Editorial: The necessity of single-player

The necessity of single-player

          Last week we talked about how EA’s closure of Visceral Games in order to move into development of what seems to be exclusively multiplayer games might’ve been a bad play on their part. Today I’ll be continuing the argument on why single-player games are still not just a requirement in the industry, but the bread and butter of video games and what makes them great.

          The notion that the days of single-player only games are numbered is one that various publishers and gaming news outlets have preached several times for many years as if they were doomsday prophets. Especially since the Internet reached gaming, creating the juggernaut known as online gaming as a result. Now you could play your favourite games with randos from all around the globe if the game would allow it. Suddenly everyone was jumping on the online craze, adding in multiplayer components into games that didn’t even need them, for better or for worse. Gaming would never be the same.

          As a result, plenty of people were saying the end was nigh for singleplayer experiences as a whole. But just like how the Angry Birds developer said that mobile gaming was going to destroy consoles entirely, they’re still going strong over a decade after the argument began.

          So why are they so important? For that answer, we can go back to a familiar argument: the Howard Moskowitz spaghetti sauce argument.

          If you’re unfamiliar with Moskowitz and his pasta story, you’re in for a treat. Sometime in the 1970’s, Moskowitz was working for pasta sauce company Prego who wanted him to design the perfect type of sauce for them that would make millions. But instead of creating just one supreme sauce to rule them all, Moskowitz went in the complete opposite direction: he made forty-five. Each of the different type of sauce varied from each other, whether they had more garlic, more spice, less of both, and much more. He offered the different types of sauce to Americans, and discovered that they tended to fall into three groups: those who like plain spaghetti sauce, those who like spicy sauce, and those who prefer their sauce to be extra chunky. Thanks to his research, Prego was the first company to supply an extra chunky style of sauce, earning them the cash money they’d hoped for.

          And that’s what companies are missing when they say single-player games are a dying breed. With multiplayer games nearly all falling into the first-person shooter category, the variety brought by the single-player market is what brings variety to the industry. This year alone we’ve had spending single-player games such as Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Nintendo’s offerings and several more, resulting in one of the best years for gaming ever.

          EA wants to keep giving you the same pasta sauce they know makes money, but they forget that a huge portion of the people paying for their games prefer extra chunky sauce.

Song of the Week

Meridian (Day) – Horizon: Zero Dawn