Opinion: Publishers are following the money - but that doesn't mean singleplayer is dead

This is a repost of an article that I wrote for games website Beyond Gaming last November. I did not originally post the article here on my own site out of respect for them, but circumstances which I only recently became aware of have caused me to reconsider this. You can read about those circumstances here if you are so inclined. This article has flaws and many of the predictions and suppositions I made were later proven incorrect by events which unfolded in the games industry after it was published, but for posterity and my own peace of mind I wanted to preserve it properly.

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There's a power in stories. A power to entertain and to enlighten. Make us think and feel things we'd never considered before. For me, the best games are the ones that tell me a great story. I got chills the first time I heard B.J. Blazkowicz's opening monologue from Wolfenstein: The New Order, and was captivated by his struggle throughout the game. I felt angry, and then sad after John Marston's betrayal at the end of Red Dead Redemption. I was proud of what my characters had been through and accomplished in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, these empty shells whom I had brought to life, given character, motivation, and personality. There is something undeniably special about a story told through a video game, a depth of immersion that's difficult to replicate elsewhere.

It's not at all impossible for multiplayer games to elicit these same feelings. There are plenty of touching stories about moments shared silently between two players in 2012's indie puzzle adventure Journey, and in Grand Theft Auto Online exists one of the best examples of the potential for emergent storytelling, as countless gifs and forum posts can attest. But these are outliers. Focus on storytelling has never been a defining characteristic of multiplayer gameplay, and in an industry that is seeing online multiplayer beginning to co-opt single-player as the foundation of many major titles some gamers are concerned that we're seeing a decline in the single-player narrative experience.

It's easy to make arguments for either side. We're seeing more and more publishers embrace the “games as a service” model, a philosophy that focuses on providing long term support to games after release to encourage consumers to continue playing – and spending money on – games whose life cycles would otherwise have ended much earlier. This model generally relies on revenue from multiplayer modes to maximize profits. Publisher Square Enix recently made a pretty definitive statement on the company's position in a shareholder report, stating:

     “Gone are the days in which single-player games were of primary status and multiplayer games secondary. Lately, multiplayer games have taken the lead, and it is standard for games to be designed for long-term play.”

Elsewhere, the unhappy news about the closure of EA studio Visceral Games and the restructuring of their single-player Star Wars game has many wondering what we'll be getting in its place. EA has long been focused on integrating multiplayer into their games and while it has since come to light that there were many factors involved in the studio shutdown, assumptions that this was a sign of EA deemphasizing single-player content sparked discussion throughout the industry.

On the other hand, it isn't as if we're running short on single-player adventures. 2017 saw it's biggest day in gaming on October 27th, with the release of Super Mario Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed Origins, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, three brand new entries in hugely successful franchises – and all story driven single player experiences, foregoing online multiplayer entirely. Wolfenstein 2 is a first-person shooter whose setting would make the perfect backdrop for cooperative multiplayer, yet the developers declined to include this mode so as not to “dilute the single-player experience”. And we've seen Star Wars Battlefront 2 hyping up its single-player campaign ahead of the game's release later this month after a massive fan outcry over the lack of one in its predecessor, echoing a similar situation with Titanfall 2 last year. These are both franchises designed “as a service” with multiplayer at their core, yet fan interest led EA (publisher of both games) to see enough value in a single-player campaign to dedicate resources into developing one for each game's sequel.

So if publishers are still seeing value in single-player games then why does it seem as if they're disappearing? Why is it that these days it's more surprising to learn that a game will be released without a multiplayer component than with one? If the demand for single-player games hasn’t declined, then what changed? The answer is that the way games make money has changed. Season passes, loot boxes, microtransactions and “games as a service” are all components of this. Businesses exist to make money. As new milestones are reached and the potential for profit is realized priorities in the games industry shift. This is true of any industry. Gone are the days when maximum revenue was limited by the number of copies sold, and there is no better example of this than Grand Theft Auto V.

