Despite ongoing PS5 hardware shortages, a couple of weeks ago God of War Ragnarok became the fast-selling PS5 game, and the second-fastest-selling game of 2022, with 5.1 million copies sold in its first week; Elden Ring–From Software’s balls-hard esoteric action-RPG–is the best-selling game of the year; and the latest LEGO Star Wars is the third best-selling game of the year.
The roaring success of the above makes hugely successful single-player games like Horizon 2: Forbidden West (the 6th best-selling game of 2022) look like a mere footnote in comparison, but the presence of a relatively new single-player IP in a Top 10 made up entirely of far more established series is not to be sniffed at.
Of the top 10 best-selling games of 2022 so far, half are single-player games, and many of those have broken all kinds of records for their publishers and platforms. Single-player games are alive and well. In fact, commercially they’re as healthy as ever.
The health of single-player games makes the idea of this vast category as ‘dying’ appear so patently ridiculous that it almost makes you wonder where this idea came from. For that, dear reader, we’d have to go back to the dark ages of 2010, when EA Games’ head Frank Gibeau said that he and other EA heads were “moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours – and you’re out. I think that model is finished.”
Now, some of you may have some trouble stomaching Gibeau’s mic drop moment, where he concluded by saying that online is “where the innovation, and the action is at.”
Suffice to say that EA have changed their tune since then. Gibeau left EA in 2015 and went on to become CEO of mobile gaming publisher Zynga, which brought us ‘innovative’ free-to-play games like FarmVille, FarmVille 2, FarmVille 3, and Game of Thrones Slots Casino. These are hugely successful games no doubt (if we gauge the success of games purely in monetary terms), but if these kinds of games are ‘where the action is at’ for Gibeau, then it’s probably for the best that he’s left the mainstream games industry. He’s probably perfectly happy working with online-only F2P money-sink games, and gamers should be happy that he’s no longer making big calls regarding beloved single-player series like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Dead Space. It’s win-win!
Since then, EA has reignited its commitment to single-player games, seemingly following the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Not only are they working on a sequel to Fallen Order, Survivor, but also a new game in the Dragon Age series, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, as well as the Dead Space Remake. In the case of Dead Space and Dragon Age, they’re reviving series that have been dormant since 2013 and 2014, respectively.
That’s not to say that EA is making these games at the expense of online service games like FIFA, Apex Legends, and all their sports franchises–it just shows that single-player and service games can happily coexist side by side, without crowbarring service elements into single-player games or vice versa. The thing is, investors and stakeholders are far more reassured by a successful service game than a successful single-player one for the obvious reason of their longtail financial longevity.
But EA has also seen in recent years that those potentially lucrative service games also carry big risks. Look at Battlefield 2042, for instance. According to Steamcharts, fewer people are playing the latest game in the war shooter series than are playing the previous game, Battlefield V, or even 2016’s Battlefield 1 (the best one, in my eyes), which has been enjoying a huge resurgence since coming to Steam and hitting all-time-low sale prices.
With 2042, EA is now stuck repairing this fundamentally flawed and maligned game for a good few years to come yet if they want to maintain some semblance of goodwill from the series’ community. Near the start of this year, EA said that Battlefield 2042 cost them $100 million in revenue, and that’s only likely to increase as they continue to update, maintain, and fix the game despite the bulk of its sales already being behind it. On the other hand, Apex Legends has pulled in billions of dollars, so the gargantuan gains of a successful service game easily make up for the losses of a failed one. The rewards certainly seem to outweigh the risks, and those big investor businessheads like that.
It wouldn’t be quite right to say that 2022 has been some kind of vindication for single-player games, because they don’t need vindicating. But the seismic success of single-player games this year feels like the final nail in the coffin of a myth that has plagued the medium for far too long. Granted, it’s faded over the years, but even earlier this year we saw a (admittedly disproportionate) furore over a Tweet from EA that took a dig a single-player games. Hopefully the figures for 2022 puts that kind of thinking in the grave for good.
