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Single-Player Game Model 'Finished,' Says EA Exec
Frank Gibeau, label president for EA Games, recently spoke with Develop about the publisher's long term development strategy. Gibeau thinks developing major games without multiplayer modes is a passing fad:
"...it’s not only about multiplayer, it’s about being connected. I firmly believe that the way the products we have are going, they need to be connected online. ... I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads; they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out. I think that model is finished. Online is where the innovation and the action [are] at."
It's also the only way to combat piracy that works. You need the legit game to play with your friends that use legit copies.
They just look at Zynga and hope they can make the same amount of money making crappy games.
Yeah, that's why everyone is still waiting and crying out for HL2:Ep3, Duke Nukem Forever, etc. It's got nothing to do with whether the game is single- or multi-player. It's just that single-player games you have to actually put more work in so the player *doesn't* feel alone (or feels *suitably* alone in the game's environment). Whereas any shit that has a multiplayer mode saves you from having to write tons of AI and instead just keep a couple of servers up.
Multiplayer was/is a twist on a game to increase longevity. Now it's *replaced* bothering to make the game's have longevity themselves. I play tons of multiplayer games, but as they age, they die except for the ones that were *always* going to be played by people anyway (e.g. Counterstrike). Single-player games and LAN-playable games and games that you can just connect to random IP addresses TOO last forever.
Stop tacking on "multiplayer" as a feature and instead make a decent game. Apart from a handful of exceptions, almost every Steam game I own is primarily single-player. I own very, very few multiplayer-only games for the same reasons.
If I want to socialize I'll go to the pub or the park. I suspect Mr Exec is more interested in the endless monthly fees they can gouge from players. These guys arent gamers, they are business zombies who contantly moan like the undead itself.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
I don't want connectivity, I want co-op, so I can play together with family members. WTF do care for some dude the other side of the ocean?
Maybe if they made 70 hour single-player games the model wouldn't be dead. I still miss the old, proper RPGs like Baldur's Gate.
Disagree != mod troll.
wasnt EA one of the slave shops who claimed PC gaming was finished too ?
hint to EA execs :
DO NOT WANT stupid asshats and 12 year olds who whine incessantly in your spyware laden voip enabled gaming franchises.
DO WANT games which are engaging, fun and can be picked up with no significant time investment.
DO NOT WANT incessantly annoying DRM which requires online servers AND a CD in the drive to validate the game is "legal". Oh and typing in a 80 digit serial number.
DO WANT games which have a compelling storyline, decent graphics with no advert ware built in and are engrossing enough to keep people occupied for the 60 bux you charge which is more than movies, theatres and any other reasonable form of alternative entertainment costs.
DO NOT WANT monthly fees ON TOP of the 60 bux you charge for the game.
DO WANT to resell games once I have finished plowing through your inevitably buggy DRM infested pile of franchised crapware.
If playing with your freinds is so great, then why are developers taking away support for lan and dedicated servers? It's a whole load of crap! I don't want to spend $120 on a game only to play it on a server on the other side of the world, with a ping of 500! It's not the players' demand for connectivity, it's studios want to charge subscription fees!
and it wont make us stop wanting to spend weekends sunk in some game where no one will bother us. Sometimes its about being disconnected.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Well, I think he's full of shit. Some of the best games I've ever played are single-player. Golden Sun for GBA, Bioshock 1, the Elder Scrolls series, Persona 3, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the Penumbra series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 (despite 2's.. er... lack of polish), the Final Fantasy series... Come to think of it, Fallout: New Vegas' sales numbers prove this crap wrong. It's a perfect example of a modern single player game that garnered huge sales. Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age also had great sales as single player games, though I can't say whether they were good or not since I haven't played them.
My guess is that EA would rather pump out the same big name game over and over. Guaranteed profits, no risk, and virtually no money spent on developing the hard things like a good plot or character depth. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite games are multiplayer (hell, the Battlefield series is one of my favorite series as well, been a fan since BF1942, and don't get me started on Valve games), but by no means is single player a dead genre.
You're right - please stop making single player games.
Sincerely,
Bethesda Softworks / Obsidian Entertainment
(you know, the people who brought you Fallout 3 which sold 4.7m copies in the first two weeks of release in 2008 and Fallout: New Vegas - which just happened to sell 5m copies in the 1st three weeks since release in 2010)
I still play Operation Flashpoint regularly. It's from 2001. I play single-player mode only.
The power ? Mission-editing: constantly recreating new missions with new concepts is much more interesting than getting online and beaten by some cheating (and sometimes: extremely good) opponent.
The only problem is that it is too much work for most, who indeed just want to use 'fire-and-forget' packaged games. Which is probably why Operation Flashpoint stands alone at the top - for me, anyway. And yes, I do not care about graphics: game concepts are the most important part of the software.
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They clearly understand jack about a gamer's heart and what makes a game great, but they hope to get their business-goals accepted by trying to sound all visionary-like.
Alas, nobody with experience in gaming will be able to take them seriously.
EA's true goals:
These profit-driven bastard won't spend a second thinking about what makes a game great, because they don't know jack about games. I spit in their face.
The future lies with indie-games and Nintendo
I tend to disagree. I dislike movie-like setups (I'm a nosy person and keep bumping into "you're not supposed to be here" corners with blatant immersion-breaking obstacles blocking your way). OTOH, I love huge, open-ended single-player sandbox style games. A huge world with a lot to do and with freedom of choice what to do. Events unfold around you and you're often in the middle of things, but you may turn around and do other things if you choose so.
