0:04 The video game industry is rapidly
0:06 changing in 2025. We're seeing it happen
0:09 in real time with these mass layoffs at
0:11 major publishers like Microsoft. Entire
0:13 studios at giant companies are shutting
0:15 down. Amazon essentially shuttered their
0:17 video game division. The AAA video game
0:20 industry. It's at a crossroads. No one
0:22 knows exactly how to move forward. And
0:25 unfortunately, single player games have
0:28 become very low priority for a lot of
0:30 developers. And I think we need to talk
0:32 about why. Hi folks, it's Falcon and
0:34 today on Game Ranks, that's what we're
0:36 going to do. We're asking the question,
0:39 why do AAA publishers hate single player
0:41 games? The video game industry is
0:43 exactly that. It's an industry that
0:46 produces over $50 billion in annual
0:48 revenue, but growth has stalled since
0:50 2021. Games are still making a truly
0:52 absurd amount of money, but the
0:54 attention economy is fickle, and
0:58 publishers want more than your $70. They
1:00 want your money forever. Every company
1:02 looks at financial successes like
1:05 Fortnite and drools. These people want a
1:08 piece of that very, very big pie. If
1:10 you're a business executive, you see
1:13 Fortnite's estimated 3 billion per year.
1:14 And you think to yourself,
1:16 >> look what I FOUND IN MY POCKET. LOOK,
1:18 >> HOW HARD could it be to copy their
1:20 success? But we've seen time and time
1:22 again that the live service model comes
1:25 with a host of unforeseen challenges.
1:27 Single player games might be really
1:29 difficult to make and require years of
1:31 expensive development time, but it's
1:33 also really safe compared to the muddy
1:35 waters of live service. It seems like a
1:37 no-brainer to develop games that are
1:40 guaranteed to be profitable, but to a
1:42 big publisher, even a successful single
1:44 player game doesn't bring in enough
1:47 revenue. A game you can purchase and
1:50 play can never compare to a forever game
1:53 like Fortnite. Everyone wants a piece of
1:56 Fortnite. And nothing against Fortnite.
1:58 Fortnite, Roblox, and to a lesser
2:01 extent, even the Steam platform are all
2:03 examples of what big publishers truly
2:05 want. They don't want to make games.
2:07 They want to buy a spot in the video
2:09 game market where they can sit and
2:12 collect rent forever. It's real estate,
2:14 baby. Not free real estate, though.
2:17 Yeah, I'm sorry, Tim Hideker meme, but
2:20 it's not free. Services like Steam are
2:22 perpetual money machines without the
2:25 inherent risk of video game development.
2:27 There's a big reason we haven't seen
2:30 Halflife 3. Valve makes too much money.
2:32 From a monetary perspective, they're
2:34 interested in diversions like Dota or
2:36 the Foundry spin-off card game, cuz
2:38 those are forever games with infinite
2:40 cash potential. Like, you only have to
2:43 build the apartment building once. If by
2:45 some miracle the tenants stay there
2:47 forever, that's great. They pay you
2:49 every month until you're dead and you no
2:51 longer have to think about it. If they
2:53 don't stay, new tenants will come in and
2:55 do the same thing. But even more so,
2:57 they have Steam. If they wanted to just
3:00 offload Dota or Foundry, it doesn't
3:02 matter. Like, they collect money off of
3:03 other people making games and selling
3:05 the games. Valve never has to make
3:06 another game again, and they will
3:09 forever be the biggest name in the PC
3:11 gaming business. It's that simple. And
3:14 all of these services and the individual
3:16 service games vary in quality. And I'm
3:18 not saying that they're bad. Certainly
3:20 not at all. Steam is a great platform.
3:22 It has its problems, but it does what it
3:24 does probably better than anybody. And
3:26 Fortnite does what people want out of
3:29 Fortnite as well. These are the top tier
3:31 services to emulate. But publishers seem
3:33 to think that copying these things is
3:36 easy and that there's room for more than
3:38 one. Frankly, we have seen how difficult
3:41 the live service model really is time
3:43 and time again. Destiny 2 is the biggest
3:46 example of a modern live service game, a
3:48 forever game with microtransactions and
3:50 constant new content. It's a mill meant
3:53 to keep players engaged, and that isn't
3:55 always fun. Even fans will say they're
3:57 putting in the hours. It's a job. Live
4:00 service games live and breathe on FOMO,
4:02 and they put timers on their content.
