A new survey has found that over half of gamers prefer to play single-player titles.
According to Midia Research, this game mode is most popular across all platforms – particularly on mobile, with 58% of respondents saying they preferred single-player games.
The data from the survey was collected from Midia Research’s Q1 2024 and Q1 2023 consumer surveys across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Poland, Turkey, and South Africa.
Research found that older gamers were more drawn to single-player titles, with 74% of gamers aged over 55 choosing to play games solo.
For me single player is number one followed by low pressure multiplayer with friends. Can be co op or PvP but the main thing is casual and low stress. Already have enough of that in my real life.
My friends are addicted to League of Legends. I often ask them how they can put up with such a toxic culture and they said they like being toxic themselves. Just reminded me of Monty Python’s “I’d like to have an argument, please”.
My friend think he’s the best LoL player ever and the smartest man on earth. Iron 4.
“Prefer”… when you’re young, you’ve got time to burn online without distractions.
Then you get married, have kids, work a demanding job, and you don’t get time for uninterrupted online play.
Eventually, correspondence chess is the only gaming you have time for! /s
…or you buy an handheld and enjoy some gaming from your sofa.
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I mean, there are
manyalternatives…but, yeah.
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I had just mentioned this in a similar post, but Discord culture has really killed multi-player games for me. Especially guilds in MMORPGs. I remember joining one before 2010 felt like this very regal thing. They were these sacred orders of gentlemen with cool names like “The Iron Wolves”, “The Order of Light”, or “The Knights Templar”. Upon initiation you were inducted into a fellowship and granted access to private forums to stay in touch and keep up with the guild. You’d get to know the more productive members who would forge you equipment and look after you. You would gather in great halls beneath the severed head of the world dragon and discuss official guild business. Somewhere along the way that magic just died.
Now the guilds are all edgy and gamey, like “HATE”, “FURY”, “APEX”, “FIRST IN”, and “METHOD”. Initiation involves two paths. You either remain in relative obscurity in the fringes of the guild, never really growing much or forging meaningful relationships, or you take the other fork; walking closely with the sweaty, most egotistical edge-lords of the guild who don’t actually care about or support you, and spread toxicity throughout the ranks. Both paths tend to require you to live in Discord, partaking in constant banter with a group of perpetually online sigma males. It’s like plugging yourself in directly to the guild hive-mind and permanently altering the game’s atmosphere. You’re just playing “ENVY” now, or whatever your dumb guild is called. I’ve joined guilds that want you to have Discord on your phone so you are connected even while offline. That’s fucking nuts.
Anyway, that garbage doesn’t exist with single-player games. I can read dialogue at my own pace, toggle walk through the entire village to take in the sights/sounds and slow down the pacing, and truly absorb every last bit of that wonderfully thick atmosphere. Single-player games are so much deeper for me.
Take a heavily modded playthrough of Skyrim for example, with camping/tenting mods. Dusk begins to fall and you hear the call of a northern flicker in the forest around you. Better make camp. You find a clear spot outside or town and pitch a tent, raise a tanning rack, and build a fire. Now it’s getting dark. You walk to the river’s edge to fill your waterskin and return with a large salmon to cook over the fire. Now the stars are out. The score is swelling to inspiring highs that move your soul. The aurora dances above you in brilliant colors. You sit beside the fire and thumb through your inventory, deciding which lore book to read first. After some time you study a spell or record your thoughts into your journal, then quell your fire and sleep.
That’s my shit right there. That’s a single-player game.
Not sure what you mean. Guilds were basically run by egotistical 14yo with too much free time back in the old days you describe too.
Yep. I remember playing vanilla WoW and seeing guilds with names like “Sapped Girls Can’t Say No”, “Naga Stole My Bike”, and “Seal Cub Clubbing Club”.
Yeah it has always been like that. Source: 25 uninterrupted years of EverQuest
I believe WoW was the tipping point for this. Never had these experiences with older games like Dark Age of Camelot.
The game required more from its players back then. I mean gl hf to solo your way to 50 in daoc :)
I recommend taking a look at the full original article, the summary linked here may be a bit misleading. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single-player-games
This breakdown chart, in particular is very interesting. https://www.midiaresearch.com/storage/uploads/paragraphs/dbdbaba91de72cd615d8be1a0119cfca
Turns out that yes, slightly more than 50% of the people they surveyed prefer solo, but that’s distorted by older people going HARD towards that option. Every segment below 45 years old skews slightly towards multiplayer, although the split between what type of multiplayer is pretty even.
