It’s no secret that the bulk of AAA games market revenues come from in-game purchases , mostlyfrom live-service games. It’s also impossible to ignore that the live-service market is fiercely competitive....
This is just like that Epic dude saying Fortnite is the future (lol). People are trying to make definitive statements about what a successful game looks like but there are so many variables to consider. The problem just isn’t as simple as “is it multi-player or not”. Cost matters too, but it’s also clear that more development money doesn’t mean better game. Spider man 2 is a good game, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Balatro, which was way cheaper to make and to buy.
I guess I just don’t get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.
Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.
Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There’s always a better opponent. And I’ve made a lot of good friends through these communities.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong or I’m just too shy to socialize with strangers in these games, but as someone who has fond memories of my favorite TF2/killing floor community servers, I feel like there is basically no sense of community in these games now that matchmaking is king and private hosting is a thing of the past
You’ll find more close-knit communities in smaller games. I play a lot of fighting games, and the FGC moves heaven and earth to keep the one thing alive that very few other games are doing: locals. Go to locals and meet people!
Ohh, that and local proximity chat or server chat is a touchy subject these days. I’d love to see more communication in games. The recent ping systems have been a good start, but having more character eexpression like in Mordhau or Chivalry 2 would be nice. Make your characters say things in R6 Siege would be particularly interesting.
Ya need to play more grand strategy games and CRPGs. Theres plenty to sink your teeth into such as eugenics and war crimes, im thinking specifically Crusader kings and Tyranny with these two examples.
Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There’s always a better opponent.
But that is exactly the problem with it. The vast majority of people don’t have the free time to spend on a given game to compete with those who do spend most of their time on it.
Sure… but that is what skillbased matchmaking is for, to set you up with a game with people precisely on your level.
99% of people playing a multiplayer game with good matchmaking are always going to have a winrate trending towards 50%, that is by definition the function of skillbased matchmaking!
I’m not expecting to beat Daigo Umehara any time soon. I’m just aiming to beat the next guy in front of me. And the next. And the next. No matter what my skill level, there’s always a challenge. That doesn’t mean I have to be the very best, quite the opposite.
That’s fair. I love the gunplay of Apex (and can ignore all the battlepass monetization) but I could never just goof around in that game like I could in Halo 3 multiplayer, Planetside2, or TF2. I often ended up back in the queue after matching with people with thousands more hours of expierience. The alternative gamemodes were the most fun because I got to have fun while losing, which is less of the focus in today’s shooters due to the super high skill ceilings. Competative games are mostly made with professional teams in mind now. That’s what I want a return to and why I like Helldivers 2 so much.
I’d like multiplayer a lot more if they still made games with user-driven match making, instead of opaque algorithms hellbent on ensuring that everyone maintains a perfect 50/50 win rate. That and the death of custom game modes/lobbies have really killed all the fun of online multiplayer.
As much as that may be true for you, on average people enjoy MP games with SBMM more than without by a decent margin. Studies have shown that people play more matches and play longer sessions when SBMM creates more balanced matches.
You absolutely certain about that reasoning? Because from what I’ve seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your “correct” ranking and actually enjoy the game. People who don’t play it like that are driven away because of it.
If you’re curious about the mechanics behind ELO and ELO confidence distributions after X matches, chess ELO is actually a well studied way to learn about the algorithm used by almost all SBMM. After a shockingly small number of matches, your ELO is going to end up being in the right neighborhood for you have +/- 50% WR.
Because from what I’ve seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your “correct” ranking and actually enjoy the game.
This is not accurate. Most people’s ELOs don’t shift much after settling into your “natural” rank, which should happen after about 50 matches or so. Probably what you’re referring to is the publicly available “rank” which is per “season”, wherein every few months your rank gets reset. This is FAR less opaque than SBMM but results in lower playtime and lower retention for casual players who don’t want to be grinding the 50 matches to settle at their ELO every 3 months.
Actual opaque SBMM (the algorithm you mentioned originally) that never resets creates, on average, much more fun MP experiences for most people.
I pulled that number out of my bootyhole because I knew it was a safe bet for a stable ELO.
US Chess Federation uses 25 games as your provisional ELO stage, many video games will use 10 matches. Assuming a large enough variety of ELO in the player base, you can be confident your ELO is mostly accurate after a shockingly small number of matches.
