Feel Like Going Solo?

Ever feel like sitting around and just playing with yourself?

By yourself. BY yourself. Not like that, you filthy-minded perv.

Anyway! I was scrolling through GamesIndustry.Biz and stumbled upon a piece about single-player games. Apparently, over half of gamers prefer solo play, and this nugget was taken from a study by MiDiA Research. I’ve never heard of them, but they supposedly help people make “informed decisions.”

Naturally, I clicked through to the study because, honestly, the GI article was a whopping six sentences long. (Good summary, I guess?) The MiDiA article wasn’t much longer but spent a good chunk griping about the gaming industry’s obsession with live service models and the giant pile of cash studios rake in from microtransactions.

Breaking news: cosmetics and in-game purchases make a ton of money. Shocker.

MiDiA lists a few studios that aimed for live service models and failed hard.

Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with most of them, but one caught my eye: Anthem. The issue with Anthem wasn’t that it was live service but that…well…it was Anthem. It was bad. They hyped up this gorgeous world and fabulous flying suits, but that hands-on pre-order test? Absolute garbage. An empty, boring world with nothing to do.
I wasn’t the only one who canceled my pre-order.

But I digress.

Let’s toss in this neat infographic from the article.

In a nutshell, the rest of the article says two things: one, recent attempts at live service games have tanked hard. And two, once you hit your mid-20s, life hits back. You’re busy, you’ve got responsibilities, and it gets harder to coordinate with friends. I feel this. Coordinating game time with my sister is a logistical nightmare – she’s juggling her stuff, and I’ve got my chaos, too. Honestly, I’m impressed we managed to make it work at all!

This made me think about survival games. As you may know, I’ve been the Community Manager for The Infected for over three years, and in that time, I’ve seen an endless stream of requests for multiplayer. Endless. I even created a particular forum space where staff shove all these requests into one epic thread spanning five pages.

In survival games, the multiplayer debate is constant. Sometimes people ask nicely, like, “Hey, could you maybe add this?” And sometimes you get the charming, “ME AND MY TWELVE FRIENDS WON’T BUY WITHOUT MULTIPLAYER, AND YOU’RE LOSING ALL OUR MONEY.” (Pics of friends or they don’t exist.)

When it comes to multiplayer survival games, I’m torn. Overwhelmingly, I’m against it. I won’t deep dive here (I’ve got another article for that), but adequately balancing a survival game is hard enough for a solo developer– when you start adding more players (and more math!), it gets messier. A lot of survival titles (not naming names here) have no mechanical depth and zero struggle/difficulty. And I don’t mean difficulty like in an MMO, where it’s just a matter of gear or buffing yourself with special food. I mean actual survival difficulty: balancing limited inventory and figuring out whether to risk venturing for water during a storm. Real shit.

But yeah, I’m off track again.

In games without real depth, throwing in more players makes everything easier. You end up building mega-mansions or dealing with artificially hard boss mobs that exist solely to add “challenge.” On the flip side, when a game has mechanical depth and layered consequences, adding more players doesn’t dumb it down. In fact, it can increase the difficulty. Think about it: now you’ve got to scrounge food for more people and manage water or shelter. Suddenly, survival’s back in focus.

So that’s my take: multiplayer can totally fucking tank the feel of a survival game, when poorly balanced. What about you? Do you prefer going solo or teaming up, and does that change when it comes to survival games versus other genres? Drop your thoughts – I’m curious if others see it the same way!