplayer games will always mean they occupy a lot of time, but that doesn't invalidate single player experiences that come to an end after a shorter amount of time, either in terms of financial success of overall relevance.

A survey on playtime will always skew towards MP and service titles, Major Nelson used to publish weekly, monthly and yearly playtime charts. Historically console attach rates have always been pretty low 8-10 games, the Wii & PS4 both average 9 games sold per console yet the latter has much higher $ spend per customer thanks to mtx & dlc.

Xbox 360 top live titles 2009, Xbox Wire.

• 01 Halo 3
• 02 Call of Duty 4
• 03 Modern Warfare 2
• 04 Call of Duty: World at War
• 05 Gears of War 2
• 06 GTA IV
• 07 Left 4 Dead
• 08 Halo 3: ODST
• 09 Fable II: Episode 1
• 10 Biohazard 5 - Resident Evil 5

@thepanzini: While it's certainly true that multiplayer games have always gotten more play time per dollar than single player games (at least for the most part; there are some single player games that people play for hundreds of hours), there are two huge differences in the list you posted vs the modern situation.

The first is that with the exception of Left 4 Dead, all of those games have significant single player components. Many have campaigns that are legendary. They may not have all been single player first, but they were all substantial campaigns that people (including myself) really enjoyed.

The second, related, fact is that they were all relatively new at the time. So even though people were playing a lot of multiplayer, that was also contributing to the release of top notch single player campaigns, as series like Halo and even Call of Duty kept putting out new versions on a nearly annual basis with some great campaigns attached. So for people who liked single player games this was not an issue. If you like Halo then Halo's multiplayer popularity only meant you'd get more Halo.

Now the liveservice games are much older and often have no singleplayer component. It makes a big difference.

I would also bet that those 10 games, while they may have been the most popular, were not nearly as much of the pie as the live service group currently is (since at the time a much smaller proportion of players even played online) but I don't have those stats in front of me. You can see a big difference if you look at games by revenue comparisons between the two eras though.

@bigsocrates: 2008/09 is when the market started to shift the charts look much worse from then on, easy access to online gaming radically altered the market, you can see why service games took over and single player campaigns went away. The charts are also unique users just booting the game will count, you can see people start sticking to that one game.

Xbox 360 top live titles 2012, Xbox Wire.

• 01 Call of Duty: Black Ops II
• 02 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
• 03 Halo 4
• 04 Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
• 05 Call of Duty: Black Ops
• 06 FIFA Soccer 13
• 07 FIFA Soccer 12
• 08 Battlefield 3
• 09 Halo: Reach
• 10 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

@thepanzini: I don't see how that list contradicts any of my points. In fact I think it supports them. Every single one of those games has a significant single player component, and we've seen almost total turnover from the list just 3 years later, with only Modern Warfare 2 hanging on at the bottom here.

Other than Minecraft all of these games would see substantial sequels with single player components in the coming years that would replace them. You can make the argument that FIFA doesn't really evolve enough to fit the model, and that's fair, though annualized sports games have been a thing since the PS1 era back way before console live service games were even possible.

You can also make the argument that most of these games are annualized franchises (Halo being the exception because it's not annual, though obviously is a major franchise) but obviously franchises have been important in video games since at least the NES era.

The idea that "For single player focused players a publisher putting out a Call of Duty with a full campaign every year is the same as Rainbow Six Siege being the only game in that franchise other than a horrible spin off of Siege that's now forgotten" just isn't accurate.

And we know that there were a lot more AAA games with single player components coming out in this era than there are 12 years later. There are multiple causes for this, but the fact that there WAS turnover from game to game made companies try more things, and try to capture some of that multiplayer market with their own games that had multiplayer modes, or just try to offer single player experiences people could turn to when they got bored of the latest CoD or Halo.

Now people just...don't get bored of whatever they're playing. You can't replace Fortnite with your own game when someone just plays Fortnite forever. It's a different situation, and very obviously a different market.

@bigsocrates:

The idea that "For single player focused players a publisher putting out a Call of Duty with a full campaign every year is the same as Rainbow Six Siege being the only game in that franchise other than a horrible spin off of Siege that's now forgotten" just isn't accurate.

Where did I say this? The point isn't single player games were not being made, but they weren't being played as much which created an environment for the service titles of today. We know the X360 activity was dominated by MP games throught achievement data, developer commentry and these charts.

And we know that there were a lot more AAA games with single player components coming out in this era than there are 12 years later. There are multiple causes for this, but the fact that there WAS turnover from game to game made companies try more things, and try to capture some of that multiplayer market with their own games that had multiplayer modes, or just try to offer single player experiences people could turn to when they got bored of the latest CoD or Halo.

Cause and effect people weren't playing single player titles or as many games because they played fewer games which killed off those franchises.