Would be interesting to see but I would assume most people won’t even make it to 10 matches in a game they don’t enjoy. The people who spend thousands of hours on a single game are a tiny minority of the tiny minority of people who have the free time to play dozens of a hours a week.
I play games that are so niche that the ‘matchmaking’ consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don’t have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.
The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.
Titanfall 2 come to mind here. I bought it well after launch and really enjoyed the campaign. When I went to hop into multi-player, I was often killed as I spawned or within 10s of spawning. I literally was not playing the game at that, just spawning and dying. I never came back, lol.
I disagree. I like GOOD games. It just so happens that 90% of the good games are singleplayer. Deep Rock Galactic and Minecraft are pretty much the only 2 multiplayer games I think are better with other people (strangers, not like playing with family).
Also I MUST bring this up every chance I get. Lemmy.world has a Minecraft server that isn’t pay to win and I need people to play with. Am lonely, please join. :)
That’s sorta the lede being buried here. This shows that people who would self-identify as gamers prefer single-player games. Gamers aren’t the target audience for AAA devs though, they want to make more money than God by targeting the entire population of Earth, and a lot of people who would not categorize themself as a gamer seem to prefer being able to play simple online games with their friends.
Saw this article before and the title is very misleading. 53% is barely “most”, and the biggest takeaway from it is that gamers age 16-24 greatly prefer multiplayer games while people aged 25-34 prefer multiplayer as much as singleplayer. Those age groups are probably most of the market.
This is a really bizarre point to try to make, to me. The headline doesn’t say “the vast, overwhelming percentage of gamers”… It says most. 53% is most.
The bigger problem I had was with the categories, really.
“Most” in more than a simple majority in my understanding of English as a non-native speaker. “More” would be a better word for it. I’d also take “single player is the most popular” of two game modes which is true but still implies more than 6% difference.
It doesn’t though. It doesn’t even need to mean more than half, it means more than anything else. If there are 8 groups of 10 and 1 group of 20, the last group has the most members.
Their methodology also seems a little fucked, reads like this was a survey they offered to gamers. There’s likely a lot of self-selection bias to the responses.
If randoms were less toxic and if a guild could stay together I’d prefer multiplayer but alas people are generally toxic asshats and most guilds don’t last very long any more.
Thankfully there have been a bunch of good single player games lately.
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
PVE
Couch co-op
Online PVP
Single player
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year’s unanimous game of the year was largely considered a “single player game”, but while it’s definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn’t want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Single-player games are a safer bet for new games…Make no mistake: the costs to make AAA single-player, non-live service games have inflated to astronomic levels. Leaks from Insomniac showed that PlayStation’s AAA flagship games, like Spider-Man 2, have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is a growing opportunity for AAA studios to make leaner single-player games.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it’s correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.
Player preference only factors into the development decision in so much as it affects profitability. Meaning that even if more people prefer single player, they will still make a multiplayer game if they feel they can charge more, and earn more money from it.
What about the folks that like playing multiplayer games solo? I enjoy the busyness/fullness of people running around the world and having small interactions, while getting into groups only when really necessary for content or items.
Same, humans make virtual worlds so much more compelling to me over entirely scripted singleplayer experiences. Even when I dont directly interact with other humans around me, it still makes a virtual world feel so much more alive.
I love singleplayer games too tho and I would hate it if all games were multiplayer affairs, I just think it is worth pointing out that pleasure of sharing virtual spaces with other people is something deeper than just a desire to directly connect and interact. Sometimes it feels more like the pleasure of visiting a new place and enjoying being alone and anonymous while people watching at a cafe in a busy city square.
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This is just like that Epic dude saying Fortnite is the future (lol). People are trying to make definitive statements about what a successful game looks like but there are so many variables to consider. The problem just isn’t as simple as “is it multi-player or not”. Cost matters too, but it’s also clear that more development money doesn’t mean better game. Spider man 2 is a good game, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Balatro, which was way cheaper to make and to buy.
I love all types of games but for real immersion and escape nothing beats a single player FPS
I guess I just don’t get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.
Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.
Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There’s always a better opponent. And I’ve made a lot of good friends through these communities.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong or I’m just too shy to socialize with strangers in these games, but as someone who has fond memories of my favorite TF2/killing floor community servers, I feel like there is basically no sense of community in these games now that matchmaking is king and private hosting is a thing of the past
You’ll find more close-knit communities in smaller games. I play a lot of fighting games, and the FGC moves heaven and earth to keep the one thing alive that very few other games are doing: locals. Go to locals and meet people!
