I keep hearing the same nonsense every few years—single-player games are dead. Nobody wants them. The future is multiplayer, live service, always-online, socially-connected metaverse garbage. We’re supposed to believe that people don’t want deep, story-driven experiences anymore because, apparently, everyone just wants to grind battle passes and chase skins in some never-ending treadmill of engagement.
And yet, every time a good single-player game drops, it sells millions. Every time.
The numbers don’t lie.
God of War: 23 million copies. The Last of Us Part II: 10 million. Elden Ring: 23 million. Hogwarts Legacy: 20 million. Baldur’s Gate 3? Dominated 2023, won Game of the Year, and sold over 10 million copies despite being a hardcore RPG from a relatively small studio.
Meanwhile, the live service games we were all supposed to care about? They keep crashing and burning. Suicide Squad flopped. Anthem flopped. Redfall flopped. Avengers flopped so hard that they shut the whole thing down in less than two years.
So why do publishers keep pushing this idea that single-player games don’t sell? Because single-player games don’t trap you in an ecosystem.
They can’t nickel-and-dime you for skins and battle passes. They don’t lock you into a never-ending grind cycle. They don’t require you to log in every day or spend money just to keep up. You buy them once, you play them, you’re done.
And for publishers? That’s a problem.
The Obsession With “Engagement”
Gaming executives don’t think about fun anymore. They think about engagement metrics. How long you play. How often you log in. How much money they can extract from you over time.
Single-player games don’t give them that.
If you buy Spider-Man 2, you play it for 30-40 hours, finish the story, and move on. That’s not good enough for them. They want recurring revenue. They want you trapped in a loop. They want you spending money long after you’ve finished the game.
That’s why Ubisoft keeps trying to turn Assassin’s Creed into a live service. That’s why Suicide Squad was turned into a grind-heavy loot shooter instead of the single-player Arkham-style game people actually wanted. That’s why even Rockstar has been dragging their feet on GTA 6—because GTA Online keeps making stupid amounts of money without them having to make a new game.
It’s not about what players want. It’s about what investors want.
Why Single-Player Games Keep Winning
The thing that keeps screwing up this whole plan is that players—actual, real humans—still love single-player games.
Nobody remembers the live service disasters of the last few years. Nobody’s talking about Anthem or The Division or any of the dozens of dead online-only games that publishers tried to force into existence.
But people still talk about The Witcher 3 like it came out last week. People still replay Skyrim a decade later. People will still buy anything FromSoftware makes, even if it’s just an Elden Ring DLC that punishes them for existing.
Because single-player games give us something that live service games don’t—a complete experience.
No FOMO, no seasonal updates, no battle passes. Just a damn good game, made with care, that respects your time.
And publishers hate that.
Why the Industry Will Keep Fighting This Reality
You’d think after all these years, publishers would finally accept that single-player games aren’t going anywhere. But no.
They’re still desperate to make live service work.
Sony—one of the last major publishers still making prestige single-player games—is suddenly trying to force multiplayer into their franchises. Warner Bros. saw the massive success of Hogwarts Legacy and announced that all future games will have “heavy live service elements.” Even CD Projekt Red, who made The Witcher 3, is now trying to get in on the multiplayer trend.
It’s the same story every time. The industry refuses to learn.
But the more they chase multiplayer and live service models, the more single-player games stand out as something rare and valuable.
And the more they tell us that “single-player games are dead,” the more players prove them wrong.