Gotta say, I HATE that PvP is the preference across all age groups among multiplayer fans. Outside of asynchronous competition, leaderboards and fighting games I profoundly dislike realtime PvP.
The Kingdom of Loathing guys (Jick and Mr Skullhead) had a development approach to keep their game system balanced. They felt that players had different primary motivations/enjoyment in the game and they wanted to make sure there was something for everyone. They divided players into four groups: Hearts, Clubs, Spades, and Diamonds.
Hearts enjoyed the social aspects of the game and would use the chat system and clans extensively.
Clubs were the PvP crowd and weren’t happy unless there were meaningful opportunities to battle other players.
Spades are explorers and look to every nook and cranny of the environment, and are interested in underlying game mechanics (this is me).
Diamonds are collectors and completists. They will scour environments to ensure they got everything and do all the sides because they want all the stuff.
Yeeeah, the motivations stuff for game design is very popular right now with devs big and small. It kinda rubs me the wrong way, although it’s hard to articulate exactly why.
I think it sits at an intersection of still wanting to look at players as behavioral data, but at the same time being sorta generic and too broad to inform much of anything specific. Still, that’s not to say you can’t do good work using it.
The reason why it might be fucked up is that while the KoL guys might design such a system to create game design that is fulfilling to all these groups, the MBA in charge of the development of an AAA game is going to be “how do we best monetize all these motivations”, as in “how do we exploit all these disparate personalities to make this game as fucked up addictive as possible for everyone”.
There are remarkably few MBAs acting as creative directors, but it’s true that the place where the motivations framework thing is most popular is triple A games as a service stuff. Honestly, it’s mostly used as a way for creatives just doing game designery things to explain how the game designery things align with the marketingy things and the businessy things. That’s part of why I don’t love it, it doesn’t really do much, it’s mostly a translation layer.
I feel like the reason people like pvp is because, well, humans are like the most advanced AI opponents and teammates you can have in a game. Most games struggle creating fun, realistic, and challenging AI opponents because it’s generally really difficult to do so.
Is that good, though? I don’t want realistic and challenging AI opponents, at least not most of the time. It works for a 1v1 fighting game, but you don’t want every enemy in Diablo being a smart, human-like entity capable of min/maxing their build and acting with real self preservation. You want them to act as a pincushion so you can test if your build is doing good damage and to watch them pop like so much bubble wrap.
So yeah, for 1v1 fighting games I want a human, but that’s not an intrinsically better solution than a “dumb” AI. It’s the opposite of that in most games, I’d say.
Not in Diablo, but in strategy games or stuff like MOBAs or shooters? Yeah, I do
“We and our 693 partners need your data”
I prefer RPG, interesting narratives and “experiences”. I also used to be really into multiplayer games like halo 3, MW2, battlefield 4/bad company2 and even rainbow 6 siege. Whats turned me off of all that is aggressive monetization and super competitive sweat fests. It feels like all the fun/soul in those “good oll’ days” games just isn’t there anymore. Peak fun for me was maxed out halo 3 custom games and they just don’t make them like that anymore.
I can’t stand the competitiveness now. Like, I know I suck and I’ll never be good because quick reactions aren’t my jam.
I still want to play every now and then, but since I play infrequently I really need something with a very simple mechanic. 30 characters to pick from is overwhelming and I can’t learn how to level up and pick a character build during the 10 minute matches and I’m not going to study builds before I play games casually. And I feel bad when I’m trying to learn and I sink the team. Like who wants to be the one that causes a dozen other people to not have fun or get frustrated. Give me counterstrike. You get good guys or bad guys. Then a handful of guns in very specific categories.
I really like RPGs where I can take my time and learn the game. Where mechanics arent too crazy and where there is only one currency in the game.
I feel like it’s become too complicated to pick up some games now.
You’ve got normal gold, then some weird premium gold that you get at a much slower rate. And somehow a third currency that you can only buy.
There are hundreds of build paths, and somehow within the first 5 levels before you even know the game or whats good you have to make a decision and lock yourself out of half of them.
Each character has a gimmicky different way to level up or learn moves.
Then there are mini games, where you have to collect things or others where you now need to level up in a whole different way. And then lock out entire portions of the main game unless you spend a dozen hours playing a mini game that really isn’t that fun.
But I digress, I really like single player that at this point are pretty easy to get into and start having fun or experience the story right away.
I think people like a variety of games too. I mostly play solo, and enjoy that, but also have a ton of fun playing with friends and family at times too.