Ohh, that and local proximity chat or server chat is a touchy subject these days. I’d love to see more communication in games. The recent ping systems have been a good start, but having more character eexpression like in Mordhau or Chivalry 2 would be nice. Make your characters say things in R6 Siege would be particularly interesting.
Ya need to play more grand strategy games and CRPGs. Theres plenty to sink your teeth into such as eugenics and war crimes, im thinking specifically Crusader kings and Tyranny with these two examples.
Never been a multiplayer fan, reading the above its the same story as many other hobbies and recreations tho right?
…which requires continuous ongoing investment to overcome or even compete
…who has more time or resource to put into getting better
…because they attract similar minded people, but there’s also toxic dickheads as well
I feel like the good bits and the bad hits of community are the community
But that is exactly the problem with it. The vast majority of people don’t have the free time to spend on a given game to compete with those who do spend most of their time on it.
Sure… but that is what skillbased matchmaking is for, to set you up with a game with people precisely on your level.
99% of people playing a multiplayer game with good matchmaking are always going to have a winrate trending towards 50%, that is by definition the function of skillbased matchmaking!
I’m not expecting to beat Daigo Umehara any time soon. I’m just aiming to beat the next guy in front of me. And the next. And the next. No matter what my skill level, there’s always a challenge. That doesn’t mean I have to be the very best, quite the opposite.
That’s fair. I love the gunplay of Apex (and can ignore all the battlepass monetization) but I could never just goof around in that game like I could in Halo 3 multiplayer, Planetside2, or TF2. I often ended up back in the queue after matching with people with thousands more hours of expierience. The alternative gamemodes were the most fun because I got to have fun while losing, which is less of the focus in today’s shooters due to the super high skill ceilings. Competative games are mostly made with professional teams in mind now. That’s what I want a return to and why I like Helldivers 2 so much.
I’d like multiplayer a lot more if they still made games with user-driven match making, instead of opaque algorithms hellbent on ensuring that everyone maintains a perfect 50/50 win rate. That and the death of custom game modes/lobbies have really killed all the fun of online multiplayer.
As much as that may be true for you, on average people enjoy MP games with SBMM more than without by a decent margin. Studies have shown that people play more matches and play longer sessions when SBMM creates more balanced matches.
personally not for me once i start getting destroyed by people leagues above my skill level i just stop playing
there’s rarely ever games that are even, i either cream the opposing noobs or get creamed by the opposing pros. no in between
Are you sure that that is not just the people who are left since all the others left the game?
It’s based on overall usage metrics - number of active users, number of matches played per user, length of a session per user, etc.
It does account for people quitting.
You absolutely certain about that reasoning? Because from what I’ve seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your “correct” ranking and actually enjoy the game. People who don’t play it like that are driven away because of it.
If you’re curious about the mechanics behind ELO and ELO confidence distributions after X matches, chess ELO is actually a well studied way to learn about the algorithm used by almost all SBMM. After a shockingly small number of matches, your ELO is going to end up being in the right neighborhood for you have +/- 50% WR.
Yes, I am.
This is just one study I could find quickly but the results are consistent.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/activision-secretly-experimented-on-50-of-call-of-duty-players-by-decreasing-skill-based-matchmaking-and-determined-players-like-sbmm-even-if-they-don-t-know-it/
This is not accurate. Most people’s ELOs don’t shift much after settling into your “natural” rank, which should happen after about 50 matches or so. Probably what you’re referring to is the publicly available “rank” which is per “season”, wherein every few months your rank gets reset. This is FAR less opaque than SBMM but results in lower playtime and lower retention for casual players who don’t want to be grinding the 50 matches to settle at their ELO every 3 months.
Actual opaque SBMM (the algorithm you mentioned originally) that never resets creates, on average, much more fun MP experiences for most people.
Ehm, 50 matches seems like a lot to me. Especially if they aren’t enjoyable (yet) because of flawed matchmaking.
I pulled that number out of my bootyhole because I knew it was a safe bet for a stable ELO.
US Chess Federation uses 25 games as your provisional ELO stage, many video games will use 10 matches. Assuming a large enough variety of ELO in the player base, you can be confident your ELO is mostly accurate after a shockingly small number of matches.
Would be interesting to see but I would assume most people won’t even make it to 10 matches in a game they don’t enjoy. The people who spend thousands of hours on a single game are a tiny minority of the tiny minority of people who have the free time to play dozens of a hours a week.
