With games like Rainbow Six: Siege, Star Wars Battlefront and (initially, at least) Street Fighter V, it seems that multiplayer-only games are here to stay, and some fear that the big-budget single-player campaign may become a thing of the past.
Recently, Xbox boss Phil Spencer echoed this in an interview with The Guardian, stating that the audience for big single-player projects is shrinking:
"The audience for those big story-driven games... I won't say it isn't as large, but they're not as consistent. You'll have things like Zelda or Horizon: Zero Dawn that'll come out, and they'll do really well, but they don't have the same impact that they used to have because the big service-based games are capturing such a large amount of the audience. Sony's first-party studios do a lot of these games, and they're good at them, but outside of that, it's difficult - they've become more rare; it's a difficult business decision for those teams, you're fighting into more headwind."
Now, though, Spencer has revealed via some follow-up posts on Twitter, that he does have hope for single-player games moving forward:
"We should want SP success, imo. Liking great examples doesn't mean genre is healthy. I want to find models/tools to help."
Do you think big, single-player games can survive as they are in the years ahead, or will they need to adapt to compete with the near-endless replayability of multiplayer titles?