Saw this article before and the title is very misleading. 53% is barely "most", and the biggest takeaway from it is that gamers age 16-24 greatly prefer multiplayer games while people aged 25-34 prefer multiplayer as much as singleplayer. Those age groups are probably most of the market.
People with lots of time and friends prefer multiplayer games more than people with little time and friends. Go figure.
I would assume people with lots of friends and little time will like them even less.
53% is barely "most"
This is a really bizarre point to try to make, to me. The headline doesn't say "the vast, overwhelming percentage of gamers"... It says most. 53% is most.
The bigger problem I had was with the categories, really.
That 3% could be a rounding error, "most" implies a much bigger difference, the title should say that half gamers prefer singleplayer games.
It doesn’t though. It doesn’t even need to mean more than half, it means more than anything else. If there are 8 groups of 10 and 1 group of 20, the last group has the most members.
Yeah, multiplayer is preferred in their data until the 45+ age ranges. Weird article.
What about the folks that like playing multiplayer games solo? I enjoy the busyness/fullness of people running around the world and having small interactions, while getting into groups only when really necessary for content or items.
The bulk of wow players play that way myself included (back in the day, im clean now)
This is it for me. I like that a multiplayer world is something dynamic I'm a part of even when I'm not interacting with it directly.
Multiplayer is only enjoyable when I play with my homies.
And since I have young kids, I don't play with my homies much anymore. So single player and couch coop (with kids) it is.
I'd like multiplayer a lot more if they still made games with user-driven match making, instead of opaque algorithms hellbent on ensuring that everyone maintains a perfect 50/50 win rate. That and the death of custom game modes/lobbies have really killed all the fun of online multiplayer.
As much as that may be true for you, on average people enjoy MP games with SBMM more than without by a decent margin. Studies have shown that people play more matches and play longer sessions when SBMM creates more balanced matches.
Are you sure that that is not just the people who are left since all the others left the game?
It's based on overall usage metrics - number of active users, number of matches played per user, length of a session per user, etc.
It does account for people quitting.
personally not for me once i start getting destroyed by people leagues above my skill level i just stop playing
there's rarely ever games that are even, i either cream the opposing noobs or get creamed by the opposing pros. no in between
You absolutely certain about that reasoning? Because from what I've seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your "correct" ranking and actually enjoy the game. People who don't play it like that are driven away because of it.
If you're curious about the mechanics behind ELO and ELO confidence distributions after X matches, chess ELO is actually a well studied way to learn about the algorithm used by almost all SBMM. After a shockingly small number of matches, your ELO is going to end up being in the right neighborhood for you have +/- 50% WR.
I play games that are so niche that the 'matchmaking' consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don't have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.
The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.
Titanfall 2 come to mind here. I bought it well after launch and really enjoyed the campaign. When I went to hop into multi-player, I was often killed as I spawned or within 10s of spawning. I literally was not playing the game at that, just spawning and dying. I never came back, lol.
Yes, I am.
This is just one study I could find quickly but the results are consistent.
Because from what I've seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your "correct" ranking and actually enjoy the game.
This is not accurate. Most people's ELOs don't shift much after settling into your "natural" rank, which should happen after about 50 matches or so. Probably what you're referring to is the publicly available "rank" which is per "season", wherein every few months your rank gets reset. This is FAR less opaque than SBMM but results in lower playtime and lower retention for casual players who don't want to be grinding the 50 matches to settle at their ELO every 3 months.
Actual opaque SBMM (the algorithm you mentioned originally) that never resets creates, on average, much more fun MP experiences for most people.
Most people’s ELOs don’t shift much after settling into your “natural” rank, which should happen after about 50 matches or so.
Ehm, 50 matches seems like a lot to me. Especially if they aren't enjoyable (yet) because of flawed matchmaking.
I pulled that number out of my bootyhole because I knew it was a safe bet for a stable ELO.
US Chess Federation uses 25 games as your provisional ELO stage, many video games will use 10 matches. Assuming a large enough variety of ELO in the player base, you can be confident your ELO is mostly accurate after a shockingly small number of matches.
Would be interesting to see but I would assume most people won't even make it to 10 matches in a game they don't enjoy. The people who spend thousands of hours on a single game are a tiny minority of the tiny minority of people who have the free time to play dozens of a hours a week.