4:04 The battle pass is such a ubiquitous
4:06 concept and it's the true marketing
4:08 genius of Fortnite. It doesn't ruin the
4:10 game experience for people who don't
4:12 want to engage with it, but those on the
4:14 fence are forced to engage with the
4:15 battle pass because it's a limited time
4:17 event. They're afraid of missing out,
4:20 maybe missing that new cool skin that
4:22 will never be available again if you
4:24 don't earn it now. It's a devious tactic
4:26 that's being used literally everywhere
4:27 in the industry. Honestly, you can't
4:30 even hardly fault it. If the game is a
4:31 forever game, you need to have something
4:34 that has some kind of scarcity. I am not
4:36 saying I like it, but I get it. Before
4:38 battle passes, we had loot boxes and
4:41 online multiplayer passes and map packs.
4:43 The Age of the Mat Pack, of course, long
4:45 past, and maybe we're better off for it.
4:48 One way we're not better off is the glut
4:49 of live service games that are in
4:51 development now. There are some amazing
4:54 standout examples like Hell Divers 2 or
4:56 The Finals that deliver tons of fun
4:58 without feeling like a literal job. I
5:00 mean, if you don't care about failing
5:02 major orders in Hell Divers 2, we don't.
5:03 But there's too many games in
5:05 development that absolutely they just
5:07 have no way that they will ever be
5:09 successful. Single player games have a
5:11 chance at being mildly successful, even
5:13 very successful. But live service games,
5:16 more often than not, will crash and burn
5:18 immediately. Take Concord for example.
5:20 This game reportedly had a massive
5:22 budget of hundreds of millions of
5:24 dollars and it shut down within 2 weeks
5:26 of launching. It wasn't just a huge
5:28 financial failure. It was also a
5:31 complete embarrassment for Sony. Somehow
5:32 this was a first party published game
5:36 that absolutely no one wanted. Sony
5:38 actually, they're the current leader in
5:40 live service announcements that no one
5:43 wants. As part of a massive live service
5:45 push by former Sony Interactive
5:48 Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan, the company
5:50 purchased Bungie, the developers of
5:52 Destiny 2 and the original developers of
5:55 Halo, for $3.6 billion. For perspective,
5:59 Disney bought Star Wars for $4 billion.
6:03 Now, I understand that $400 million is
6:05 an obscene amount of money, more money
6:07 than I will ever see, certainly. But if
6:09 your purchase of the Destiny 2
6:12 developers puts you in the neighborhood
6:15 of Star Wars, something is wrong. Like,
6:19 according to Sony, post Halo, Bungie is
6:22 worth just shy of what Star Wars is
6:25 worth. one. It's just the most baffling
6:27 decision. One of the most baffling in
6:29 video game history. It was part of
6:32 Sony's strategy to develop 12 new live
6:35 service games by 2026. As of writing,
6:37 eight of those live service games have
6:39 been cancelled. That includes a God of
6:42 War live service game, a Spider-Man live
6:44 service game, a Last of Us live service
6:46 game, and I don't know the other ones,
6:48 but I'm sure that if they touched any
6:51 major franchises, they also would have
6:53 been embarrassments. How would those
6:55 games work as multiplayer games you play
6:57 with friends? You know what? I asked
6:58 that question not wanting to know the
7:00 answer. I don't want to know the answer
7:02 to that question. I just don't. And you
7:04 know what? Here's another dumb thing.
7:05 You know how many Fortnites there are?
7:08 There's one. Epic Games owns it and they
7:10 don't try to make another Fortnite. Sony
7:12 was trying to make 12 things. They were
7:15 seriously trying to make like these
7:17 games historically struggle with
7:19 attracting players. even like the
7:20 biggest names, they have to attract
7:22 players away from other games, the
7:23 biggest games they're already playing.
7:25 And Sony planned on competing with
7:28 itself 12 times over, assuming one of
7:30 those games was successful. In their
7:33 minds, it was worth it to try to
7:35 fragment the market with 11 other
7:38 entries. I just can't imagine that
7:40 working. Like, even if one of them was a
7:43 wild success, how would you possibly
7:45 think any of the others wouldn't just
7:48 harm your successful one? Hell Divers 2
7:50 is one of the few successes Sony's had
7:52 with the live service experiment and
7:53 thankfully it seems like they're winding
7:56 down the idea as like a big initiative.