Yes, MMORPGs seem bland to me, I prefer a good open-world single-player game instead. But railroad-fests like Half-Life don't quite appeal to me.
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It's not that single-player is dead. It's that offline is dead (or dying). Which is, and I say this as a predominantly single-player game enthusiast, basically okay. Right now I'm playing two games pretty regularly, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Joe Danger, which both have well integrated leaderboards. But they don't just pit you against millions of random people across the globe. They actually pit you against people on your friends lists.
So when I boot up NFS and get ready to tick off another event on that big map I instead skip over to the Autolog and see what my friends have been up to lately. I then spend the next hour and a half trying to beat their times and reclaim my top spot on the wall. So for a game where I would normally run straight through trying merely to complete every event and reach 100% completion, I'm now basically wasting time re-racing events competitively against my friends list. And you know what? I'm loving it. I think this is actually the best way to enhance replayability that I've seen in a long time. And it's not like leaderboards are anything new in games, far from it. But that connectedness is really addicting. I've yet to play one multi-player event. I will at some point but I'm still having fun with the single-player. Fun that indeed benefits from the connected, social features they've weaved into the game.
And yea I'm not a Facebook guy but from what I understand this is a pretty common thread among Facebook games as well. It's an interesting way to game.
Electronic Arts is still alive & kicking?
You aren't EA's target demographic. Please don't forget while people are properly outraged on the internet against things like DLC and the death of LAN gaming, they are actually the vocal minority, compared to masses of consumers who don't necessarily even know that LAN exists, much less what it does. Really the point here is that while a person from EA might read, and even agree with what you're saying, it's not going to change their business strategy one bit.
What he meant to say is "online is where the money is". DLC, DRM, lower development costs due to lack of story or AI, mini-transactions, monthly fees, it's a wet dream for EA.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The problem with multiplayer is you can't play casually. The servers are full of people with absolutely no life who get their jollies fragging newbies (usually shouting obscenities as they do so...)
It might be somebody's idea of a 'game' but it's not mine.
No sig today...
I have always thought a good idea would be a solid single player game where the multiplayer aspect would be the role of the enemies, as an enemy if you were killed by the player you would be transported Agent Smith style into another host enemy. Would certainly improve the replayability of a title, maybe make the multiplayer component free or at minimal cost to keep the numbers up,
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
Nethack confirms it, EA is dead
I think Oblivion could've even been better if it had had coop mode. My friend and I actually explored places together, playing parallel to each other. It would've been a LOT more fun if we could have been in the same world together. Just because you have multiplayer, doesn't mean it has to mean deathmatch.
Get creative!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
so they want to give up on people with satellite broadband / dial up?
They need to also have lan play so people with poor pings / low bandwidth / low caps can play as well.
Red Dead Redemption had that problem- no ranking at all. You go in at level 1 riding a nag and armed with some dinky weapon loadout, and a level 50 guy with a golden gun riding a golden buffalo that runs at about Mach 3 keeps killing you. Whee. Always wondered what the fun was from the level 50 guy's POV. It seems it would be like playing a game with a God code activated. It would get boring after 5 minutes.
And you have to be a fanatic to even get to level 50. I got to level 36 and was burned out on it completely. I think the golden buffalo is for reaching 50, passing into legend, and going from 1 to 50 *again*! Crap, I'm just not that OCD.
Co-op is the real king in my book, especially games like Borderlands where you can play the same thing single or in co-op, and the game adjusts the difficulty based on how many people are in the group. I played that both ways, and it was great.
Portal 2 looks like the next great co-op. In that case it looks like added levels designed specifically for two players.
There aren't any "properly designed multiplayer games". I've seen plenty which have some sort of ranking system for matching up players. What happens? Very good players get bored playing against very good players, make another account, and spend a month or so working their way back up the ladder crushing new players. They send their gear to their alts, so not only do they have massive skill over new players, they have untouchable gear. I haven't yet seen a game with a "douchebag rating" sort of system either. You're forced to ignore (if you can) every third individual spewing crap out of their mouths.
The problem with multiplayer is you can't play casually.
You can when your friends are visiting you.
No, you can't. There are very few games where that's the case. Most console multiplayer games have gone away from split screens, and "multiplayer" is now "online multiplayer", where you have to be on separate consoles, with separate subscriptions to play online. Sure, there are still a few Mario Cart and "people on a platform" sort of games to play multiplayer. But the bulk of console games now can't be played by 2-4 people in the same room at the same time.
Before you rip into other posters, you might want to take a look at the current state of console gaming. It's changed a ton in the last 5 years or so.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
No everyone wants to play in an environment populated by potty mouth teenagers jumping around like monkeys.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
To expand on what garvon wrote:
In the days before Internet multiplayer video games, before magnet schools and suburban sprawl, children used to visit their neighbors or classmates at their home after school or on weekends to play together. But now that children who go to school together tend to live far from one another, now that both parents work, and now that the mainstream media has been spreading phobia about kidnapping of children, parents have demanded that these visits be arranged in advance. This is a play date.
It's what used to be called having a friend over to play. New name for today's more regimented child rearing.
Or rather, for families with busier schedules. In the past, a kid might be able to drop by another kid's house outside of school hours and have a good chance of finding them there or nearby. Now they're as likely to be in daycare (if they're younger) or at extracurricular activities (if they're older).