Grand Theft Auto V is a game defined by money. Of course, the story centres around bank robbers and the missions feature high stakes heists with millions of dollars on the line, but there’s much more to it than that. With a development and advertising budget of $265 million, GTA V is the second most expensive-to-produce video game in history. By the end of its first day in stores on September 17th, 2013 it had recouped that budget more than three times over, and since that first day on sale over four years ago it continues to appear on lists of top selling games each week. It broke scores of records for units shipped and had surpassed one billion dollars in sales before the end of its first week – all before Grand Theft Auto Online even launched. To date, GTA V has sold eighty-five million copies. When I began researching for this article it was the #4 best selling video game in the world – but before I finished it had climbed to #3. Conservative estimates put its total revenue at over $3 billion USD. To call Grand Theft Auto V the definition of a successful single-player game would be a massive understatement.

So with these figures in mind, it would be fair to say that anything attached to the Grand Theft Auto name will be a guaranteed success. Publisher Rockstar Games seemed to agree in a blog post at the end of 2013, promising single-player story DLC for the following year along with continued support and improvements for the fledgling GTA Online. Years went by, and the online mode continued to grow and find success with new content and regular updates, but the promised single-player DLC never materialized. Only recently in an interview with Game Informer did Rockstar comment on why the story content was shelved. Citing the commitment of resources towards launching the upgraded PS4 and Xbox One versions, the long awaited PC port and continued development on GTA Online, as well as feeling that Grand Theft Auto V was a “complete” game, they no longer felt that single-player expansions were either “possible or necessary”. There's no reason not to take this at face value. Rockstar is an impressive company, but their resources are not unlimited – something had to be prioritized. But why Online? Perhaps because by 2016 Grand Theft Auto Online had generated $500,000,000 on its own via “shark cards”, the vehicle through which Online allows players to purchase in-game currency using real money. Considering how the online service's success has continued to grow since then we can assume that number has also risen substantially. As successful as single-player DLC would no doubt have been for Rockstar, GTA Online proved to be more profitable and easier to manage with the resources at hand, and ultimately that decision has paid off so well that Take Two Interactive – Rockstar's parent company – now plans to implement what it calls “recurrent consumer spending” (aka microtransactions) in all of its games going forward.

And therein lies the issue that concerned gamers are dealing with today. Game publishers are businesses, and businesses follow the money. People voluntarily pay outrageous sums for loot boxes and other microtransactions and as a result, the platforms that support these methods are given priority – and the fact is that single-player-only games don't support them nearly as well. Yet in spite of all this, we still have holdouts. 2017's open-world single-player RPG Horizon Zero Dawn was Sony's best selling debut ever for a new IP and was lauded by critics. The majority of mainstream titles that Bethesda Softworks has published over the last five years – including recent hits Prey, Dishonoured 2, and Wolfenstein 2 – have been single-player story-driven games with no multiplayer component at all. Modern graphic adventure games like Life is Strange and The Walking Dead continue to captivate their audiences with the stories they tell and find critical success. We're even seeing the companies most gamers are quickest to point fingers at for the perceived decline defending their commitment to single-player and insisting that it's here to stay. As part of a statement regarding the closure of Visceral Games, EA executive vice president Patrick Söderlund said:

      “This truly isn’t about the death of single-player games – I love single-player, by the way – or story and character-driven games (...) Storytelling has always been part of who we are, and single-player games will of course continue.”

Rockstar Games director of design Imran Sarwar said in his interview with Game Informer:

      “We would love to do more single-player add-ons for games in the future. As a company, we love single-player more than anything, and believe in it absolutely – for storytelling and a sense of immersion in a world, multiplayer games don’t rival single-player games”.

So, are single-player games at risk? I would say no. There is still value – and profit – to be found in a single-player story. From a cold and calculated business perspective, a game's plot and setting are still valuable tools in marketing and a good story can keep people reminiscing and reengaging for years to come. But are single-player games going to change? Yes. Absolutely, and most gamers won't like it. We will see more single-player games that could stand on their own being shipped with multiplayer modes designed to support the “games as a service” model. In those that don't (and probably also still with those that do), we will likely continue to see the season pass model used. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to see loot boxes and other microtransactions popping up in single-player modes that can find a way to justify them, as we've recently seen in Middle Earth: Shadow of War. Hopefully, publishers and developers will make an effort to make these additions unobtrusive to our stories and experiences – but maybe they won't.

