Single Player Isn’t Dying
Indie devs could be picking up the torch
In an interview for Gamewatcher, Arcade Berg — senior designer for Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus— claimed that there aren’t that many single player shooters around because there’s no sense of community in there. Hence we have all those cooperative, multiplayer-focused, MTX-driven games.
What’s wrong with this statement?
Communities are good when the game goes for a long run. But not every game has to go for a long run to be hugely profitable. Not every game has to invade every day of your life to leave a mark on you. And the reason why big publishers have to resort to that is that they waste their money on stuff that is not really important. Like Hollywood stars on voice-overs.
Someday these bubble of long-run games will pop as there won’t be any new players to play them all. No more free time, no more attention to steal.
Someday the market will give the backwards reaction, as it already does in tech. In the next section it might look like I’m going off on a tangent, but bear with me, alright?
Mindfulness + games = ?
What were we seeing in tech startups for the past couple of years? Meditation apps like Calm and Headspace are on top of the charts. People are making text editors providing nothing but a writing field. Mozilla created browser named “Focus” with only one tab to use. The Huffington Post’s founder pushes an app that blocks all notifications and every time someone texts you, it responds with something like “GTFO, I’m thriving!”
What all those things have in common? They collect almost every buzz-thing from Apps in 2015 — advanced multitasking, push-notifications, and aggressive “hey man, see, a community!” boasting — in attempt to kill it all with one wide swipe. “Focus” is a huge buzzword for quite some time already. Evidently, there’s a huge demand for it.
(I find it kinda ironic that Apple started truly embracing multitasking in iOS only now… but I digress).
More and more people overwhelmed with external triggers start to consciously look how to funnel their attention towards something that truly matters.
I firmly believe that soon this notion will flood video games industry as well with less multiplayer and more singleplayer games arriving. Even with all the buzz around omnipresent online components (especially with it!), compact, focused single player games aren’t dead. And they won’t be anytime soon.
Change the conversation
It’s not that hard to find incredible examples of high production value single player games “rising from ashes” (duh, like like something ever happened to them). All it takes is just to know where to look.
Ex-People Can Fly people from Astronauts are making a triple-A quality FPS Witchfire (above) with a team of 8.
Ninja Theory, similarly, stripped down their studio to about 20 people and crushed it with their Hellblade.
Raycewick made an amazing video explaining why Hellblade is the most important game of the year, and I fully agree on many of his points
Consortium: The Tower creators are obviously cutting a lot of costs on visuals yet making it up with superb voice acting. While playing demo I kept forgetting that the game looks outdated because of how damn good it sounds sometimes. Sounds are way cheaper to produce, and in result it seems like we’ll soon receive a Deus Ex game we deserve.
See where I’m going?
Even if real triple-A’s won’t change their course, these smaller guys will inhabit the market large publishers left and begin thriving on it. In any case, we won’t be left without good, focused single-player experiences to turn our minds to.
This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Artemy Kozlov. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
