Ben-DutkaWe've known for a while that multiplayer gaming is huge. Some fans of single-player entertainment worry that multiplayer will eventually, inevitably dominate.
Well, there's a lot of money to be made with such widespread appeal, and most of the major publishers realize they can't even release a single title without multiplayer possibilities.
Take Electronic Arts, for example. In a new promotional pamphlet that discusses the future of cloud gaming, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau made it plain:
"I have not green lit one game to be developed as a single-player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365."
Of course, we can't forget that EA publishes a ton of games, including RPGs where the single-player experience takes center-stage (BioWare's products lead the pack). That being said, it's clear what Gibeau is saying: His company simply won't produce a game that doesn't have some semblance of multiplayer attached to it, and that's that. It's amazing how quickly things can change in this industry, isn't it? Rewind just five or six years to the start of this generation, and such a philosophy wasn't so widespread. Rewind ten years and it makes zero sense.
Yes, the dinosaurs (that's me!) have difficulty keeping up.