Single-player games have become a hot-button issue lately, thanks to EA’s recent shuttering of Visceral Games and the cancellation of its Star Wars game. While some studios and publishers remain dedicated to providing big-budget, self-contained, single-player experiences—take Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus developer MachineGames, for instance—most major publishers are increasingly demanding more continuous revenue streams in the form of microtransactions. Heck, Activision recently patented a matchmaking system that actively encourages microtransaction purchases.

Microsoft VP of Global Games Publishing Shannon Loftis recently weighed in on the discussion in an interview with GameSpot and responded pretty much exactly the way you’d expect an executive at a major publisher to respond.

“I don’t think that [the market for single-player games] is dead per se,” Loftis said. “I do think the economics of taking a single-player game and telling a very high fidelity multi-hour story get a little more complicated. Gamers want higher fidelity and they want higher resolution graphics.”

In other words, developers increasingly need to spend more money to develop the kind of single-player experiences that players expect, and without a continuous revenue stream coming from those games, publishers are less likely to want to cover production costs.

One solution is to insert microtransactions into single-player games, like what Monolith and WB Interactive did with Middle-earth: Shadow of War, a decision that was met with derision from the online community and a defensive tone by developers. This, too, seems to be EA’s driving principle as it reworks and molds the scraps of Visceral’s Star Wars game.

But, in Loftis’ estimation, this doesn’t mean that single-player games are dying in the way many internet reactionaries are declaring.

“I don’t think that there is ever going to be a time when there aren’t single-player, story-based games,” she said. “I do love the idea of building a community around the experience of these games.”

One way that Xbox will continue to fund single-player game development, according to Loftis, is through subscription services like Xbox Game Pass, which so far seems like a successful program in terms of the number of subscriptions.

However, given Loftis’ recent comments on Microsoft’s cancellation of Scalebound, maybe she’s not the right person to be instilling optimism about the future of big-budget, single-player experiences.

Meanwhile, Nintendo will continue to sit quietly at home, counting its The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and soon Super Mario Odyssey) money.

Posted: Oct 26, 2017 9:21 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/microsoft-exec-says-single-player-games-arent-dead-per-se/