The release of Evolve a few weeks ago serves to highlight a notable challenge of the multiplayer-only genre: building a devoted fanbase who feel as though they have a stake in the game. With hordes of MOBA’s coming out, and Titanfall’s release almost exactly one year ago, it would seem as though games with little to no singleplayer are quickly becoming a dominant trend. However, the launching of any franchise is going to be an uphill struggle. By default, the audience for a genuinely new game is not big. A multiplayer game needs a community to survive; which is a bit problematic for a new venture. Without that community, the very lifeblood of multiplayer only games, the game is condemned to fail.
I’ve seen it happen before, having worked for an indie game studio making a multiplayer only game. At the time I joined the company, they were trying to create a player base. Their biggest challenge was player retention: there was simply no reason for anyone to stay and play. They tried everything they could think of, including advertisements, promotional events, and scheduled play times where the company president was guaranteed to be online. If you can name it, they probably tried it, or at least considered it. Nothing worked over the course of the summer that I worked for them. Oddly enough, it’s not that there wasn’t interest. There actually was a small community on the Steam greenlight page. And while the game did wind up getting greenlit, it never showed up on the store page; ultimately it faded quietly away. This is not to suggest that multiplayer-only games cannot exist. Games such as Dota, League of Legends, World of Warcraft and Hearthstone are all great examples of how successful this strategy can be. However, the feature that all of these games share are their pre-existing base – all are either mods or spinoffs (curiously, all of them also have a common ancestor in Warcraft 3). It’s the very same reason the Marvel universe seems to be single-handedly keeping Hollywood afloat.
To get around this, the tactic for AAA studios launching new multiplayer games has been to create massive amounts of hype for them, an option not available to smaller studios. This may have worked for Titanfall (although EA has declined to release sales numbers for this game). Similar success for Evolve, launched with a much smaller amount of hype and a confusing amount of DLC and pre-order editions, is much less assured.
My opinion on this topic is that multiplayer dedicated games are a result of the increasingly popular explosion of socialization and interconnectivity since the introduction of the “Facebook Era”. Games today are widening their scope and multiplayer modes are becoming seemingly more popular than singleplayer games. The main reason behind this is that players today gather more enjoyment out of being able to share their gaming experiences with their friends. In my own experience, playing games with people you know personally is much more enjoyable while in-game, but also after the game has ended because you are still able to mutually reflect on the experiences you had with one another rather than playing alone.
Now this is not to say that singleplayer games are not as important for gameplay experiences. Technology today has made it possible for players to actively share their singleplayer game experiences via game streaming services such as twitch.tv where a community of other gamers can watch you play and participate in chatting with you as you play your games. Bringing in socialization to gaming is a key development strategy in my opinion and I think that this is the main reason behind why some games today are being developed to be exclusively multiplayer.
Don Bosco Hoang, you 100% said what I was thinking here.
If multiplayer only games are doomed to fail, how in the first place did the mulplayer only games come to fruition? While for you, many of the various MOBA games that are appearing here and there seem to be failing, I’d argue that your concept of “failure” may be flawed. Games like Super Monday Night Combat, which at its best was a mediocre game with a fledgling community, survived pretty strong for a good 3 years and probably made more than enough money back from original purchases before it adopted a free-to-play model. Smite, another mediocre game which I’m still amazed exists, is in the early stages of becoming popular and probably won’t stick around for too long, but I guarantee Hi-Rez is making a stupid amount of money off of it from the swaths of people that buy in-game crap.
If you only define a game’s success by the persistence of the game’s player base, I’d say your statements are still way off. Take a look at a series like Tribes. Before Tribes Ascend came out in 2012, the last Tribes game to hit the shelves and have a community was Tribes:Vengeance in 2004. The series itself was well liked, and the community existed long after (until about 2007) support for the game stopped (2005). When Tribes Ascend was released the community that played it in 2007 almost immediately picked it back up and continued playing. Which goes to show that the audience doesn’t necessarily dissipate; some games just have a shelf life.
I haven’t played many of the games that came out in the past year but I have found that I don’t really care for the single player mode anymore when it comes to first person shooters. Over the years games like Call of Duty and Halo have shifted their focus from the single player mode to the multiplayer mode. As a costumer I put value a game for the time I would spend playing it, in single player modes this value is limited by the story line. However multiplayer modes offer endless entertainment value although like the single player mode multiplayer has its own limits. After a while this multiplayer games become repetitive and loose the fun. It is always interesting to see how game developers come up with new mechanism to keep player interested in the game.
I would have to argue that a fan base or community is not the reason for a successful game. A community or fan base is the result of a successful game. Then, it becomes a relationship of a growing fan base is the cause of a game going from successful to wildly popular to a classic. But a game’s success is not entirely because of its fan base. A game as you said by default will have no fan base unless it is a spin off or mod of an already successful game. But this is a different topic.
What you have addressed in your article is that you believe that entirely new games without the help of a pre-existing parent game with the aim of being multiplayer-only will most likely fail. However, I would have to disagree. For instance, how do you suppose that games at their beginnings ever got to being popular? Aside from the time-component, randomness of events, and other things out of their control, successful games are successful because they cater to certain interests of a large following of people. This can be that a game has a very interesting element or theme to it. These elements are as discussed in class mechanics, story, aesthetics, and technology. If a game has a really interesting mechanic, or the story is inviting, or the aesthetics were pleasing, or the technology being used is state-of-the-art, then this gives a game a fan base. People will want to continue exploring these elements and that’s how a game becomes successful.
This is an interesting article. From a consumer standpoint, I never really thought games in this fashion. If a new game comes out, and from marketing, promotions, etc. it looks good, then I play it, otherwise, I don’t. It’s very simple from a consumer standpoint, but it’s much more complex for the game developer. They need to find the right amount of marketing for people to even play their game. And, you’re absolutely right. If no one else is playing, why would I? It seems there have been a lot of great games that have just been brushed aside by the community because after the novelty of the game has worn off, they tend just to go back to their favorite game like Call of Duty, League of Legends, etc. I suppose this is why there have been an influx of mobile game advertisements on TV recently. A lot of these new mobile games are multiplayer, and they need to have a good base to begin to attract new players. Games such as Clash of Clans has done this really well, but I’m sure many other games just fall to the bottom of the app store due to a lack of effective marketing. So the question becomes: Should small game developers and studios stick with well executed single player games until they build enough capital/have a good enough fan base to develop that multiplayer game that they want to make? Or, should they just try and hope it works out? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely interesting to think about.