The fictitious fall of single-player video games, and their ‘return’ in 2021
Using 2017’s end-of-year industry analysis features as a barometer, you might reasonably have expected single-player titles to be dead and buried by now. It was the year PUBG seemed to materialize from thin air and top a Steam player chart that CS:GO and Dota 2 had sat atop for years. In that same 12 months, Epic’s new game Fortnite went from a PvE flop to a hastily assembled battle royale with 10 million players in its first two weeks. Battle royales were en vogue, and pulling in huge player bases.
Also in 2017, Arkane released Prey. It was the latest in a string of nostalgic single-player franchise reboots, spiritual sequels and crowdfunded rebirths that harkened back to a golden period of late nineties to early noughties gaming, and like Torment: Tides of Numenera, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Thief (2014) before it, it’s commercial performance was modest. It would not be getting a sequel.
That November EA closed down Visceral Games. On the Star Wars title currently in development there, CFO Blake Jorgensen told investors “As we kept reviewing the game, it continued to look like a much more linear game people don’t like as much today as they did five years ago or 10 years ago.”
That was it, then. Linear solo experiences were done for, and the Destiny model had won. There’d be no more isometric RPGs telling us wonderful stories through reams and reams of written text or tapping 0451 into keypads. So long, pause menus that actually pause the game. Hello battle passes and epic emotes.
It only took until 2018 for us all to realize that wouldn’t be the case. Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey had been massive unit shifters for the Switch the year previously, and Spider-Man and God of War were commercial smashes for consoles. PUBG and Fortnite were still the big success stories of the day, and 2018 bestseller Red Dead Redemption 2 did feature an online component to complement its single-player story. But the market demonstrated that it still loved playing alone.
Still, that pivotal year that birthed two industry-changing battle royales did have lasting effects. Foremost, it saw triple-A studios change tack. Developing to such massive budgets today, the industry agrees, is about narrowing focus, shaking off the dead wood, and doing one thing better than anybody else. That thinking saw Call of Duty Black Ops 4 release without a solo campaign, and Battlefield V use single-player only as a series of brief scene-setting exercises that covered the controls. The Last of Us Part II released without its planned Factions multiplayer mode, and however you may have felt about Cyberpunk 2077 on release, at least the 5th bestselling buy-to-play last year didn’t tack on a ‘capture the intel’ online mode.
Contradictory as it may sound to celebrate two massive shooter franchises dropping solo play, that move takes the pressure off single-player developers to attempt some maximalist suite of modes that keeps their players engaged for years to come. Nobody bought either Last of Us Game for the multiplayer. No one buys Battlefield for the single-player. Do one thing, better than everyone else.
Where are we in 2021 then, those of us who like to read reams and reams of text in isometric RPGs, and enter 0451 into keypads, and scouting out alternate paths through the vents? Well, we’re spending a lot of time playing Deathloop, which you might even consider a Prey 2017 sequel since it has as much to do with that game as Prey 2017 had with previous Prey titles. There’s an invasion-based online feature, but you wouldn’t say this was a multiplayer game any more than you’d say Dark Souls was. There’s even an 0451 door code.
We might spend a bit of time enjoying Disco Elysium: The Final Cut’s position at top spot of Metacritic for 2021. Alright, it’s technically a game from 2019, but its new edition still sits higher than Forza Horizon 5 and that’s incredible for a CRPG where most of the graphics are in your head. See also: Hades, one of last year’s biggest indie hits, now on PS5 and still absolutely single-player only.
Remasters and definitive editions are also becoming a significant strand of the industry, and given that their nostalgic focus lies before the connected age, they tend to be serving us fresh helpings of familiar single-player. Mafia: Definitive Edition, Quake Remastered And Tony Hawk’s 1+2 all give us fine excuses to spend 10 hours in the company of ourselves. As for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, make that 100 hours.
None of this is evidence that the industry was wrong to recognize online games as a growth area. Instead, it shows that the big players now recognize what indies have known for years: gaming is a long tail economy. Every few years a Fortnite might capture the imagination of a huge group at the high end of that curve, but if studios can curb their production costs in order to hit a consumer group further down the tail with a laser focus – in no universe was I not going to buy a Mafia remaster, for example – even the niche, the nostalgic, and the downright esoteric projects can work.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.