If you can't make it 10 matches in a new game, I don't think SBMM is your problem with the game.
10 matches should be like, between 3-10 hours. Assuming an hour a night, you'll be approximately ranked for SBMM within a week.
Do you understand why people play games though?
Warcraft 3 multiplayer was peak "matchmaking" in my opinion, where people created lobbies with certain rule sets and anyone who was interested in that type of game could just join directly. It was a blast, playing lots of different game modes all the time and meeting a wide range of player types, instead of having to invest an insane amount of time (3-10 hours, vs less than a minute to find a game in WC3) into one single game mode even before you can actually start playing.
What you have described is exactly what I was talking about when I called it "playing the game like a job," where you have to invest plenty of time before you can even hope to enjoy it.
Do you understand why people play games though?
I understand why I do. I can't speak to your motivations, I'm not you. I can, however, point to studies that discuss groups of people's preferences in aggregate, as I have done. You're an outlier, and that's ok! Play what you want how you want!
SBMM is, unfortunately for you, the current utilitarian optimal for multiplayer PvP gaming. It maximizes both adoption and retention metrics, as well as self-reported enjoyment scores (Likert scale) for the highest number of people. Bummer that it doesn't optimize for you, but the other good part is that there are plenty of games that still support custom lobbies. Find one you like and have fun!
You are never going to answer that question with math and statistics, and attempts to do so are exactly why the industry keeps tanking studio after studio.
It should take about 20 matches or less to give you a decent rating, what games have you played that took longer?
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
PVE
Couch co-op
Online PVP
Single player
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year's unanimous game of the year was largely considered a "single player game", but while it's definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn't want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Single-player games are a safer bet for new games...Make no mistake: the costs to make AAA single-player, non-live service games have inflated to astronomic levels. Leaks from Insomniac showed that PlayStation’s AAA flagship games, like Spider-Man 2, have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is a growing opportunity for AAA studios to make leaner single-player games.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it's correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.
I dislike people enough in my day to day life. Why would I want them in my video games?
If randoms were less toxic and if a guild could stay together I'd prefer multiplayer but alas people are generally toxic asshats and most guilds don't last very long any more.
Thankfully there have been a bunch of good single player games lately.
I'm betting the majority of us older gamers enjoy coop games with friends more than anything.
Yep. Even a bad game can be good when played coop.
I'm one of those that will check if a game is coop first before anything else. Games are just better with friends.
Edit and you're absolutely right, even a shit buggy game can have us rolling in laughter for hours.
Agreed. Single player games have to be exceptionally good for me to want to play them. Besides that, it's coop only for me.
I'm an adult who doesn't have time or friends anymore..
It's not because they aren't fun, I just can't dedicate time or play them the way they were designed to be played
I guess I just don't get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.
Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.
Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There's always a better opponent. And I've made a lot of good friends through these communities.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong or I'm just too shy to socialize with strangers in these games, but as someone who has fond memories of my favorite TF2/killing floor community servers, I feel like there is basically no sense of community in these games now that matchmaking is king and private hosting is a thing of the past
You'll find more close-knit communities in smaller games. I play a lot of fighting games, and the FGC moves heaven and earth to keep the one thing alive that very few other games are doing: locals. Go to locals and meet people!
Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There’s always a better opponent.
But that is exactly the problem with it. The vast majority of people don't have the free time to spend on a given game to compete with those who do spend most of their time on it.
I'm not expecting to beat Daigo Umehara any time soon. I'm just aiming to beat the next guy in front of me. And the next. And the next. No matter what my skill level, there's always a challenge. That doesn't mean I have to be the very best, quite the opposite.
Ya need to play more grand strategy games and CRPGs. Theres plenty to sink your teeth into such as eugenics and war crimes, im thinking specifically Crusader kings and Tyranny with these two examples.
Player preference only factors into the development decision in so much as it affects profitability. Meaning that even if more people prefer single player, they will still make a multiplayer game if they feel they can charge more, and earn more money from it.
I love all types of games but for real immersion and escape nothing beats a single player FPS
This is just like that Epic dude saying Fortnite is the future (lol). People are trying to make definitive statements about what a successful game looks like but there are so many variables to consider. The problem just isn't as simple as "is it multi-player or not". Cost matters too, but it's also clear that more development money doesn't mean better game. Spider man 2 is a good game, but I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Balatro, which was way cheaper to make and to buy.
