Will the Online Pass Kill The Single Player Campaign?
Sony are the latest in a growing number of publishers to follow the trend set down by EA and THQ recently by introducing an additional online pass to try and combat the ever increasing loss of revenue to the second hand market.
Both sides of the debate have been extensively argued and continue to rumble on, but we are not here to debate who is right or wrong, but rather to look at the potential unintended side effects from the introduction of the online pass.
When you consider the concept of an online pass and that obviously the online pass is only really effective when it comes to games with an online side to them. The same Online pass then does nothing to help combat the sales of single player games on the second hand market. With its introduction ee could start to see a massive drift in gaming to online multiplayer games at the expense of the solo player experience. A shift that is perhaps already well under way.
This shift is all the more apparent in the FPS market than anywhere else. Many older gamers will go to great lengths to tell anyone that will listen about how shooters have lost their way, with more and more shooters turning their back on the old school ideas such as a 20 hour campaign, ingenious weapons and complex level designs, to instead favouring a system pushing the player down a set route from one cinematic cut scene to the next.
Multiplayer games are by no means a new idea, Quake for example is no spring chicken but the mind set of publishers changed when franchises like Halo and Call of Duty emerged. They quite clearly came with a solid solo campaign that was the main focus but also featured the additional bonus of a powerful and engaging online experience. This combination was lapped up by gamers and thus saw their sales sky rocket, making everyone else sit up and take notice.
The online multiplayer side of gaming adds immensely to the total overall package keeping players playing the game for years rather than days, but at what cost? As developers start to focus more and more on the online aspects, the solo campaigns are starting to suffer.
The dwindling time line in the single player campaigns has become more and more evident with recent games such as Medal of Honor producing a 6 hour campaign and Home front clocking in at under 5 hours. Is it fair to assume the single player experience is no longer the main focus of the developers?
Sadly for solo gamers it is now common place for the single player gaming experience to last an average of 8 hours, with large chunks of that made up with cut scenes. As a consequence it is often now the solo campaign that feels disappointing and tacked on rather than the multiplayer experience.
With this new incentive to push players online so the Online pass is more effective, is it only a matter of time before the single player experience starts to become extinct altogether?
We all agree that developers need to be paid for their work and that the second hand market does throw up a lot of questions that the whole industry needs to address but what about the forgotten gamer? The one who for whatever reason doesn’t want to, or just can’t go online?
Are they to continue paying full price for a product that is getting smaller and smaller each year? If a gamer should have to pay to go online is it not fair to suggest those that can’t go in line should get a discount too?
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