Non-RPG General News - The State of Singleplayer Games

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An article about the current state of single player games on PC Gamer:

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The state of singleplayer games in 2019 so far

In 2017, we worried singleplayer games were dying. 2019 tells a different story.

There have been a few moments of panic over singleplayer games across the last several years, but a lot of this discussion emerged back when EA cancelled Visceral's Star Wars game, which coincided with the closure of the studio in 2017.

EA didn't say anything about singleplayer games specifically, but the reason given at the time was that the company was "listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace". EA's Blake Jorgensen later suggested, according to this GameSpot article, that the game wouldn't sell enough copies to justify itself.

Other factors have led to a sense that singleplayer games are in trouble: BioWare making a disappointing co-op game in Anthem instead of the singleplayer RPGs it's known for, for example. Black Ops 4 was the first Call of Duty game not to feature a campaign. GTA 5's possible singleplayer DLC was mothballed in the face of more content for the successful online component, the demands of porting the game to more formats, and making Red Dead Redemption 2. Jedi Fallen Order was marketed on being a singleplayer-only game with no loot boxes, which felt like an admission that EA had gone too far in the other direction.

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