It's easy to decry companies for preying on our wallets, and I'm not at all suggesting that all game companies are innocent of shady practices and exploitative strategies – but these practices still exist in abundance today because they were successful. Maybe it began with microtransactions in multiplayer games, or maybe it goes as far back as the introduction of downloadable content, but the genie is out of the bottle now and there's no putting him back. Publishers know that the copy of their game that you paid for and own is not the limit of the money they can earn for it – there is no upper limit anymore. Single-player games aren’t going anywhere, but because they work – and work so well – these spending hooks are also here to stay.

So about that article ...

Some of you may remember an article that I wrote last year for a website called Beyond Gaming. It was the first (and to date, only) time I had written anything for someone else's platform and at the time it was kind of a big deal for me. You can read about my process and the events surrounding the article in this post I wrote after it went live, but as for the article itself I'd prefer you didn't read it, at least not where it's currently being hosted.

I made a serious error in judgement after that article went live. I never read through it completely on Beyond Gaming. I didn't check to see if changes had been made, I naively assumed I wouldn't need to. Surely the editor would have informed me if there were? I took the fact that there was no discussion or signifigant criticism from the editor to be a good thing, with a naivety that borders on stupidity. I did click the link to make sure it was working, saw my work posted on the site and then ... left. I had just written the article after all and had read through it on my local copy probably five times before and since submitting it. I didn't think I needed to. That was a mistake.

A few weeks ago I was going over some of my old work and decided to read through the article again. Rather than dig through my hard drive to find my local copy I opened up my "Behind the scenes" post and hit the link to Beyond Gaming, and for the first time I saw it as visitors to the site have seen it. To say that it lacks polish would be an understatement. The opening paragraph was posted twice, suggesting to me that it was copied and pasted paragraph-by-paragraph instead of the whole body at once, which is baffling to me. The formatting is a disaster. My own formatting isn't perfect but it was at least readable. In my original copy I separated quotes from the main body by spacing and indentation, like this:

            “Beyond Gaming has disappointed me.”

But in the final posted version the indentation and some of the spacing has been removed, resulting in quotes that seem to begin or end paragraphs where I didn't intend that to happen. Finally, the thing I find most disappointing was that all of the links and sources I included in the article had been removed. Some references to those sources are still there but if people want to see them I guess they'll just have to go look it up themselves. The links that I included were all as close to the original source as I could find, but when I submitted the article I offered to replace them with links to articles on the same subject matter on Beyond Gaming if any applied, assuming that those would correctly credit the original source. Of course, it turns out that this wouldn't have worked since none of the sources I linked in the article were ever covered by Beyond Gaming at any point in time. Sourcing articles on other publications is something I routinely did here and I don't think it's unusual in the industry to link to other sites if that's where you're getting your information from. Is this a policy of Beyond Gaming? I have no idea. The fact that this was never brought up beforehand and that all of my links were removed without discussion kind of sucks. 

The whole thing kind of sucks, to be honest. I can use this as a learning experience for more than just writing and games, and that's the only reason I don't regret associating with this site at all. The site is all but defunct now, with no regular posts and nothing but clickbait articles  - most of which have absolutely nothing to do with gaming - despite the "editor" telling me specifically that he hated that kind of thing. Click the "About" section on the website and you can see that everything they apparently stood for has been thrown into the trash, and what they stood for was in my opinion pretty questionable to begin with. Apparently their facebook page is still very active and where most of their gaming content is focused. I have no interest in going there.

I haven't heard anything from Beyond Gaming or its editor since the day after my article went live. I was told that advertising revenue from the article would be mine but never received any follow up in this regard. I'm not upset by this. I didn't do it for money and I didn't expect that it would generate much - if any. If I really wanted it I would have asked about it, but I don't feel entitled to it anyway. No contract was ever signed, no formal agreement ever made, which is also why I don't feel I owe them anything either and I'll be posting the article that I wrote, the way I wrote it, in its entirety in a separate post here on the blog shortly. This is something that I declined to do previously out of respect for Beyond Gaming - a respect that I no longer have.

It's possible that this was an accident. That something went wrong with the attachment and that the body of the article was messed up when the editor opened it on his end and had to be reassembled manually. That would explain the formatting issues. It might even explain the missing links. But it doesn't explain why the article was allowed to go live in the abysmal state it did or why I was never contacted to help fix those issues. It's embarrassing to think that people may have visited that site and thought that the sloppiness was all me. It's embarrassing that I linked to the article from here and that my readers saw that mess. I know my work isn't perfect and I know that the article wasn't perfect, but I worked hard on it and I deserved better than that. 

