That trend along with the growth of subscription services like Game Pass and the invention of cloud streaming have just about ended any hope for defenders of offline play, at least when it comes to big studio games. It is the same as EA tweeting a picture of a Minion farting.īut the magnitude of grievance posting that took place after this tweet shows there's clearly still anxiety among gamers and developers over the moneymaking potential that has drawn so many big publishers toward free-to-play monetization models-gacha, battle passes-and popular multiplayer genres like battle royale. I don't think throwaway Twitter posts mean much about EA's actual strategy, in other words. Just this week, EA revealed some very early footage of the new Skate game, which will presumably have an online component, but probably not as its main attraction. Under its Originals label, EA also published singleplayer games Lost in Random last year, Sea of Solitude in 2019, and Fe in 2018. The messaging didn't change-EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen said in 2019 that the company was "doubling down on live services," for instance-but along with the upcoming EA singleplayer games I've mentioned already, a new Seattle studio is working on "expanding the narrative, storytelling, and character development opportunities in the Battlefield series," which sure sounds like a task that involves a new singleplayer game (maybe with co-op). That possibly led EA to pull back on those live service ambitions, because it did not go the same route with The Sims 4, which released in 2014.Įven though Blizzard's Diablo 3 is the example of an always-online game blowing up on the launch pad, Diablo 4 is also going to be always online, too. In 2012, EA executive Frank Gibeau boasted that he had not greenlit a single game that would be "developed as a singleplayer experience." A little later, the always-online requirement in EA's 2013 SimCity reboot ended up causing a Diablo 3-style launch meltdown. (Wait, how do other people stop the ship in Sea of Thieves?)Īlthough big and small developers continue to produce celebrated singleplayer games, fear of corporate antagonism toward them isn't unfounded. "They're a 10 but they anchor to stop the ship," tweeted (opens in new tab) Sea of Thieves on the same day, for example.
Other videogames have uncontroversially used the same format recently. But that's decidedly not what's being called out here. It's the meme format itself strikes me as a bit gauche: I wouldn't let my kids refer to people by an objectifying attractiveness number, at least if I had kids, and not just a bunch of plants. (Glad to know they're taking the L, whatever that entails.) "We'll take this L cause playing single player games actually makes them an 11." "Roast well deserved," EA tweeted a few hours after it posted the initial tweet. (Although it certainly could have a multiplayer element, and Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was good.) Although Dragon Age: Dreadwolf was once rumored to have a big live service element, it was later described as a singleplayer-focused game, and the new Mass Effect will almost definitely be a singleplayer RPG like Andromeda. Meanwhile, BioWare failed to succeed with a Destiny-like live service game, and is currently working on new Mass Effect and Dragon Age RPGs. (Both Dead Space sequels notably included multiplayer elements.) The company is also in the process of remaking the original Dead Space, Visceral's singleplayer horror classic.
EA corporate leadership wouldn’t know what a '10' looks like in terms of video games."Īt the time Visceral was shut down, EA CEO Andrew Wilson denied that the decision was about "singleplayer versus multiplayer." EA did eventually release a singleplayer Star Wars game, Respawn's Fallen Order, which is getting a sequel next year. Not because the developers are bad but because EA the corporation forces them to rush games out. "Also, if you break game rating scores down to a 10 point scale most EA games are a solid 6 or 7. "This is the company that shut down my studio and laid off ~100 great developers because we were making a single player game," wrote Mumbach (opens in new tab).
EA shuttered Visceral in 2014 while it was working on a singleplayer Star Wars game, and the popular belief is that EA did so because it didn't consider singleplayer games profitable enough. The most cutting response came from former Visceral Games producer Zach Mumbach. make single-player games…" tweeted former BioWare studio manager Aaryn Flynn, who is now working on Nightingale, a solo and cooperative survival game. "As usual, EA jumps on a trend, misses the point, punches itself in the face," said Dragon Age writer David Gaider, and former Dragon Age designer Mike Laidlaw called the tweet (opens in new tab) "tone deaf." A few former BioWare developers were more explicit about their feelings.
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