A lot of the MP people likely did the same thing - played once or twice and quit. We have no stats on repeat MP players, or how the community grew/contracted since release.
Troy
The QT3 folks playing SI online are great (granted, with my whopping 1 game sample size and 2 turns in). Since SI takes <10 minutes a turn, and most games seem to have standardized on 1 turn/day, you should be able to easily play 2 games of SI (on QT3 and Cryptic Comet boards).
Thats why games that don’t have me playing with random strangers are the best kinds of games for me.
L4D1 and 2 is all about the qt3 steam group, it really really makes the game. I don’t see how anyone could play it singleplayer for long and enjoy it. Halo, gears of war, borderlands, etc all have co-op, which is one of the fun ways to get people of disparate skill levels together to have fun. Games need to have ways for people of lower skill to be able to join a game and still feel like they are able to contribute and not get harassed. Demigod and DotA games are terrible because they do the opposite of this and actively punish a team for having a new player. It could be argued that l4d does this as well to some extent, but its not as bad, a noob player who listens to simple directions like “follow me” and shoots at zombies can contribute well enough until they get the hang of it and won’t ruin everyone’s game.
Maybe, just maybe, the appeal of Demigod multiplayer (or lack thereof) has to less to do with some earthshaking, fundamental shift in human preference away from playing games that involve other people, and more to do with the fact that all of the word of mouth and half the professional reviews described the multiplayer as often unplayable.
It’s a reflection of the reality that single player gamers dominate the market. Multiplayer gamers are a niche. Well, larger than a niche, but a minority. Many of the MMO players I know aren’t even multiplayer gamers. They basically solo.
That was my opinion as well. I love online multiplayer but after reading that it was impossible upon release, and how upon hearing that most people who bought it aren’t playing online why would I buy this game when left 4 dead is on steam for $8 right now and borderlands is sitting in the drive of my PS3?
That would seem to just support the point. Multiplayer gamers are going to go in droves to a very few games. Something like MW2 will have a high percentage, but little else will. Multiplayer games suffer from the schooling factor. If no one else is playing, the no multiplayer will buy that game because no one is playing. All the small minority of multiplayer gamers cluster on a very few games.
Most games are going to be dominated by single player customers and a few select games will have a high, and largely temporary aside from very few games, multilplayer community.
Single player may be more popular, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t missing out on a richer and deeper experience. If people refuse to try multiplayer their just plain wrong in my opinion. I mean, the majority doesn’t play videogames at all - that doesn’t mean that videogames are overrated or don’t represent the “core” audience. There is no core audience.
Can I pause whenever I want in multiplayer? Can I relax and half watch TV while I play in multiplayer? Can I play the game once every 2 or 3 months and have it be fun in multiplayer (versus a bunch of assholes yelling at me for sucking)? Can I play on my laptop for an hour when I have time to kill waiting for an airplane?
What exactly am I missing in multiplayer based on why I play games?
I’m not going to argue with you about what your personal preferences are (whatever the hell they may be, I’m not going to read your post history to find out), but describing multiplayer games as a “niche” is laughable.
Pretty much every super-huge series or gaming phenom (I can think of, particularly the dominant serial games people seem to complain so much about) have been multiplayer… from Blizzard’s early games to WoW, Sims online, Counterstrike, Left4Dead, TF2, Wii Sports, Madden, Rock Band/GH, Halo. It’s not just that these games are dominant, but they’ve been platform and company defining, skyrocketing Valve to global dominance a as a digital store front, Blizzard as the premiere model for recurring revenues, Halo making the XBOX into the strong console it is today, Wii Sports making the Wii the unlikely winner of this generation’s console wars, Madden and GH driving EA and Activision’s dominance of the publishing game.
My post was to suggest that if you have a point to prove, you should find better examples than an only modestly popular game with notoriously terrible multiplayer reception. If you have a lot of figures and stats about game sales that will somehow overwhelm the very obvious success of multiplayers’ shining stars, then I’ll be interested.
If you just come back talking about how 11 million+ people pay blizzard subscriptions every month just so they can experience single player fetch/collect/kill quests, or embark on more personal polemics about how you best like to sit on your couch, and how often you’d like to press pause … I’ll feel even worse about making a reply to this topic than I already do
Civ IV, Master of Magic, The Sims, Sim City (hell, the whole Sim genre), Bejeweled (the whole casual genre for that matter). Any number of HUGE RPG’s like all the Ultimas, Oblivion, etc. The list goes on, all huge games, all either exclusively or predominantly single player. Hell, Portal was on the list of game of the year for many people and it’s only single player.
Edit: Oh, and Guitar Hero and it’s various offspring. Not sure how that’s classified as it has a co-op, but not really a multiplayer (well, RockBand has online band mode).
You are right, the games you mentioned are big and some made those particular companies. There’s no way to know, but I’m pretty sure most would have been huge even without multiplayer. My friends and I all bought Diablo, but only a couple played much multiplayer. We all played the Halo campaign, but no one plays multiplayer.