Makes sense as it aligns with their forever relationship status.
Saw this article before and the title is very misleading. 53% is barely "most", and the biggest takeaway from it is that gamers age 16-24 greatly prefer multiplayer games while people aged 25-34 prefer multiplayer as much as singleplayer. Those age groups are probably most of the market.
People with lots of time and friends prefer multiplayer games more than people with little time and friends. Go figure.
I would assume people with lots of friends and little time will like them even less.
This is a really bizarre point to try to make, to me. The headline doesn't say "the vast, overwhelming percentage of gamers"... It says most. 53% is most.
The bigger problem I had was with the categories, really.
That 3% could be a rounding error, "most" implies a much bigger difference, the title should say that half gamers prefer singleplayer games.
It doesn’t though. It doesn’t even need to mean more than half, it means more than anything else. If there are 8 groups of 10 and 1 group of 20, the last group has the most members.
Yeah, multiplayer is preferred in their data until the 45+ age ranges. Weird article.
What about the folks that like playing multiplayer games solo? I enjoy the busyness/fullness of people running around the world and having small interactions, while getting into groups only when really necessary for content or items.
The bulk of wow players play that way myself included (back in the day, im clean now)
This is it for me. I like that a multiplayer world is something dynamic I'm a part of even when I'm not interacting with it directly.
Multiplayer is only enjoyable when I play with my homies.
And since I have young kids, I don't play with my homies much anymore. So single player and couch coop (with kids) it is.
I'd like multiplayer a lot more if they still made games with user-driven match making, instead of opaque algorithms hellbent on ensuring that everyone maintains a perfect 50/50 win rate. That and the death of custom game modes/lobbies have really killed all the fun of online multiplayer.
As much as that may be true for you, on average people enjoy MP games with SBMM more than without by a decent margin. Studies have shown that people play more matches and play longer sessions when SBMM creates more balanced matches.
Are you sure that that is not just the people who are left since all the others left the game?
It's based on overall usage metrics - number of active users, number of matches played per user, length of a session per user, etc.
It does account for people quitting.
personally not for me once i start getting destroyed by people leagues above my skill level i just stop playing
there's rarely ever games that are even, i either cream the opposing noobs or get creamed by the opposing pros. no in between
You absolutely certain about that reasoning? Because from what I've seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your "correct" ranking and actually enjoy the game. People who don't play it like that are driven away because of it.
If you're curious about the mechanics behind ELO and ELO confidence distributions after X matches, chess ELO is actually a well studied way to learn about the algorithm used by almost all SBMM. After a shockingly small number of matches, your ELO is going to end up being in the right neighborhood for you have +/- 50% WR.
I play games that are so niche that the 'matchmaking' consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don't have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.
The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.
Titanfall 2 come to mind here. I bought it well after launch and really enjoyed the campaign. When I went to hop into multi-player, I was often killed as I spawned or within 10s of spawning. I literally was not playing the game at that, just spawning and dying. I never came back, lol.
Yes, I am.
This is just one study I could find quickly but the results are consistent.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/activision-secretly-experimented-on-50-of-call-of-duty-players-by-decreasing-skill-based-matchmaking-and-determined-players-like-sbmm-even-if-they-don-t-know-it/
This is not accurate. Most people's ELOs don't shift much after settling into your "natural" rank, which should happen after about 50 matches or so. Probably what you're referring to is the publicly available "rank" which is per "season", wherein every few months your rank gets reset. This is FAR less opaque than SBMM but results in lower playtime and lower retention for casual players who don't want to be grinding the 50 matches to settle at their ELO every 3 months.
Actual opaque SBMM (the algorithm you mentioned originally) that never resets creates, on average, much more fun MP experiences for most people.
Ehm, 50 matches seems like a lot to me. Especially if they aren't enjoyable (yet) because of flawed matchmaking.
I pulled that number out of my bootyhole because I knew it was a safe bet for a stable ELO.
US Chess Federation uses 25 games as your provisional ELO stage, many video games will use 10 matches. Assuming a large enough variety of ELO in the player base, you can be confident your ELO is mostly accurate after a shockingly small number of matches.