7:58 Jim Ryan left the company in 2024 and
8:02 his bad bad ideas unfortunately like you
8:03 make decisions at that level and they
8:06 affect the video game division for a
8:08 while. It's a year later and they're
8:11 just finally kind of getting out of his
8:13 decisions. Other big publishers have
8:15 different ideas on how they're going to
8:18 rent seek. Microsoft is seemingly
8:20 dropping the hardware business entirely
8:22 to focus on a subscription model, which
8:24 has been both great and terrible for
8:26 single player games. The Xbox Game Pass
8:29 needs a constant supply of new games to
8:31 keep players interested. So, Microsoft
8:34 purchased way too many game studios. too
8:36 many to handle as a matter of fact
8:38 because that's the reason Microsoft gave
8:40 for closing down Arcane Austin the
8:43 developers of Prey and backup developers
8:47 on Dishonored. Yes, Arcane Leon is still
8:49 in existence, but talk to a lot of
8:52 people and Prey is the best Arcane game
8:54 there is. I mean, it's not a completely
8:57 unanimous opinion, but it's near that.
8:59 Most people think Prey is a masterpiece
9:01 who like that kind of game.
9:03 Representatives of Microsoft say it was
9:05 a strategic decision to consolidate
9:08 resources or that Bethesda did it, but
9:10 that's all smoke and mirrors. Microsoft
9:12 owns Bethesda and Bethesda essentially
9:15 forced Arcane Austin to develop Redfall.
9:17 Redfall is another major live service
9:20 failure story where an extremely good
9:21 video game studio made something they
9:23 didn't want to make. And it was clear
9:26 because if you played it, you knew that
9:27 nobody wanted this thing to exist,
9:29 players or developers alike. It was
9:31 clearly executives that wanted it to
9:34 exist. By the time Redfall was released,
9:37 70% of the staff at Arcane Austin had
9:40 just straight up left the studio. That's
9:41 a big warning sign that nobody wanted to
9:43 make the game. And here's the thing.
9:45 Yes, you'll have some staff that isn't
9:47 necessarily the most jazzed about every
9:49 project of all time. But seven out of
9:51 every 10 people that worked at Arcane
9:54 Austin found it unbearable enough to
9:56 leave a dream job for a lot of these
9:59 developers. People with passion, the
10:02 people that developed prey, talented,
10:04 passionate people who liked what they
10:06 did were like, "Actually, you know what?
10:09 I could go anywhere else." And they did.
10:11 If the people behind the game don't
10:13 think that the game's going to be fun,
10:16 it's not going to be fun. It's also just
10:18 a really simple truth that traditional
10:20 video game development requires
10:22 different skills. Your regular video
10:24 game developer just can't transition
10:26 into live service development without
10:27 really just rebuilding the company.
10:30 We've seen it repeatedly. Rock Steady
10:32 Games is one of the best developers out
10:35 there with an incredible sterling track
10:37 record. The Batman Arkham games. Do we
10:40 need to say anything else? These are
10:41 some of the most incredibly polished
10:44 games with a clear vision. Some of our
10:46 favorite games of all time. and Suicide
10:48 Squad killed the Justice League,
10:50 ironically just killed all that
10:52 momentum. Like other live service
10:54 failures we've discussed, the game
10:57 stopped support before the end of the
10:59 game. After a few updates, they pulled
11:01 the plug and this really expensive flop
11:04 was finally put out of its misery. It's
11:05 not the first time a beloved developer
11:07 was crushed by the challenges of live
11:09 service development, either. Again, at
11:11 the behest of the demands for more money
11:14 by these big publishers, Boware barely
11:16 survived Anthem and had to fight to cut
11:18 all the live service elements from
11:20 Dragon Age: The Bailguard. Yes, that
11:22 game could have been much, much worse
11:24 than it was. It has its own rocky
11:26 development history, but we can say with
11:28 confidence the version of the game that
11:30 came out was an improvement over the
11:33 thing that EA wanted. One of our top
11:35 tier developers of all time, Platinum
11:38 Games were also almost crushed by Square
11:40 Enix's Babylon's Fall. It's another game
11:42 that was pulled completely from stores
11:44 and is currently unplayable. Thankfully,
11:46 Platinum got a second chance and made
11:48 the absolutely phenomenal Ninja Gaiden
11:51 4. That game was funded by Xbox Game
11:53 Studios to feed the Xbox Game Pass and
11:55 its neverending need for new content.
11:58 But it's an example of if you pair the
11:59 right developer with the right project,
12:01 it can work. forcing developers of
12:03 single player games to make quasi
12:05 multiplayer forever games. It's
12:07 dangerous from a financial position.
