Single-player games will be dead in three years, says industry analyst
So game development studios desperately want to move the entirety of our hobby online in order to mimic the recurring revenue model of MMORPGs. That's not exactly news, but it is news when an industry analyst makes an eyebrow-raising claim regarding the immediate future of the genre. To that effect, Eurogamer recently attended a "closed-door, Sony-organized panel discussion on the future of video games," which featured an analyst predicting the end of single-player titles by 2014.
Mark Cerny, a "veteran video game consultant," used the 2009 single-player RPG Demon's Souls as an example, saying that its mixture of traditional offline gameplay and social connectivity to other gamers experiencing the same title is the wave of the future.
"The funny thing here is, we don't even know what to call this. Is it single-player or is it multiplayer? We don't even have the words. It's kind of Orwellian. If you don't have any word for freedom you can't have a revolution," Cerny said. What exactly is that revolution, and will it be good for gamers? Check back in 2014 to find out.
