Off topic question for gamers (I know zero about gaming literally). Is the natural rise and fall of a game an artifact of the result of experience players getting so good that anyone starting can't make their mark easily against them? Whereby if they go to a new game they get a fresh and less competitive chance of success? (Am I stating this correctly even?)
It's the endgame content. Once you've gotten as good as you can get, it gets boring. In shooters, once you've memorized the levels and have a best gun and best loadout, the game becomes routine. Go to this corner, throw a grenade, come out shooting, duck back, hide in this bush. After time, everyone starts using the same tactics and it stops being fun. For other games like MMOs (WoW, GW2, etc), once you've beaten the main content of the game there may not be anything left to do. Just more of the same, or competitive PvP play that has the same problem as the shooters I was talking about.
Once you've seen everything the game has to offer, it starts getting boring quickly. Like watching the same movie over and over. Some you can watch over and over because they're that good, some you watch once or twice and you're done.
Now to your question of it being too hard to beat good players in an older game, that does have an effect. You might find it difficult to get into Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2 these days because the people still playing are really, really good. They've been playing the same game for a decade.
> In shooters, once you've memorized the levels and have a best gun and best loadout, the game becomes routine. Go to this corner, throw a grenade, come out shooting, duck back, hide in this bush. After time, everyone starts using the same tactics and it stops being fun.
This is then considered the "meta", most efficient tactic available, and in some communities, it will be heavily frowned upon to deviate from the established meta as that's seen as "throwing the match".
That's why a lot of multiplayer games are really fun right after release: Most players are new with no clue what they are doing, everybody is enjoying themselves even if they are messing up, they are still having fun exploring how everything works.
But as communities mature, and more people understand the mechanics at play and how best to exploit them to their gain, the community becomes more "mature" and competitive. Which is completely at odds with "messing around for fun", a process most new players learn by.
100% this. It's about replayabiliy. Some games have it in spades as the game elements involve interacting with other players making each play through experience somewhat unique. Others are very dull to play again. Single player offline games are quite rare these days for this reason, the last big one I can think of was half life 2.
There are plenty of very successful single player games these days... but exactly like you said, they tend to involve the player interacting in unique ways to make the experience more varied. Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, Elder Scrolls games, Far Cry and Just Cause. Even Mario and Legend of Zelda have gone this route. Linear story-driven single player games are niche, but open world, player-driven, interactive, "radiant AI" style games bring the feeling of a living multiplayer world to the single player experience.
One thing I've realized recently, AAA games are a medium like blockbuster movies. They aren't enjoyed in a vacuum, there's a social participatory element to them. People want to be part of an active fanbase and/or talk about it with their peers.
Playing an unpopular indie game (or even a game that's >8 years old) is kinda lonely. Yeah its fun but who am I going to talk to it about? Playing Fortnite or Overwatch or even a new AAA single-player game feels like being in the cultural zeitgeist.
It took me a while to realize the same thing. I used to play video games a lot but stopped abruptly and a lot of this had to do with the missing social context (went from a "gamer" group of friends to a more diverse friend group).
This is actually super annoying to me, I love single player games, story driven fps or rpg or whatever, but everyone just keeps on churning out multiplayer or (even worse) co-op games. I don't have any gamer friends and I don't wanna play co-op with some random person but I do wanna have fun and experience some cool content.
Offhand - Spiderman, Red Dead Redemption, Detroit, titanfall 2,Sekiro, monster Hunter world (kind of - the multiplayer I'd pretty much optional) are all AAA games released in 2018/2019.
There's also a glut of indie games like Into the Breach,Celeste, Dead Cells - if that's more you're thing!
There are oodles of great single player games being released still, and the enteryainemtn value of them is massive - games like Red Dead Redemption have o er 40 hours of content just in the main storyline alone!
I think that the strategy of focusing on multiplayer is failing. There are multiple recent examples of AAA games that created backlash, eg. Anthem, Destiny, Fallout 76.
Yes. Second Life has that problem. Second Life has about 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent users at any one time, which is about equal to GTA V Online and would put it in 10th or 11th place on Steam if it were on there. But it's 16 years old and a "dead game".
Funny because lately I've seen way more people posting Second Life stuff than say Spider-Man or GTAV, but then again most of my online socializing is with furries.
It's generally tied to the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Most super popular games these days have a short skill ceiling and an accessible skill floor; encouraging getting good isn't a major focus of design.
If all there is to do is to get achievements and better loot, then players will tire and leave.
If there's community, ways to express identity, and so forth, then players will keep each other engaged.
Fortnite doubles down on the latter by having an in-game store with time-windowed products and other mechanics that heavily leverage FOMO and social anxiety.
> Most super popular games these days have a short skill ceiling and an accessible skill floor; encouraging getting good isn't a major focus of design.
What games are you thinking about where this applies?
Many of the most popular games with which I'm familiar (Overwatch, PUBG, Starcraft II, DotA, League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, etc.) seem to have very high skill ceilings. That is, high-level competitive players in those games are way better than the average gamer.
I think a big way these games bring in players/stay current is by having a very active esports scene -- which only really works when you have "pro" quality players.
With the exception of time-gated achievement games (most MMOs, for example), the trend I see is a low barrier-to-entry but a very high skill ceiling.
One tactic that seems pretty common is to get people in-game quickly (f2p), teach them the core gameplay mechanics, then make it a very time-consuming grind to achieve the highest levels of play.
You've listed mostly previous generation, or much older, games. Overwatch being somewhat the exception, though I would say it has a very low skill floor and a mediocre skill ceiling. Overwatch is nowhere near the skill ceiling of Quake 3, IMHO.
Consider that in Fortnite a junior player can outlive and outlast a seasoned player by avoiding conflict, and score reasonably well.
In Pokemon Go and other similar mass market games, skill is an after thought at best; it's all about the balance between engagement with your friends and community and grinding levels and awards; intrinsic versus extrinsic.
The prolonged death of arena shooters is the evidence of the importance of skill.
This is probably a small factor -- a much larger factor is just that gamers get bored easily and want to play newer games, even the skilled ones.
Most games will put players of similar skill level against each other, so the fact that there's a cohort of players who are much stronger than you can be totally invisible to your experience of the game as a weaker player, even when that delta is getting larger over time. Whatever skill level you happen to be at, there's probably someone else there too.
Psychology of game design - Sid Meier - YouTube. Games are so brilliantly built these days - designer for maximum addiction while keeping you constantly engaged at the perception of winning. Battle royal is brilliant in the way you describe it but also because you can finish 2nd just by doing nothing.
I think it's usually more of a result of getting bored with the content than the skill of the players. Certain games never get boring for a big enough critical mass of players to keep going indefinitely (CS:GO, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Fortnite, etc). Many of these games have matchmaking system that try to put players of similar skill together. These systems are sometimes flawed, but can generally work well enough to soften the experience of picking up the game for the first time.
