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.
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).
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.
“We and our 693 partners need your data”
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.
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.
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.
