Cyberpunk 2077 Proves EA and Ubisoft Wrong About Single-Player Games

It’s been more than half a year since EA shut down Visceral Studios, who had been working on the single-player Star Wars game. Before it was cancelled, the game was compared to the Uncharted series. Their reason sent gamers into an uproar: They said that single-player games just aren’t as popular anymore. The newest Cyberpunk 2077 trailer proved them wrong.

The gameplay demo reached 1.3M views on YouTube barely 18 hours after it hit the platform, with comments showing that people have even accepted the fact that the game is in first-person, which was a topic of much debate originally. Everyone’s hyped about how amazing the game looks and is in general going crazy about everything shown in the trailer. The official CD Projekt Red stream leading up to and revealing the gameplay reached almost a million views, too.

Interest in Cyberpunk 2077 on Google spiked earlier today, much higher than, for example, EA’s new sci-fi project Anthem, which has had two smaller peaks in searches over the last year. That contradicts what EA said about players not being into single player games anymore, especially since this is the game they’re making Bioware put all their focus into (after having killed the Mass Effect franchise).

We’ve had a lot of recent games that proved that AAA single player experiences are in fact very profitable. CD Projekt Red’s most famous success, The Witcher 3, was still selling half as well two years later as it did in its launch year, continuing to be highly profitable for the Polish company. On Steam, it was one of the games that made the most money in 2017, topping many huge releases from that year and other games whose main sources of revenue were loot boxes and other in-game purchases, like PUBG and CS:GO.

Another single-player game that was highly successful was God of War. In the first three days after it released, it sold more than 3 million copies, becoming the fastest selling PS4 game and spectacularly eclipsing the sales record previously set by Horizon: Zero Dawn. It was highly praised, too, having an aggregate score of 94 on Metacritic, making it the highest rated original PS4 game.

Although Santa Monica and CD Projekt Red haven’t given up on single player games, not everyone believes that people still want to play them despite what the evidence says and some companies have shifted towards the games as a service model. Why? Because they know they can make easy money.

Despite temporarily having gone back to the yearly release schedule with the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Ubisoft seems to be moving towards the games as a service model, too, having said: “new releases now only represent a part of our business, which is now focused on longterm engagement with our player communities”. Rainbow Six Siege is already in its third year of content with no sign of stopping and The Division 2 is on its way, too. Their opinion on the matter is that they want games that last players quite a bit longer, using season passes, DLC, and other in-game purchases to keep the game profitable. Despite Ubisoft’s experience in making big bucks with large single player experiences, do they feel like it’s too much of a risk to create them?

On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that the games as a service model is successful. You can already see this in Ubisoft’s sales numbers. They have made more than $370 million in DLC, items and other in-game purchases since June 2017 alone. As they announced at E3, they reached 35 million players earlier this year, more proof that Rainbow Six Siege is still kicking.

GTA Online, another massive popular games as a service preacher, is still reining in the cash, too. Of the $388 million publisher Take Two made in the first fiscal quarter of 2019, a whopping 81 percent of it came from in-game purchases. That’s not a small number at all, especially when you look at the fact that they said that GTA Online is their biggest contributor to “recurrent consumer spending”, a term they’ve given to describe in-game purchases.

With the games as a service model showing a lot of success, too, it’s not hard to see why developers and publishers are going for that approach instead of sticking with big name single player experiences. However, as Ubisoft said, many aspects of this approach require “lower levels of marketing and research & development expenses”. This leads to another question. Are developers and publishers that go with the games as a service model just taking the easy money?

You can answer that question in two different ways. The first would be that, no, they’re not taking the easy money, because the budget, infrastructure and game community needed to even consider the games as a service model require a solid basis for you to even get started. The people that argue this point would argue that if the games as a service model does turn out to be profitable for you, you’ve done the two things right you’d have to do for a game anyway: The gameplay is entertaining, and the game has enough to keep people playing and get other people to play it.

Although I agree in the short term that it’s similar, I disagree in the long term. Developers of a single-player AAA game often start working on their next game very soon after they finish the game they were working on. Although some (CD Projekt Red) could easily afford to just take their sweet time and not really do anything for the next decade or so, and some do (Valve), they often work hard to bring new experiences to the players. A games as a service adopter instead can decide to make small cool tidbits and add-ons that take maybe a few days to make because of the animations, but otherwise have no real in-game effect. Then they wait until players ask for more customizability, and they sell them that, too.

Some big name publishers and developers see large single-player games as a pretty big risk, which is why they tend to opt out in favor of grand multiplayer experiences that keep players coming back for more paid content without having to pump out a new IP or sequel every few years. CD Projekt Red has the fortune of being able to take its time because of GoG, but not every big publisher or developer has the money. The model has its upsides and downsides, but the fact is: while single-player games are far from dying out, as we see with Cyberpunk 2077, the games as a service model makes a lot of money without as much effort, provided the base experience is just as good.