Its just not sustainable for my adult life to log in to whatever live service trash daily and compete agains faceless humans, who have more free time and advantage against a casual player.

Also the state of live service games is pure trash for decades now. Everything needs to be a copy of the 3 most popular titles with some kind of rpg progression and cosmetic items for real world money.

I'm betting the majority of us older gamers enjoy coop games with friends more than anything.

Multiplayer is only enjoyable when I play with my homies.

I love all types of games but for real immersion and escape nothing beats a single player FPS

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:

• PVE
• Couch co-op
• Online PVP
• Single player

Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year's unanimous game of the year was largely considered a "single player game", but while it's definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn't want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.

Single-player games are a safer bet for new games...Make no mistake: the costs to make AAA single-player, non-live service games have inflated to astronomic levels. Leaks from Insomniac showed that PlayStation’s AAA flagship games, like Spider-Man 2, have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is a growing opportunity for AAA studios to make leaner single-player games.

Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it's correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.

If randoms were less toxic and if a guild could stay together I'd prefer multiplayer but alas people are generally toxic asshats and most guilds don't last very long any more.

Thankfully there have been a bunch of good single player games lately.

I dislike people enough in my day to day life. Why would I want them in my video games?

Player preference only factors into the development decision in so much as it affects profitability. Meaning that even if more people prefer single player, they will still make a multiplayer game if they feel they can charge more, and earn more money from it.

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.