The bit about notoriously terrible multiplayer reception is a bit disingenuous. It had a problem that got high visibility and was fixed after a few weeks, but the multiplayer experience in the game was supposed to be good.
From a financial perspective, you want to look at a modestly popular game for your stats, not the megahits. There’s only a handful of those each year. You can’t run a development house hoping to hit the lottery with the next game. You need to bank on average game stats and hope you can keep hitting average or better until you get a breakout hit. Just ask the littered history of bankrupt MMOs…
Like WarCraft and WarCraft II, which required a LAN? While they were genre establishing games, their multiplayer was experienced by a tiny percentage of players.
According to Wikipedia, battle.net had something like 12 million people, pre-WoW integration. That’s impressive. But Diablo has sold nearly 20 million copies, and StarCraft like 10 million, which means maybe 30-50% of players registered an account to play online. Impressive, but it still shows that the draw to their games may still be single-player.
What about World of WarCraft? Isn’t the lesson everyone took from its success is that you should try to make your MMO play more like a single-player RPG at the start and not force players to constantly form groups to succeed?
Sims online
Really? This was huge and genre defining? More like company killing. The Sims was huge. Sims Online? A flop.
Counterstrike
For sure. Though it’s a bit chicken/egg, since it relied on the enormous single-player success of Half-Life, which if people recall, had pretty crappy multiplayer. Team Fortress also piggypacked on Half-Life’s single-player success.
Left4Dead
True, but it relied on the enormous success of Steam and Valve’s other games. Would it have been as successful had it been released by a random game studio and not been on Steam? Same with Team Fortress 2.
A better example than either of Valve’s multiplayer games is the success of the Battlefield series.
Anyway, the data says the majority of users never plays multiplayer. Even the biggest games—and right now, the biggest of the big is Modern Warfare—see anywhere from 20-40% go online to play multiplayer. Which doesn’t mean multiplayer isn’t important, but it’s not a major stretch to say that the single-player experience still dominates gaming.
Single-player and multiplayer are tied together because you need X players to have a viable multiplayer community, and to get them you’re going to have to sell enough overall copies to largely single-player fans to create that community in the first place. I’d be surprised if even the biggest multiplayer fans have gone online once with every game they’ve owned that has multiplayer functionality.
If you have a lot of figures and stats about game sales that will somehow overwhelm the very obvious success of multiplayers’ shining stars, then I’ll be interested.
Gosh, you’ve been so convincing with your own stats! I mean, excepting an MMO like WoW, you’re talking about correlation of multiplayer and success, not causation. There are just as many successful games without multiplayer. Consider successes like Fallout 3, all 3D GTA games before IV (does anyone still play its multiplayer?), etc.
As ckessel and steve point out, you must not play a lot of games, then. Or have a pretty selective definition of “super-huge.” Anyone who mentions Sims Online to “prove” the dominance of online MP without mentioning The Sims juggernaut should ask for a refund on whatever they’re smoking.
from Blizzard’s early games to WoW, Sims online, Counterstrike, Left4Dead, TF2, Wii Sports, Madden, Rock Band/GH, Halo.
First off, most of the games you list include both SP and MP game modes; while I don’t have stats on all of them, I’m reasonably willing to bet the SP-only players outnumber the MP ones on all of them. Also, are we talking online MP or same-console MP? Because several of those, like Guitar Hero, focused on the latter, with the former being a later addition.
So what’s left of the MP-only games? WoW, by far the single most popular MMORPG ever which also happens to be the most solo-friendly MMORPG I’ve ever played (coincidence? I doubt it); Sims Online, which was a colossal flop and proved once again that EA couldn’t figure out how to make the MMO thing work out (see also: Motor City Online, Earth & Beyond); and FPSs like CS and TF2, which were and still are popular within the hardcore shooter community, but whose online numbers pale in comparison to a lot of other games (right now there are more people on Steam playing Football Manager 2010 than TF2).
When you reach the point that you have only a couple hours a night, max, to play games and you’re faced with the question of: “Do I spend the next 30 minutes waiting to see if everyone shows up and is on point for their game tonight, or do I just boot up this game and get a full 30 minutes of play by myself out of it?”
Beyond MMOs, I don’t play any games online anymore.
Why? Most everyone I run into is a combination of asshat/cheater/quitter. I just don’t have any desire to wade through the dreck of humanity trying to find a couple of honest gamers who are just in it for the fun. Everyone else is running hacks, and/or a total fucktard, and/or quits when they start to lose.
I play MMOs and I play games with strong single player modes. I might play co-op action games or the occasional PBEM wargame but that’s so infrequent it might as well never happen. When I want to game, I want a concentrated dose of gaming goodness on my terms and without having to worry about anyone that doesn’t have AI for brains.
AI generally isn’t a racist moron who should never have been issued a microphone. AI shows up and plays about as long as I feel like playing. AI never gets bored of a game I like. AI’s my, sniff, bestest friend in the whole wide world.
The only problem with my friend AI is that he’s either unbeatably good (at a few games, like chess), or he’s a weaker opponent than a grade school kid (at games that I like to play).
He’s also about as fun to chat with as my cat.
