https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-explains-assassin-s-creed-odyssey...
For instance, you could buy things like XP boosters, unique-appearance gear, map unlocks, etc. Though if I remember correctly, you could pretty easily use Cheat Engine to give yourself as much of the microtransaction currency as you wanted—after all, it was a single-player game.
yongyea and jim sterling disagree
dont know about whatever gamespot/ign have been saying but they're becoming irrelevant
I used to stay on top of new games and at least try all the top grossers, but as time went on I started playing fewer and fewer ones because of a lot of factors.
Less time in general, and I’m also more demanding, meaning I’ll skip obviously sub-par ones since I’ve already tried ones like them didn’t enjoy it. And my tasted have sharpened - I know better beforehand what I would like exploring.
So yeah all in all I think instead of partying hard and drinking whole bottles of cheap vodka, I know prefer a glass of good brandy in agreeable company now and then. To be honest I think its a good thing.
Sadly this brings also single player games which could be be easily offline, but they need access to server anyway.
1. Keeping up with latest technology (graphics) is important for games, as those create the first impression. It is difficult to market a game built on outdated technology.
2. The above means that making games gets more and more expensive, probably faster than the market expands (if it is still expanding).
3. Multiplayer games are more profitable than single-player games.
This means that getting funding to make a single-player game gets more difficult, as it may provide a very poor return on investment, if at all. Only exceptions are low-risk existing franchises, which is why we mostly see those in the single-player scene. The original Deus Ex, System Shock 2 or even Metal Gear Solid would be nearly impossible today as those projects would be considered to be too high risk / low reward.
This only applies to some genres. There's a whole category or games trying to replicate retro feel. Cadence of Hyrule could come out at least 5 years ago. (reskinned necrodancer with new mechanics) Same for crosscode.
Another category are games where the impression comes from esthetics, not from tech improvement: Ori and blind forest, Hollow Knight, Rayman, ...
Then on an intersection of that are things like Katana zero. Sure, most fps games will chug as much power out of GPUs as possible, but that's not the whole world.
3. Its harder to pirate multiplayer games than single player only, thats why they ditched them.
I don't think single player games are high risk / low reward but the games industry is defiantly laser focused on high risk / unrealistic rewards.
Pretty is a design choice (or should be). Minecraft's low resolution works well with people who appreciate low resolution worlds, aka kids. Minecraft's true genius, intended or not, is being a game that grows up with the kid as they play.
You start off singleplayer by yourself just getting by in survival mode and you end up building massive city sized projects in multiplayer learning to co-operate on a grand scale. That learning process can cover 5yr old to 16yr olds.
Photoreal is going to become cheaper and cheaper so making an artist aesthetic is going to be more important for standing out than 'better' graphics.
Who says piracy is a victimless crime?
The first Denuvo game was in 2014, more than a decade after the trend towards multiplayer games got rolling.
> Except that the duration during which the game stay protected doesn't seem to have any impact on the sales.
The game publishers who continue to pay to use Denuvo indicate otherwise. In a hit-or-miss industry like video games, publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money.
I could say that the game publishers who continue to release games without additional protections indicate exactly this, as publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money. That doesn’t seem like a good argument, does it?
The only reason, at least the one I could think of, why some publishers still push aggressive DRMs into their products is that someone is selling them this solution and management believes that they protect themselves from “bad pirates”.
If someone wants to buy the game, he will buy it. If someone wants to pirate it, he will do just that. The only 100% working way around it are multiplayer games.
The other almost as successful method seem to be just making good games, as Nintendo, From Software, CD Projekt etc show again and again.
The single player game was 'dead' because video game companies decided they were dead, not because of any market forces. They realized that games with multiplayer features sold a bit better, so they decided to focus on those, to the point of (mostly) abandoning single player games.
Big publishers decided to make fewer, bigger games. But indies (and other mid-tier devs) filled a huge market gap (Kickstarter, anyone?), so nothing really changed much.