Multiplayer video games grew like the xenomorph. Over the past decade, competitive and cooperative modes went from being additional ways to play that triple-A games included alongside their campaigns to being so large that they abandoned their hosts and scrambled out to live on their own. If you want to pinpoint it, Overwatch was the moment the industry got its chest burst.
With Overwatch, Multiplayer Broke Containment
Blizzard’s hero shooter proved that a multiplayer-only game could sell for $60 bucks and still be a hit with console players, no campaign needed. The past eight years have seen the industry increasingly bifurcate. There are single-player games and multiplayer games, but save for legacy series that have been including both for so long that nixing one would be seen as admitting defeat (Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefield), they no longer coexist in one package.
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The success of titles like Among Us and Valheim during the early pandemic did not accurately represent the long-term appetite for games as a service.
That’s because player expectations for multiplayer games have become increasingly all-consuming while, at the same time, the market has become increasingly flooded. We want games that are constantly giving us new things to do, new weapons to work for, new cosmetics to buy, new maps to play, and more experience to gain in the process. You can’t just make a game with a multiplayer mode, a handful of maps, and active servers anymore. You have to support it endlessly so that players don’t jump ship the second there’s a lull.
The All-Consuming Nature Of Modern Multiplayer
It’s too much for some studios that have historically made games with multiplayer components. Naughty Dog had planned to launch The Last of Us Part 2’s Factions mode alongside the single-player game. Prior to launch, it realized that it would be too much to ship at once, and spun the multiplayer off as its own game.
Then, a few years later, it announced that it was cancelling the game altogether because finishing it would mean supporting it long-term, and supporting it long-term would mean becoming an entirely different kind of studio. Maintaining the game at a triple-A competitive level would mean losing time and resources that could go to the single-player games most fans want from Naughty Dog.
This seems to be the predicament that many triple-A developers find themselves in. If I’m moderately interested in a single-player game, I’ll buy it, play through the campaign, and move on. They still get my money, even if I don’t like it. But multiplayer games are built with long-term engagement in mind and often are given away for free with the expectation that fans will get hooked and shell out for the battle pass and microtransactions. That is, by necessity, a long-term business model.
But if no one is playing the game in a couple months, that long-term business model is no longer viable. A game’s player base moving on means no additional revenue, which means that it becomes more cost effective to shut the servers off. At that point, the game can’t make more money at any point in the future, and after being given away for free, didn’t make any to begin with.
Aside from the rare case where a single-player game gets delisted (often several years or even decades after launch), that’s never the case. It’s always there drawing passive revenue. For a risk-averse triple-A developer or publisher, launching a single-player game that has the potential to sell forever is a safer bet than making a multiplayer game that has to win the lottery to become profitable.
It’s the difference between Concord and Star Wars Outlaws. Neither sold well, but Outlaws is still making money for Ubisoft, while Concord has been deleted from existence. That’s an extreme example, but all unsuccessful online multiplayer games follow the same trajectory sooner or later.
Winning The Lottery Is Winning The Lottery
The thing is: if you’re an indie studio, you’re already working with the assumption that becoming a hit is essentially winning the lottery. For every Stardew Valley, there are a thousand games you’ve never heard of, with equally hard-working creators behind them. It’s a tough space to break into, regardless of if you’re making a single-player or multiplayer game.
Indie devs are investing far less, financially speaking. Studio MDHR remortgaged their houses to finance Cuphead. That gamble was risking everything for them. But, to Ubisoft, the cost of a house is maybe a few hours’ of operating expenses. That means that an indie game has a lower threshold it needs to hit to become a success. If a five-person indie studio experienced XDefiant’s initial success — one million players in two-and-a-half hours — it would pull in enough revenue to keep the studio operating for years.
For triple-A, the numbers are different, the investment is bigger, and the threshold is higher. Among Us’ virality, two years after launch, would have been a drop in the ocean for a triple-A studio that might have already killed it by then. For indie studio Innersloth, it was a transformative success.
When your game’s success doesn’t have to keep a multinational corporation running, or please shareholders, or endlessly generate ever-increasing revenue, it’s okay to be a flash in a pan. When I look at games like Among Us and Valheim and Content Warning, I see dreams paying off. And because they’re made by small teams, the payoff doesn’t even have to be that big.
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