Sam Thorne on the decline of linear single-player experiences in gaming…
Prey is a great game, probably the best game this year that most people will never play. The first-person-shooter developed by Arkane Studios, published by Bethesda, should have been one of this year’s biggest titles, drawing heavily on critically acclaimed games such as Bioshock and System Shock. Prey is somewhat positioned as a spiritual successor to those games, but while they’ve been able to emulate the same level of quality, the sales just aren’t there.
Many took the PAL charts for the week ending May 6th, 2017 as a massive red flag showcasing Prey’s financial failures when it failed to unseat Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as the #1 title on its launch week. You could suggest that this is nothing to read in to, due to the sheer selling power of Nintendo’s flagship plumber, but if you strip back the logic, the data is concerning. Nintendo is by and large an incredibly weak market for the UK, a seat primarily held by Sony’s PS4 these days. So the fact is a Wii U port – however big, on a new console two months after launch with a tiny install base, managed to sit atop the charts in the face of a new triple A game published by Bethesda. That has to be a massive concern for anyone at Bethesda, Arkane and Zenimax, and possibly for many developers in the industry as a whole.
Let’s not pretend that the Nintendo Switch isn’t a juggernaut, because it certainly is, that’s a fact at this point. But when you link these sale figures to the fact that Prey can now be found at £10 at various retailers only six months after launch, we all can assume the figures were incredibly disappointing. It would be easy to point the finger at Bethesda’s review policy which I won’t comment on now, or simply at their seeming inability to effectively market any series not containing the words ‘Fallout‘ or ‘Elder Scrolls‘, but I believe Prey’s shortcomings are indicative of a much deeper shift in the industry.
To a certain extent, it could be said that any spaces in the gaming calendar for linear titles similar to Prey, are now rapidly being replaced by ambitious open-world games such as The Witcher 3, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I use these three as an example, as they’re all incredible games, but their success is definitely something other studios will try to latch onto and replicate. The larger concern is when developers start to feel that there is only room for games like this in the industry, at a time when big budgets are already spiralling out of control. Another fear is that the gaming calendar is already transitioning to a state where it’s mainly populated by remasters due to long wait periods caused by intense, prolonged development cycles.
Variety is necessary in all types of media, but studios seem to be going all-in on open-world design en masse, which is a true signal that tight, linear single-player experiences could be in trouble outside of nostalgic and already established intellectual properties. As with most things, there’s clearly a middle ground here for tight linear games to co-exist with huge and ambitious open-world games, but in an industry currently based on trends and jumping on the success of others, that seems unlikely to ever be the reality.
Electronic Arts have become a sore spot for most gamers in recent weeks, but I feel it’s necessary to bring up a certain Star Wars game as part of this discussion, and no, I don’t mean Battlefront 2.
Before the swarm of bad press became focused around Battlefront 2’s pay-to-win loot boxes and micro transactions, many of us were up in arms over EA’s closure of Visceral Studios, and their plan to reconfigure industry vet Amy Hennig’s passion project for the Star Wars I.P, which promised an Uncharted-esque linear Star Wars game which presumably would have been fantastic. Breaking news on the topic covered by Dualshockers, notes that EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen explained the closure in full, essentially saying that ‘gamers don’t like linear games as much as today‘.
Leaving that statement where it is for now, I think it’s more important to focus on the ramifications of a senior at a huge developer and publisher saying this, as it’ll almost certainly have a significant ripple effect moving forward. Between Bethesda failing to sell their non-core linear games, and more publishers looking to monetise loot boxes and ‘games as a service’, spearheaded by EA publicly stating so, things aren’t looking good for fans of games like Prey.
Sam Thorne
Originally published November 30, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
