No. That’s the simple and obvious answer to this question. The problem, however, is that some people, especially those that keep up with new tech, predict the death of singleplayer games’ death every other year. In this article we’ll look at the history behind these predictions, whether there is any truth to it, and what can we expect in the future.
Why Do So Many People Predict the Death of Single-Player?
It is mostly a case of extrapolating data into the future when it doesn’t make sense. The famous example that textbooks use is the headlines that popped up 20 or so years ago predicting that female athletes will be faster and more competent than their male counterparts in 10 years. This obviously didn’t happen, but a lot of people took these claims seriously, and there was data to support it. For the past ten years before the headlines popped up, female athletes were improving and getting faster much more quickly than their male counterparts, and if the trend had continued, the headlines would hold true. Of course, it is ridiculous to expect that trend to continue – mainly because we know there’s a physical plateau for humans, and the female events were nascent and hadn’t developed, so there was a lot of room for improvement initially, but that obviously wouldn’t continue indefinitely.
This is exactly what happened with multiplayer games, too. Initially, all games were singleplayer because we didn’t have the technology to create multiplayer video games, but then, slowly, multiplayer games became more viable and were introduced to the market. MMOs started cropping up, first-person shooters started getting multiplayer modes, and those increasingly became the prominent face of the games, and exclusively multiplayer games started getting traction. Just two decades ago, multiplayer games had almost 0 gaming market share, now, they probably make up more than 50% of it. If someone just looks at the data without considering the broader image, they would think that multiplayer games would completely replace single-player in 20 years.
Is There Any Truth to the Claim?
As we discussed above, it is obvious that multiplayer games have been exceedingly popular in the last decade, and even now, which is considered a renaissance of singleplayer games by some, multiplayer games are still chipping away at their sales. They provide a few things that single-player games can never provide:
Communication with other players: multiplayer has become so popular because it is exceedingly easy to play and enjoy yourself with your friends online. You can voice chat, text message, and play together seamlessly. This wasn’t possible ten years ago, and it was one of the reasons multiplayer took off.
No matter how powerful our computer’s CPUs are and how effectively the AI is coded, it can never replicate how real humans behave. Just ten years ago, after playing for a certain amount of time, you’ll basically learn all of the AIs movements, and the game would just turn repetitive by that point. In multiplayer games, however, you can keep playing for years and you’ll never be able to fully predict the other players’ movements. Why? Because they are also humans, and humans are inherently unpredictable.
These two reasons were the main driving force behind multiplayer games taking off, but these will not make single-player games extinct. Single-player still has its appeals – it is the best way to experience a story in-game format, and that will never disappear. That’s why the resurgence in games right now have been almost all single-player story-heavy games.
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