12:09 When one of these developers survives
12:12 and comes back up from the live service
12:14 dungeons, scarred or not, we're very
12:16 thankful. We've talked a lot about the
12:18 dangers of live service. But there's
12:20 another player that's taking a lot of
12:22 luster away from AAA developers. It's
12:24 the double A developers where the
12:26 mid-budget games thrive. For a long
12:28 time, we did not see many of these
12:30 releases, but that was because these AAA
12:33 publishers kind of owned all of that. As
12:35 we've seen, they've kind of just given
12:37 up on it. So, the double A space kind of
12:40 just was ripe for the picking. You know,
12:41 people went in and got the good
12:44 cherries, no pun intended. We'll talk
12:45 about Team Cherry in a second, but
12:47 mid-budget games are back at the
12:50 forefront. big successes like Clare
12:52 Obscure are these much smaller scale but
12:55 still find a way to bring grandeur to
12:57 it. Games like Korean and Chinese
12:59 developers like Lies of P or Blackmth
13:01 Wukong, those types of things, those
13:03 feel like they're bigger budget games
13:05 than they are. They're not on the level
13:08 of a Call of Duty by any even vague
13:10 stretch. And indie games on Steam are
13:11 getting more attention than ever. I told
13:14 you Hollow Knight Silkong, it's the kind
13:16 of huge money maker that publishers can
13:18 only dream of. It's a game that captured
13:21 the conversation for a very long time.
13:22 And the interesting thing is these
13:24 publishers would likely never pay for
13:26 the extremely long development time of
13:28 Silkong, which is to the advantage of
13:30 these much more interesting smaller
13:32 developers like Team Cherry. They don't
13:33 need to keep paying a staff of
13:35 thousands. When game budgets for AAA
13:37 games are ballooning to unnecessary
13:40 levels, it's no surprise that publishers
13:41 are looking for easier ways to make
13:44 money. Game development is very, very
13:47 hard. Making a single game that lasts
13:49 for a long time and continually makes
13:52 money as it exists sounds easier than
13:54 making 10 games. And I think that's a
13:56 lot of what's going on here. For an
13:58 industry that's about having fun,
14:00 developers are routinely required to
14:03 work 80our weeks or longer to get their
14:06 games made. Making one game instead of
14:08 10 maybe sounds like they might bypass
14:11 that cuz those 80hour work weeks, I
14:13 guarantee you that overtime ain't cheap.
14:15 But the game industry is at a
14:17 crossroads. A lot of people think single
14:20 player is dead because a few industry
14:22 analysts say that single player is dead.
14:24 They're wrong though. Single player
14:26 games are everywhere. The DA space is
14:28 growing and there are just too many
14:31 incredible indie games to even count. We
14:33 can only hope that these big publishers
14:35 learn the same lesson Hollywood is
14:38 learning right now. Big budgets don't
14:41 always equal big success. And before we
14:43 wrap this up, I want to give you an
14:45 example of somebody who proves it.
14:47 Capcom, while everybody else has been
14:49 panicking about the death of single
14:51 player and playing the lottery every
14:54 single day, hoping one day they'll hit
14:57 it big and get a Fortnite going. Capcom
15:00 doubled down on single player. They
15:03 release focused, polished singleplayer
15:05 games, and the results speak for
15:07 themselves. Their market cap has grown
15:10 more than tenfold over the last decade.
15:12 And their revenue and profit lines have
15:15 been stable, predictable, and up. They
15:17 didn't chase trends. They didn't throw
15:19 all their money into a live service
15:21 money pit. And they didn't expand to an
15:23 unsustainable team size. They just made
15:25 good games that people actually wanted
15:28 to buy. And the funny thing is that
15:30 works. If you make something worth
15:33 buying, people will buy it. And you will
15:36 make money, often a lot of money, just
15:38 not all of the money, and you'll have to
15:41 make another thing that's worth buying
15:44 next year or the year after. You won't
15:45 be able to just sit on your ass and
15:47 collect infinite money forever. You'll
15:50 actually have to do things. I understand
15:52 that's not appealing to an executive.
