On Game Tunnel, you can read this interesting piece of work by one Russell Carroll. The gist? From the horse’s mouth:
Multiplayer gaming is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think that online multiplayer modes are all that great. Unless I’m playing in the same room as the person I’m playing against, I lose the emotional and physical connection that makes multiplayer games fun.
There’s two points to cover here. Lets start with the simple facts. Online multiplayer does not sell most games. It just doesn’t. The facts and figures back up people buying all kinds of game and playing it mostly if not exclusively single player. Of course, that wouldn’t count for MMOs, but in general, it’s true (Unreal Tournament for instance? Mostly played single player…). So in that point, the numbers back up Mr. Russel.
That being said, with the success of Live and considering things like Battlefield, it’s lesser cousin Battlefront, and many other games like that, people like to play multiplayer games online. Yeah, not enough to drive all sales, but enough that not having a multiplayer component in your game can/will hurt sales. As Russel says, sure it’s better to have players in your living room with you, that often doesn’t work out and it’s damn hard to get 16 people together with 16 tvs and consoles attached to them. You can do that online pretty easily.
More from Mr. Carroll:
Playing against someone I don’t know or care about further dampens the experience for me, and adding a headset on top of that, just so that I can listen to some 17 year-old who thinks that profanity (and their M-rated title) somehow makes them an adult only makes me want to avoid the playing online any further. (can I cast my vote for changing the ‘M’ rating to ‘J’ for Juvenile)
Welcome to the internet. Yep, a fair amount of people playing online are jackasses. No kidding. To counter that you need to do things like play on the same servers or with the same people over and over. Find people you like to play with games, friend them or favorite the server and keep going back there. If it’s on a PC you find a server with active moderators. If it’s on a Live type service, you friend people you liked to play and invite them to play again when they are online. It takes more work than just randomly joining a service, agreed completely. But it’s well worth it.
Overall Russell’s argument is that he doesn’t like losing to people better than him, doesn’t care to play against people he doesn’t know and would rather play single player because it’s less work. Not a lot to say to that, other than to ask if those kids are still on his lawn…
What Would Matt Do: Play multiplayer all the day long. It’s the spice of life. Especially with the direction AI has taken recently. It’s going downhill, not getting better, in most cases. Bluh.
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