I'm not a journalist, but I would never have allowed that article to go live in the sloppy, embarrassing state it did. At least I know what I am and what I'm not, and I don't think the editors at that site can say the same.

UPDATE:  If you would like to read the article as I wrote it I've posted it here on Shock and Pause

Starting Fresh.

Hi there.

It's been just over six months since my last post, which if I'm being honest was nothing more than a low-effort attempt to keep my few regular readers from thinking I was giving up - a pretence which I soon abandoned entirely. I stopped wanting to write, stopped wanting to research and put time into a finished product that I didn't believe was ever going reach the quality I expected.

Let me be clear: I never thought that building a career out of a free web-based blogging platform would be easy and I never expected to see tangible results within a few months of starting, but what I did expect to see was an increase in my own confidence in myself and in my writing. I expected to start enjoying what I was doing more instead of less, and I didn’t.

When I began this whole thing I had a lot of uncertainties, but one thing I knew beyond a doubt was that the internet is so completely saturated with content creators that "video game blog" didn't have a chance in hell of succeeding if that was all I had to offer. At a guess there are probably more gaming blogs on the web than there are people living in my country (Canada, population 37 million if anyone's curious). Without some gimmick my chances of gaining traction and followers were roughly zero, or so I thought. Which is why I settled into the theme of "learning about games by teaching about games." It seemed like a great idea at the time. Maybe it still is and I just lacked the conviction to execute it properly. Maybe one day I'll go back to it, maybe not. But right now it doesn't work for me.

I'm not a games journalist, and knowing about games doesn’t make me one. I don't have a journalism degree or any formal training. I've come to recognize significant flaws in the single article I wrote for games website Beyond Gaming, but if a lack of polish was all that I thought was holding me back I wouldn't be giving up so easily. The truth is I don't think I enjoy writing about games, and if I don't enjoy it then what's the point? It would be no different than the job I have now, except that the bad attitude I would inevitably develop would risk alienating people I might actually like.

So where does this leave me? Is this a goodbye post? Well, no. Starting now Shock and Pause is going to be one of those uncountable gaming blogs with no gimmick, no special features or tricks. No more promises about weekly posts to guilt myself into keeping them. When I have something to say, I'll say it. I'll talk about games I've played, games I'm looking forward to and just games in general. The posts will be less formal than before. I'm doing this for me now, because I love games and I still have a lot to say about them. I still want to work in the industry but I don't think that journalism is the right path. There are other places that will be better for me and where I can do more good if I make the right calls. Maybe we'll see each other there?


As always, thanks for reading.

Words to Know - What is a Let's Play?

A “Let's Play” is a general term referring to a recorded playthrough of a videogame for the purpose of entertainment or instruction. Usually the recording will be edited to remove filler content and minimize showing parts of the playthrough that would not be interesting to viewers. For this reason gameplay that is played live on streaming platforms are generally seen as being distinct from pre-edited Let's Plays and for clarity's sake are instead referred to as Livestreams, though that term is not exclusive to videogame content. Let's Plays will usually include commentary by the person or people playing the game, either recording as they play or inserted over the footage later. A second camera in-picture setup showing the players face and reactions as they play is also common among Let's Players, particularly for horror games.

Let's Plays exist in a legal grey area, since the publisher of the game retains the distribution rights to any media assets, including video footage. However, most publishers allow and even encourage Let's Plays as they are valuable marketing tools.

Thanks for reading Words to Know. I haven't posted in awhile so I wanted to toss something up here to let you all know I'm still around. I've been working on some ideas for the blog but they won't be ready for awhile, so in the meantime I'll be continuing to make smaller posts sporadically and I'll post an update when I've got my plans straightened out. Until next time!

A Very Gamey Christmas post

(continuing my tradition of terrible names)

Merry Christmas everybody! I hope your holidays are going well already but hopefully I can help make them just a little bit brighter by sharing some fun seasonal celebrations from the world of video games.  If you don't happen to own any of the games on this list worry not! I've included some awesome festive video collections from some of my favorite youtube channels as well.  In no particular order ...