A new survey has found that over half of gamers prefer to play single-player titles.
According to Midia Research, this game mode is most popular across all platforms – particularly on mobile, with 58% of respondents saying they preferred single-player games.
The data from the survey was collected from Midia Research’s Q1 2024 and Q1 2023 consumer surveys across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Poland, Turkey, and South Africa.
Research found that older gamers were more drawn to single-player titles, with 74% of gamers aged over 55 choosing to play games solo.
I recommend taking a look at the full original article, the summary linked here may be a bit misleading. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single-player-games
This breakdown chart, in particular is very interesting. https://www.midiaresearch.com/storage/uploads/paragraphs/dbdbaba91de72cd615d8be1a0119cfca
Turns out that yes, slightly more than 50% of the people they surveyed prefer solo, but that’s distorted by older people going HARD towards that option. Every segment below 45 years old skews slightly towards multiplayer, although the split between what type of multiplayer is pretty even.
Gotta say, I HATE that PvP is the preference across all age groups among multiplayer fans. Outside of asynchronous competition, leaderboards and fighting games I profoundly dislike realtime PvP.
I feel like the reason people like pvp is because, well, humans are like the most advanced AI opponents and teammates you can have in a game. Most games struggle creating fun, realistic, and challenging AI opponents because it’s generally really difficult to do so.
Is that good, though? I don’t want realistic and challenging AI opponents, at least not most of the time. It works for a 1v1 fighting game, but you don’t want every enemy in Diablo being a smart, human-like entity capable of min/maxing their build and acting with real self preservation. You want them to act as a pincushion so you can test if your build is doing good damage and to watch them pop like so much bubble wrap.
So yeah, for 1v1 fighting games I want a human, but that’s not an intrinsically better solution than a “dumb” AI. It’s the opposite of that in most games, I’d say.
The Kingdom of Loathing guys (Jick and Mr Skullhead) had a development approach to keep their game system balanced. They felt that players had different primary motivations/enjoyment in the game and they wanted to make sure there was something for everyone. They divided players into four groups: Hearts, Clubs, Spades, and Diamonds.
Hearts enjoyed the social aspects of the game and would use the chat system and clans extensively.
Clubs were the PvP crowd and weren’t happy unless there were meaningful opportunities to battle other players.
Spades are explorers and look to every nook and cranny of the environment, and are interested in underlying game mechanics (this is me).
Diamonds are collectors and completists. They will scour environments to ensure they got everything and do all the sides because they want all the stuff.
Yeeeah, the motivations stuff for game design is very popular right now with devs big and small. It kinda rubs me the wrong way, although it’s hard to articulate exactly why.
I think it sits at an intersection of still wanting to look at players as behavioral data, but at the same time being sorta generic and too broad to inform much of anything specific. Still, that’s not to say you can’t do good work using it.
The reason why it might be fucked up is that while the KoL guys might design such a system to create game design that is fulfilling to all these groups, the MBA in charge of the development of an AAA game is going to be “how do we best monetize all these motivations”, as in “how do we exploit all these disparate personalities to make this game as fucked up addictive as possible for everyone”.
There are remarkably few MBAs acting as creative directors, but it’s true that the place where the motivations framework thing is most popular is triple A games as a service stuff. Honestly, it’s mostly used as a way for creatives just doing game designery things to explain how the game designery things align with the marketingy things and the businessy things. That’s part of why I don’t love it, it doesn’t really do much, it’s mostly a translation layer.