this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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I appreciate the sentiment but the (very shitty) reality is single player games don't come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games in the current climate. Like no where even remotely close in terms of effort to profit. You can straight up clone call of duty every year, or add a few maps to fortnite, or add a new operator to siege, and monetize every tiny fraction of the game thru micro transactions and people will keep on playing and keep on paying.
Single player games operate pretty much the opposite. You buy it once. Play thru it. Beat it. And generally never touch it again unless maybe some dlc comes out and you might add a few more hours to it and then never think about it again.
I say this as a giant fan of single narrative games, it's just a much smarter business move to pump out shitty online multiplayer games.
Fortnite was released in 2017, last year it netted almost $6 billion.
Call of duty has been dog water for like a decade. Its been the best selling game every single year since 2009 unless Rockstar releases a game (and Hogwarts legacy randomly dominating one year).
World of Warcraft came out in 2004. Last year they announced they had over 7 million active subscribers... Over two decades later.
Apex legends came out in 2019, last year it made over $3 billion.
The list goes on and on and on. You just can't compete with weirdos obsessed with showing off a wizard hat on their character in an online game or busting open a loot box to get a new weapon skin or something.
On the one hand, you’re right that the market for micro transaction laden multiplayer games is much larger than single player games. On the other hand, the market for people who want single player games is still very large. You showed that yourself mentioning Rockstar games and Harry Potter.
So while many publishers want a piece of that larger pie, every publisher trying for it just leads to over saturation and greater odds that a game will fail entirely. So there is still incentive for publishers to release large single player games even if the pie is smaller since there may be less competition making it easier to stand out. And what the article is saying is that, within that pie, one way to stand out is to avoid micro transactions. And since it’s discussing single player games specifically, I don’t see a lot of relevance for bringing up multiplayer games that exist in a different part of the gaming world.