The billions of worker-hours and dollars players put into those games have to come from somewhere, and many players could be seeing shorter, more linear games as worse values for the time and money in comparison.Īfter all, why should someone pay $60 for a self-contained story when they can often pay much less (or nothing) to play a game whose engaging online component ensures it will functionally never end? Then there's the explosion of indie games that can often provide similar (if often less technically impressive) experiences for a fraction of the budget or cost to the consumer. Look at that list of huge, years-long multiplayer successes I listed above. This is where it's reasonable to question whether the big-budget, single-player story is peaking or is already on a downswing as a market force. "AAA non service / single player games can succeed," he wrote in a follow-up tweet, "but they really need to be the best in the genre and executed perfectly."Įnlarge / When a great single-player game like Prey underperforms, you have to wonder what will succeed. Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad writes on Twitter that " Prey, RE7, Dishonored 2, Deus Ex" all underperformed sales expectations this year. Maybe Visceral is more of a canary in the coal mine, though: a big, public warning that the format can't sustain itself anymore. The release schedule proves that worries about an immediate death for the big-budget single-player narrative are being overplayed. Next year's release calendar already includes Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us, Part 2, Kingdom Hearts III, God of War, Monster Hunter World, and plenty of other titles that show the industry isn't ready to give up on sprawling single-player stories. Later this month we'll see Super Mario Odyssey, Wolfenstein II, and Assassin's Creed Origins all released on the very same day, rounding out a year that has seen plenty of similar single-player titles.
So is Visceral's fate the death knell for big-budget, linear, story-driven games? In the near term, at the very least, major publishers don't seem to be giving up on the format. And if that's the case, what kind of chance do lesser-known franchises have? Advertisement As the Visceral shuttering shows, even a mega-franchise like Star Wars isn't always enough to justify that kind of budget for a single-player adventure. Within EA, multiplayer-focused games like FIFA are generating $800 million a year through the sale of digital card packs, while critically acclaimed single-player games like Dead Space 2 have reportedly struggled to make back their $60 million development budget. Even single-player mega-franchise Grand Theft Auto has gotten in on the act with the huge success of GTA Online. These are the e-sports and "games-as-a-service" titles that can continue to bring in money long after a single-player title has been returned to the shelf and forgotten about.
From Hearthstone and Overwatch, to Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Rocket League, to Dota 2 and League of Legends, to Clash of Clans and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege, and on and on, the games getting the most player attention (and money) today tend to be never-ending online competitions.
That's all a bit vague, but the wording suggests that the "story-based, linear adventure game" being planned didn't look like it was going to turn a profit given "fundamental shifts in the marketplace." In other words, they started making Uncharted and now they want Destiny.įurther Reading Take Two cancels plans to stop printing money via Grand Theft Auto OnlineLooking around at the most popular games these days, it's not hard to see the market shift Söderlund is talking about. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe. The core of all that worry comes from a section of the blog post EA's Patrick Söderlund wrote to announce Visceral's shutdown (emphasis added): But the abrupt shutdown has also caused a bit of an existential crisis to creep into the game industry chatter regarding the future of big-budget, single-player, story-driven gaming in general. Further Reading EA shuts down Visceral, will reboot its Star Wars game due to “marketplace”Yesterday's news that EA is shutting down Visceral Games is bad news for fans of franchises like Dead Space and for the studio's unnamed Star Wars project.
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