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)
Same, humans make virtual worlds so much more compelling to me over entirely scripted singleplayer experiences. Even when I dont directly interact with other humans around me, it still makes a virtual world feel so much more alive.
I love singleplayer games too tho and I would hate it if all games were multiplayer affairs, I just think it is worth pointing out that pleasure of sharing virtual spaces with other people is something deeper than just a desire to directly connect and interact. Sometimes it feels more like the pleasure of visiting a new place and enjoying being alone and anonymous while people watching at a cafe in a busy city square.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, multiplayer is preferred in their data until the 45+ age ranges. Weird article.
Their methodology also seems a little fucked, reads like this was a survey they offered to gamers. There’s likely a lot of self-selection bias to the responses.
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.
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.
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.
It should take about 20 matches or less to give you a decent rating, what games have you played that took longer?
I love all types of games but for real immersion and escape nothing beats a single player FPS
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.
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.
Sure… but that is what skillbased matchmaking is for, to set you up with a game with people precisely on your level.
99% of people playing a multiplayer game with good matchmaking are always going to have a winrate trending towards 50%, that is by definition the function of skillbased matchmaking!
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.
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
Yeah. Factorio.
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.