@thepanzini: I don't really understand the point you're making, at least regarding my initial points. The issue is not that people are playing more multiplayer now (they may or may not be, but sure, multiplayer was popular in the 7th gen, of course) but rather that the types of games they are playing has changed. Whereas in the 7th gen they played hybrid single-player and multiplayer games, switching to new entries into their favorite franchises when those came out, now they are playing literally the same game (although changed over time) for many years, and lots of those games have no single player component.

As for the "cause and effect" claim...this in fact WAS what I was saying. The games people play have changed and thus the games being made have changed. In 2009 because people were playing sequential versions of hybrid franchises we got not only a lot of new entries in those franchises (with often great campaigns; I personally love ODST for example, though that's pseudo DLC) but we got a bunch of games trying to compete with those franchises and steal players when the time came for the shift. So, for example, EA put out two Medal of Honor games, with campaigns (admittedly not the best) to try and siphon off some Call of Duty players. It didn't work, but they tried. A lot of other games did the same thing.

Now you get a lot fewer games and many of them that do come out don't bother with single player because that's no longer seen as a major part of the package, and because those games are meant to last for many years. The change from hybrid sequels to eternal live service multiplayer only has greatly changed the single player market.

@bigsocrates: In 2009 people were buying hybrid franchises but a significant number were not playing the campaign or buying alternates to the online games they were already playing, this is why we have fewer games. The players changed first the games then followed.

During the X360 older COD, Halo's & FIFA's started filling up the activity charts a large portion of players were only playing 1-2 franchises and only the online part, Fortnite & Siege etc just filled this niche.

@thepanzini: Yes...of course? Well, more accurately, they changed together because live service games weren't really technically feasible in the same way on Xbox 360 and PS3 due to the way those consoles handled patches and the like. There were some workarounds but they were clunky. That's why Team Fortress II, an early Live Service game, evolved on the PC but stopped getting patched or played much on console.

But absolutely it's not like someone put a gun to anyone's head and said "Fortnite is now the biggest game." Epic put the battle royale mode out in response to PUBG (Fortnite was primarily intended as PvE originally) and it exploded in popularity.

If people wanted to play Alan Wake II instead of Fortnite then Alan Wake would be the most popular game. There's nothing stopping them from playing Alan Wake.

To some degree what people want is what will always get made, and in 2009 the way the business worked meant that what people wanted led to more games that I wanted to play getting made and now there are fewer, though still enough. If tastes continue to change then there may be even fewer at the high production end (we'll always have great indies to play.) It's not a conspiracy or anything, it's changing tastes and changing practices.

I'd be intrigued if this is any kind of seismic shift (per capita, anyway) away from MMOs or MOBAs or Battle Royales, even, in their day, and I'd like to see what that 8% actually constitutes in-terms of a raw number. Just throwing out a percentage doesn't actually tell me all that much, a lot of people just pick up 1 game and then play it until they get sick of it. If it's a live service game, it scratches a similar itch to MMOs, but with more robust solo content, so it's not exactly surprising that something like Warframe, Sea of Thieves, and Destiny have a ton of staying power with people who just want to hop on, do dailies, chat with friends, and hop off.

The problem for me is that major publishers refuse to learn from the past and are still trying to "make" new live services work (just like they did when ever new MMO tried to dethrone WoW) and, failing that, push the bullshit "graphics arms race" because that's what's always worked in the past.

Bespoke, artistic experiences have never sold better in any industry than big, flashy mainstream ones, it's why The Pixies never outdrew New Kids on the Block, it's why the year Abbey Road came out, the #1 single was "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies. Alan Wake 2 was never going to outsell Fortnite, because more people would rather floss as Ninja, Goku, or the xenomorph than play a meditative, meta narrative about a writer coming to grips with the very notion of fiction and the supernatural.

There's a reason The Lighthouse isn't as much of a draw as Transformers 4, I'm not sure this is anything new, it's just becoming hyperfocused as more and more the myth of "infinite growth" is further exposed.

Those artistic efforts linger longer in the memory. There's something to be said about a piece of art leaving a legacy. Especially given how industries love to exploit a legacy for all it's worth.

@undeadpool:

The problem for me is that major publishers refuse to learn from the past and are still trying to "make" new live services work (just like they did when ever new MMO tried to dethrone WoW) and, failing that, push the bullshit "graphics arms race" because that's what's always worked in the past.

WoW was never dethroned but plenty of newer MMO's have managed to carve out an audience, there's always room for someone else. Warzone & Valorant were both newer live services of something already out on the market.

Call of Duty was originally spawned as a competitor to Medal of Honor before transforming into the juggernaut it is today. Fortnite was a PVE tower defense game before ripping off that new battle royale fad, Fortnite & Siege both somewhat failed at launch before becoming the monsters they are. Failing for many is a necessary step to success.

Hello from mid-April, 2024. I only bought and played one new release of this year so far and it's called Persona 3 Reload. It would be reaching to call it half-new.