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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.
Storyboard: Red light
When it comes to roleplaying, we've got more than our fair share of elephants in the room. Things we all know are taking place, that fall under the same aegis as the rest of the hobby, but things we don't really want to acknowledge publicly. Partly because you can have good roleplayers, people you know and play with, who have some less-savory elements lurking in the background. It's hard not to notice that a fellow roleplayer is cliquish, isolationist, and condescending... but it's very possible for a friend to be heavily into erotic roleplay (ERP) without you realizing it. And it needs to be talked about. It needs to be addressed, because there's something strange about the entire roleplaying community pretending that it doesn't exist. From a combination of factors -- squick, inappropriateness, and just plain disinterest -- we've allowed a shadow community to grow up in the space around roleplaying, with the tacit hope that if no one mentions ERP as if it were a part of roleplaying, it'll just go away and we can go back to what we were doing before. Before I go any further in this column, I'd like to note that some stuff in here might be squickworthy. It's the nature of the beast. Please tread carefully, and I apologize in advance to anyone skeeved out.
The Daily Grind: When do you stop paying attention to parts of the game?
We admit that yeah, there are places where the developers clearly just don't care any more. But it's not like we players are exactly blameless here, either. World of Warcraft players freely admit that they've long since stopped reading the quest text, leading to several cases of players standing around and bashing their metaphorical heads against a wall because they didn't actually read the text before jetting off. It's not necessarily that the quest text is bad (that's another discussion altogether), just that there comes a certain point when 90% of the time it's so irrelevant that you don't need to care. And if it's not the quest text, it's something else. You turn off the music in City of Heroes to just listen to Pandora instead. You start browsing for known good builds in Champions Online rather than figuring one out. You take a look at what you have to do between campaign missions in Guild Wars so you can stop bothering with sidequests. When have you stopped paying attention to a part of a game, however minor? Have you ever tried to care again, or have you remained apathetic toward that element from then on? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of something or other lorem ipsum watermelon rutabaga cantelope lorem ipsum: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so if you noticed the text here has changed mention butterflies when you respond to this Daily Grind!
EA abandoning offline game development
Kotaku points out a grim omen for the future of offline gaming in the form of some comments from Electronic Arts executive Frank Gibeau. In an interview at Develop, Gibeau minces few words about the future of the firm's business model. "They're [EA studio heads] very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay -- be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services -- as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you're out. I think that model is finished. Online is where the innovation, and the action, is at," he says. While it's clear why publishers are desperate to move everything online (hello monetization and DRM), the benefits to the consumer are decidedly less apparent. Whether the larger gaming industry adopts an MMO-style access model remains to be seen, but EA is clearly moving in that direction.
With success comes the flood
Remember when Data Design Interactive was going to port a "few" titles to the Wii? Apparently, a "few" means "more than thirty." By the end of the year, it looks like we will be rich in clunky, poorly-reviewed budget ports. Thanks, Data Design. And by "thanks," we mean, "gah, why?" Not a single game we've seen announced is new ... and we're not sure we'd want to see a new one if they made it.Don't let the cute look of Ninjabread Man fool you. All signs point to awful.
A possible justification for Sonic RPG?
Level Up's N'Gai Croal has been thinking about the Bioware Sonic RPG announcement, and, like the rest of us, trying to make some kind of sense of it. Why would anyone make a Sonic RPG? Why would Bioware jump onto a ship that is not only sinking, but sinking at blast-processed speed?Croal thinks it's because they're using Sega's franchise-- and money-- to practice making kid-friendly handheld games, so they can then make their own good ones. It makes sense-- they made a Dungeons and Dragons game, learning about fantasy RPG's, and now they're working on Dragon Age; Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic lead into Mass Effect and Jade Empire.The good news is that all of these licensed games turned out great. That doesn't mean we're going to allow ourselves to have high hopes. We're all out of optimism for new Sonic games.