If you can’t make it 10 matches in a new game, I don’t think SBMM is your problem with the game.
10 matches should be like, between 3-10 hours. Assuming an hour a night, you’ll be approximately ranked for SBMM within a week.
It should take about 20 matches or less to give you a decent rating, what games have you played that took longer?
I play games that are so niche that the ‘matchmaking’ consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don’t have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.
The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.
Titanfall 2 come to mind here. I bought it well after launch and really enjoyed the campaign. When I went to hop into multi-player, I was often killed as I spawned or within 10s of spawning. I literally was not playing the game at that, just spawning and dying. I never came back, lol.
Makes sense as it aligns with their forever relationship status.
Couch co-op was great during gen 5/6 but after that I stopped playing multiplayer.
I disagree. I like GOOD games. It just so happens that 90% of the good games are singleplayer. Deep Rock Galactic and Minecraft are pretty much the only 2 multiplayer games I think are better with other people (strangers, not like playing with family).
Also I MUST bring this up every chance I get. Lemmy.world has a Minecraft server that isn’t pay to win and I need people to play with. Am lonely, please join. :)
Then WoW is released and everyone and your mother is a gamer now.
That’s sorta the lede being buried here. This shows that people who would self-identify as gamers prefer single-player games. Gamers aren’t the target audience for AAA devs though, they want to make more money than God by targeting the entire population of Earth, and a lot of people who would not categorize themself as a gamer seem to prefer being able to play simple online games with their friends.
I dislike people enough in my day to day life. Why would I want them in my video games?
Saw this article before and the title is very misleading. 53% is barely “most”, and the biggest takeaway from it is that gamers age 16-24 greatly prefer multiplayer games while people aged 25-34 prefer multiplayer as much as singleplayer. Those age groups are probably most of the market.
Yeah, multiplayer is preferred in their data until the 45+ age ranges. Weird article.
People with lots of time and friends prefer multiplayer games more than people with little time and friends. Go figure.
I would assume people with lots of friends and little time will like them even less.
This is a really bizarre point to try to make, to me. The headline doesn’t say “the vast, overwhelming percentage of gamers”… It says most. 53% is most.
The bigger problem I had was with the categories, really.
“Most” in more than a simple majority in my understanding of English as a non-native speaker. “More” would be a better word for it. I’d also take “single player is the most popular” of two game modes which is true but still implies more than 6% difference.
Are you Spanish or Arabic speaking by any chance?
No. I am a native English speaker and writer.
That 3% could be a rounding error, “most” implies a much bigger difference, the title should say that half gamers prefer singleplayer games.
It doesn’t though. It doesn’t even need to mean more than half, it means more than anything else. If there are 8 groups of 10 and 1 group of 20, the last group has the most members.
Their methodology also seems a little fucked, reads like this was a survey they offered to gamers. There’s likely a lot of self-selection bias to the responses.
If randoms were less toxic and if a guild could stay together I’d prefer multiplayer but alas people are generally toxic asshats and most guilds don’t last very long any more.
Thankfully there have been a bunch of good single player games lately.
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year’s unanimous game of the year was largely considered a “single player game”, but while it’s definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn’t want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it’s correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.
Player preference only factors into the development decision in so much as it affects profitability. Meaning that even if more people prefer single player, they will still make a multiplayer game if they feel they can charge more, and earn more money from it.
What about the folks that like playing multiplayer games solo? I enjoy the busyness/fullness of people running around the world and having small interactions, while getting into groups only when really necessary for content or items.
The bulk of wow players play that way myself included (back in the day, im clean now)
Same, humans make virtual worlds so much more compelling to me over entirely scripted singleplayer experiences. Even when I dont directly interact with other humans around me, it still makes a virtual world feel so much more alive.
I love singleplayer games too tho and I would hate it if all games were multiplayer affairs, I just think it is worth pointing out that pleasure of sharing virtual spaces with other people is something deeper than just a desire to directly connect and interact. Sometimes it feels more like the pleasure of visiting a new place and enjoying being alone and anonymous while people watching at a cafe in a busy city square.
This is it for me. I like that a multiplayer world is something dynamic I’m a part of even when I’m not interacting with it directly.
Yeah. Factorio.
I don’t get your point… Facrorio is as great in singleplayer as it is in multiplayer.