15:54 But the thing about creative businesses,
15:56 whether that's the games industry,
16:00 books, movies, any kind of art, the only
16:01 reason it's an industry in the first
16:04 place is because everybody needs to be
16:07 able to have the time to make these
16:09 things, which means that people have to
16:12 get paid for it. But once money starts
16:15 changing hands, people who are not
16:18 interested in art become interested in
16:20 the business that's taking place around
16:23 it. They don't understand that for that
16:25 business to exist, people have to
16:29 actually be satisfied sometimes. That's
16:31 really what a lot of this really boils
16:35 down to. The forever game has to almost
16:38 satisfy you time and time again. You
16:40 can't get closure. You shouldn't feel
16:43 catharsis. And it can't end. Satisfied
16:46 customers are repeat buyers. And
16:48 eventually, if your business model
16:51 revolves around not quite satisfying
16:53 people, the people are going to leave.
16:55 And it's not a vote with your dollars
16:57 type situation. That's not how things
16:59 work. In order for this all to collapse,
17:01 people have to understand that they're
17:03 not going to get what they want out of
17:06 this thing. And that is coming. And in
17:07 the meantime, people who are making
17:10 single player games are taking advantage
17:15 of literal catnip. If by some miracle a
17:17 publisher is listening to this and you
17:19 have a brain and can digest this
17:21 information, think about this for a
17:23 minute. You can make a lot of money by
17:26 making a satisfying product. Yes, you'll
17:29 have to make more than one. And no, you
17:31 will not make all of the money in the
17:33 world forever, but you will make no
17:35 money. In fact, you will make negative
17:38 money. You will sink money into a hole
17:41 99 times out of 100. If you chase the
17:44 live service trend, you probably are
17:47 going to fail. And it is proven that
17:49 even though you don't grow to be the
17:52 biggest godamn thing in the world, you
17:55 still grow and make tons of money by
17:58 just making good games. You've got the
18:01 entire AA industry. You've got the indie
18:04 games industry. And you've got, like I
18:06 said, a great example of a AAA like
18:09 Capcom that has done nothing but single
18:12 player games and grown every step of the
18:16 way. Just stop doing this [ __ ] You
18:19 can't all be Fortnite. You won't all be
18:22 Fortnite. Most of you will not own a
18:24 platform. Epic has more money than you
18:27 can imagine, and they have not made a
18:30 dent in Steam. And hell, they own
18:33 platforms. The Unreal Engine and
18:36 Fortnite are both technically platforms.
18:38 Like, people use Unreal to make their
18:41 games, and that makes epic money. People
18:44 use Fortnite not only for fun, but
18:47 people make content with it. People rent
18:49 their intellectual property to it, and
18:51 they do these collaboration events. And
18:53 it's this stuff. It It's It's something
18:56 you're not going to get. A lot of these
19:00 companies were either first or entirely
19:03 locked into it. Why do AAA publishers
19:06 hate singleplayer games? Because as
19:09 Tears for Fears put it, everybody wants
19:11 to rule the world. The problem with that
19:14 is that's not how the world works. We
19:17 all have a lot of different ideas about
19:19 how the world should work. And my idea
19:22 is probably very different from the idea
19:24 that these people have. But it doesn't
19:26 matter what I think or what they think
19:29 because the world works the way the
19:33 world works now. Any input from Jim Ryan
19:36 or myself will not change that. If you
19:38 want to be in the games business, make
19:40 games people want to play. You're not
19:42 going to rule the world with that, but
19:44 you'll do pretty damn good. If you're
19:46 picking up what we're throwing down
19:47 here, a lot of this came from
19:50 discussions we have making the Falcon
19:53 Show, our new membersonly podcast. Now,
19:54 some of it you can hear on the show.
19:57 Some of it happens around the show, but
20:00 that's where a lot of what this is about
20:02 came from. The Falcon Show is the first
20:05 thing we're doing for our new 1% club.
20:07 Now, that's kind of an ironic name. The
20:10 1% has always meant the elite, but we're
20:12 kind of co-opting that a little bit,
20:15 talking about how these executive types
20:17 that this video has been very pointed
20:20 at, look at single player gamers, like
20:22 we're some small segment of the
20:24 population that shouldn't be paid
20:26 attention to. We need to go out after
20:29 naive fools and children who don't know
20:31 any better, uh, who will become addicted
20:34 to our endless services. If you want in
20:37 on our 1% club and the Falcon show,
20:40 become a member today. We thank you so
20:42 much. This has been and will continue to
20:44 be a passion project. The single player
20:46 game space is what we really hold dear
20:49 here at Game Ranks. And on that note, we
20:51 want to know what you think. Leave us a
20:52 comment. Let us know. If you like this
20:54 video, click like. If you're not
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20:57 We upload brand new videos every day of
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21:06 you very much for watching this video.
