Last week, a designer at Treyarch commented that those who only play single-player campaigns in Call of Duty "bugs the shit out of" the developers, and now another developer says that single-player games are dying out. No love for the single-player campaign from developers these days, eh?
Rob Pardo, Blizzard's executive vice president of game design and lead designer of World of Warcraft talked at length with GamesIndustry International, where he called single-player an "endangered species."
I don't see there being a great business model for it [single-player] these days. It's really sad, there's just a lot of elements out there that conspire to make those games difficult to make now. Between pirating or the ability for people to rent games, it's hard for publishers to pour millions and millions of dollars into a game and not necessarily see the return they need to make those budgets realistic.
In terms of renting games and trading games in, I understand his thoughts from the business end, but in reality, how many people would be willing to completely give up the single-player experience to play with others? Not to mention, how self-serving is it for a developer for a multiplayer-only game to make comments about the state of single-player games? That alone makes it all a little fishy, good points aside.
If single-player games did die off, would you still play video games?
