this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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I appreciate the sentiment but the (very shitty) reality is single player games don't come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games in the current climate. Like no where even remotely close in terms of effort to profit. You can straight up clone call of duty every year, or add a few maps to fortnite, or add a new operator to siege, and monetize every tiny fraction of the game thru micro transactions and people will keep on playing and keep on paying.
Single player games operate pretty much the opposite. You buy it once. Play thru it. Beat it. And generally never touch it again unless maybe some dlc comes out and you might add a few more hours to it and then never think about it again.
I say this as a giant fan of single narrative games, it's just a much smarter business move to pump out shitty online multiplayer games.
Fortnite was released in 2017, last year it netted almost $6 billion.
Call of duty has been dog water for like a decade. Its been the best selling game every single year since 2009 unless Rockstar releases a game (and Hogwarts legacy randomly dominating one year).
World of Warcraft came out in 2004. Last year they announced they had over 7 million active subscribers... Over two decades later.
Apex legends came out in 2019, last year it made over $3 billion.
The list goes on and on and on. You just can't compete with weirdos obsessed with showing off a wizard hat on their character in an online game or busting open a loot box to get a new weapon skin or something.
Reading the article, where did you get "audience rewards" == "maximal extraction of cash from the audience"?
IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn't lose because you didn't make the most money out of all your competitors.
Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.
Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn't as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.
It's not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on "nearly guaranteed" online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It's kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.