A lot of those multiplayer games aren’t really designed for people who like variety though if you have to compete with people who have played nothing but that game for 1000 hours a year for the last 7 years.
ha, I’m surprised it’s so high, but I guess we don’t talk to each other.
Personally, I’m surprised it’s so low, but I guess we don’t talk to each other 😁
Well that graph sums my situation up. Got old, had a kid, don’t have the time nor inclination to get all sweaty playing against those half my age.
That’s basically what happened to me. I still love pvp games, I just don’t have the time. It’s much more conducive to my lifestyle to play a game I can just pause at any moment and switch to something I need to do.
Am I crazy or is 53% not a wild number? For one thing, I play multiplayer games all the time but I much prefer my best single player experience to my best multiplayer experience I would absolutely identify as preferring single player games despite probably playing more multiplayer games.
For another thing, 53% is pretty low, about half of gamers prefer single player. If anything that number should be higher cause I bet the amount of single player games dwarfs multiplayer games (this also would include single player campaigns in multiplayer games).
53% of gamers are over 30. 😂 (This includes me almost 40 😭
Also I think more accurately to me I prefer games where single play can stand on its own. The game just happens to also have multiplayer features w/o half the game being locked out with micro transactions.
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I’ll take a wonderful experience over a repetitive “make rank number go up” game any day of the week.
Don’t get me wrong, I played all the online multiplayer stuff, many MMOs, all the FPS games, RTS, you name it. But even in those universes I preferred something like Left 4 Dead over something like Counter Strike. At least with a co-op game like L4D the gameplay was more interesting and felt more immersive. CS, Overwatch, even good old Quake in multiplayer mode just felt so repetitive that I got tired of them after 15 minutes of “get flag, kill enemy, twitch around the map like a hyena on meth”
An old single player rpg with a great story was always going to capture my interest more than those online games. An MMORPG is more like an MMO and less like an RPG. And for games with less of a story to tell, a great platformer or adventure game where there was actual progression and new mechanics/challenges to discover level by level, was just more engaging than running Dust 2 a hundred times a night.
Now a days with games like Witcher 3, BG3, Cyberpunk, Hades, and the like, I just can’t bring myself to plug into those perpetually repetitive online experiences. Especially when if I do want to do some multiplayer, a game like BG3 has a wonderful implementation of it. Something like that is the kind of multiplayer I can get down with.
And also, plenty of others have said it already but I’m old and I got shit to do man. I can’t be gaming on someone else’s clock. Steam Deck has really helped get me back into gaming through. That thing has been a godsend. Knock out a chapter in Justice before I go to bed, it’s like reading a bit of a good book before bedtime. Love it.
Justice is great by the way if you like the Yakuza series but want something a little less goofy. Same studio.
That may well be true, but a single player game can only take your money once.
A multiplayer game will take it over and over again. They’re all just chasing that Fortnite high, aiming to be that game all the sweaty streamers play and their viewers pump money into.
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You sure? Horse armor bullshit began in a single player game.
Couch co-op please!!!
Couch co-op can be difficult, because it often means having to run the game twice on the same machine. The devs of Windrush also found that it made it harder for players to keep track of where they were (with a single player they can fix the center of the screen on the player)
That said, yes, more couch co-op please. I’d settle for cheaper second copies.
it often means having to run the game twice on the same machine.
Not quite that much. A sane game would run all players in the same simulation, assuming they’re in the same map. Multiple cameras would increase the amount of stuff drawn on screen, but at least the amount of pixels to calculate stays same, which helps a lot.
True, true, but often you need to scale everything to cater to the number of players.
Cyberpunk with all the pedestrians and cars, for one, but then you’d have to make them consistent between the players too.
It’s a lot of processing, but you’re right not literally a second game.
How is gamer defined here? I don’t have access to the full report but apparently it mentions Candy Crush, so I wonder how the statistics would look like if you removed games like that.
Sure, and if you remove games like Fortnite, it would skew the numbers the other way. It strikes me as an arbitrary distinction.
But, I think what you point out is important, because based on the above replies it seems most people are interpreting this as their desire to play rpg games is what they are saying is more popular, when what is likely really happening is that there are just a lot of casual gamers playing CC type games.
Honestly I love multiplayer gamers because I like meeting people. There’s plenty of wholesome lobby games and some more intense games both have their benefits. Most people hate intense lobbies because of people who can’t handle the heat and freak out, but it’s really fun holding the team together or seeing someone do that. Both types of games and lobbies are fun to me. I get why people only want single player games though
