Recently Gamespot had a chance to interview Electronic Art’s (EA) CEE, Peter Moore, who had quite a lot to say. However during one point of the interview, Gamespot had asked why there was no single-player included in the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront, to which Peter Moore had the following to say;
“So, there’s two phenomena with that statement. The first is that yes, you might be right. The second is that very few people actually play the single-player on these kinds of games. That’s what the data points to.”
So in a nutshell, due to several popular titles such as Call of Duty and even EA’s own Battlefield series, it would seem that the data insists that gamers simply don’t want a single-player campaign for their first person shooters, so the data says. However I’m interested in exactly what data he is referring to and what metrics are being collected. Better yet, I’d wonder how in touch they are with the gaming community.
I know for a fact that gamers have been asking or more first person shooters with an interesting story, to immerse them. Sure, jumping online to hang out with friends or blowing people away is fun, I’m guilty of doing this as well. But there have been decent attempts to create a single-player campaign to draw gamers in. Hell, even Call of Duty has a some what decent story, most have even if it’s been recycled a few times. Even Battlefield did this, in fact gamers have been asking for a follow-up to the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for a while now. Bad Company, both 1 and 2 were amazing games. They enabled the gamer with so much freedom that it was paramount for a game to do that much, well other than the Grand Theft Auto games (which also are mainly single-player games).
Perhaps, Peter Moore, the issue isn’t that all gamers do is play online. Perhaps the issue is that companies have failed to create an immersible campaign for gamers that they merely lose interest the poor attempt included in the “finished product.” There’s tons of games out there that feature both single and multiplayer modes, and they get equal billing for it. Many first person shooters are single player online campaigns, mainly because the development team wanted to focus on creating a believable and enjoyable world, something that they crafted and what gamers to love. Maybe instead of trying to rush a product to market you should instead get feedback from the community, you know, the people who will ultimately be the ones that buy the game in the first place?
Lets also not forget those gamers who may not even be able to play a online at all. There are still gamers who don’t have a quality connection or even better, what about our military force’s gamers? We all know they love to game, but what happens when they’re deployed in the middle of nowhere without a connection? Guess that means they can’t play and you got to wonder if they take that into consideration and would even take the time to buy the game in the first place. There’s a lot of factors here that I’m sure this “data” doesn’t include, nor has EA taken into consideration either.
What do you think? Do you think that gamers would rather play a single-player over a multiplayer game or vice versa. Would you rather a choice in the decision or does it not matter to you?