Would be interesting to see but I would assume most people won't even make it to 10 matches in a game they don't enjoy. The people who spend thousands of hours on a single game are a tiny minority of the tiny minority of people who have the free time to play dozens of a hours a week.
If you can't make it 10 matches in a new game, I don't think SBMM is your problem with the game.
10 matches should be like, between 3-10 hours. Assuming an hour a night, you'll be approximately ranked for SBMM within a week.
Do you understand why people play games though?
Warcraft 3 multiplayer was peak "matchmaking" in my opinion, where people created lobbies with certain rule sets and anyone who was interested in that type of game could just join directly. It was a blast, playing lots of different game modes all the time and meeting a wide range of player types, instead of having to invest an insane amount of time (3-10 hours, vs less than a minute to find a game in WC3) into one single game mode even before you can actually start playing.
What you have described is exactly what I was talking about when I called it "playing the game like a job," where you have to invest plenty of time before you can even hope to enjoy it.
I understand why I do. I can't speak to your motivations, I'm not you. I can, however, point to studies that discuss groups of people's preferences in aggregate, as I have done. You're an outlier, and that's ok! Play what you want how you want!
SBMM is, unfortunately for you, the current utilitarian optimal for multiplayer PvP gaming. It maximizes both adoption and retention metrics, as well as self-reported enjoyment scores (Likert scale) for the highest number of people. Bummer that it doesn't optimize for you, but the other good part is that there are plenty of games that still support custom lobbies. Find one you like and have fun!
You are never going to answer that question with math and statistics, and attempts to do so are exactly why the industry keeps tanking studio after studio.
It should take about 20 matches or less to give you a decent rating, what games have you played that took longer?
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year's unanimous game of the year was largely considered a "single player game", but while it's definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn't want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it's correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.
I dislike people enough in my day to day life. Why would I want them in my video games?
If randoms were less toxic and if a guild could stay together I'd prefer multiplayer but alas people are generally toxic asshats and most guilds don't last very long any more.
Thankfully there have been a bunch of good single player games lately.
I'm betting the majority of us older gamers enjoy coop games with friends more than anything.
Yep. Even a bad game can be good when played coop.
I'm one of those that will check if a game is coop first before anything else. Games are just better with friends.
Edit and you're absolutely right, even a shit buggy game can have us rolling in laughter for hours.
Agreed. Single player games have to be exceptionally good for me to want to play them. Besides that, it's coop only for me.
I'm an adult who doesn't have time or friends anymore..
It's not because they aren't fun, I just can't dedicate time or play them the way they were designed to be played
I guess I just don't get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.
Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.
Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There's always a better opponent. And I've made a lot of good friends through these communities.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong or I'm just too shy to socialize with strangers in these games, but as someone who has fond memories of my favorite TF2/killing floor community servers, I feel like there is basically no sense of community in these games now that matchmaking is king and private hosting is a thing of the past
You'll find more close-knit communities in smaller games. I play a lot of fighting games, and the FGC moves heaven and earth to keep the one thing alive that very few other games are doing: locals. Go to locals and meet people!
But that is exactly the problem with it. The vast majority of people don't have the free time to spend on a given game to compete with those who do spend most of their time on it.
I'm not expecting to beat Daigo Umehara any time soon. I'm just aiming to beat the next guy in front of me. And the next. And the next. No matter what my skill level, there's always a challenge. That doesn't mean I have to be the very best, quite the opposite.
Ya need to play more grand strategy games and CRPGs. Theres plenty to sink your teeth into such as eugenics and war crimes, im thinking specifically Crusader kings and Tyranny with these two examples.
Player preference only factors into the development decision in so much as it affects profitability. Meaning that even if more people prefer single player, they will still make a multiplayer game if they feel they can charge more, and earn more money from it.
I love all types of games but for real immersion and escape nothing beats a single player FPS
This is just like that Epic dude saying Fortnite is the future (lol). People are trying to make definitive statements about what a successful game looks like but there are so many variables to consider. The problem just isn't as simple as "is it multi-player or not". Cost matters too, but it's also clear that more development money doesn't mean better game. Spider man 2 is a good game, but I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Balatro, which was way cheaper to make and to buy.
Makes sense as it aligns with their forever relationship status.