News

Single player games are an endangered species, according to Blizzard's Pardo
Posted: 03.10.2012 18:55 by JonahFalcon Comments: 6
In the last few weeks, much has been made of the "death" of single player games. Insomniac stated that it was "done" with developing single player games, while Electronic Arts prez Frank Gibeau bragged in a pamphlet he never green-lit a single player only title.

Blizzard exec VP Rob Pardo feels the pain of gamers who just want a single player experience during his interview with Games Industry BIZ.

Pardo stated, "It's really sad. There's just a lot of elements out there that conspire to make those games difficult to make now. Between pirating or the ability for people to rent games, it's hard for publishers to pour millions and millions of dollars into a game and not necessarily see the return they need to make those budgets realistic."

He went on to stated that most of the multiplayer grafting comes from executives and not the game designer.

"Someone that's more business-oriented or production-oriented will graft a business model onto a game because that's what they think is going to drive the most revenue, but the game doesn't really support it," Pardo noted.
Source: Massively

Comments

By The_Tingler (SI Veteran Member) on Oct 03, 2012
The_Tingler
The day games stop being single-player is the day I get out of the industry. It'll never happen, especially as this type of headline has been printed in every gaming site or magazine since Ultima Online and Quake.
By danfreeman (SI Core) on Oct 04, 2012
danfreeman
Completely agree Tingler,go f yourself blizz,you`re the only company stupid enough to actually think that,there are stuff you can do in sp games that you will never be able to in mp ones and there are many more reasons why sp will never die.
By nocutius (SI Elite) on Oct 04, 2012
nocutius
Yea, you can almost smell an agenda when Blizzards talks about this particular issue.
By HenoKutus (SI Core) on Oct 04, 2012
HenoKutus
Well,they only made 3 games in the last 5 or 7 years-Warcraft+dlc,Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 but people will get eventually bored from these mp games.
I defenitly could not play 2 years everyday on the same game,i would go insane.
By lichlord (SI Core) on Oct 04, 2012
lichlord
says the comp who devellopes MP focused games... their so much on SP and Bioware proved it in the past with dragon age one, Bethesda proves it with Oblivion,Skyrim and it goes on

i do not want to be forced to play MP games just because some company think its the way forward... its not but if they want to focus on the MP market let them do so but do not think without prove that its a dying thing... just because EA does something stupid like they ussually do...

@Heno or more then a month for that case i never could keep up on on GW,lol name the MMO i always play them with pause seasons it can go up for 3 years 85% of the thing i play is solo and perhaps they few onlines might be with more or less RL friends ussually
By SiyaenSokol (SI Elite) on Oct 06, 2012
SiyaenSokol
Multiplayer is popular, but we all want to play Single Player games, thus I doubt that it will ever die.

I actually don't really know why Blizzard decided to go for online only games. I see some positive side to it, but mainly I think that it was a terrible idea.