Silicon Knights: Used Games Forcing Multiplayer into Single-Player Games

Oh that's such BS. Multiplayer games are being pushed more and more over single player because multiplayer games are ripe for nickel and dime DLC content, online subscription fees, forcing your friends to buy a copy of the game if you want to play with your buddies. THAT'S why single player games are being pushed to the side

Lol wildmario that is such a simplistic way of describing it. You really think that your friends will buy a game because you're going to? The answer is not likely and these multiplayer games are basically company savers which is why Capcom is suddenly making Resident evil: Raccoon City and Dragon's Dogma. Its all about more money through some appealing multiplayer based title. I mean look at the success of COD franchise (even though their games are nothing that a real hardcore gamer would buy because they know its **** and will always be **** until a dev buys their rights after its bled dry by Activision).

I personally prefer to buy my games new and I never sell them. But I have a hard time rationalizing the decision to pay sixty dollars over thirty dollars for the same product. My wallet usually makes the decision for me. If I can bu a game, go to a movie, and have dinner or just buy a game, well, that's not much of a decision.

Steam hasn't already taken over the PC market? EA has their own EA download manager digital distribution system and even they sell on Steam. I can hardly think of any PC games that aren't released on it nowadays, beyond Blizzard games. I assume that is because Steam loves sales and price reductions, so they naturally wouldn't get along with Blizzard.

@213EDD Maybe it's just my circle of friends (a couple of which I've only associated with through XBL), but I've bought several games solely based on the fact my other friends were buying them. Halo 3, MW 1 2 and BO just to name a few. My brother lives out of state, so we agree on fun XBL games to get and that's how we get to spend time together over distance. When I was active duty, my entire patrol squad bought Halo 3 and Modern Warfare. Three of us even went out and bought xbox360's for this reason. After being released, I still talk with some of those guys and buy new games coming out to play over XBL with them.

I can't imagine I'm the only person who does this. I personally don't always like playing with people who aren't a group of friends that I'm familiar with.

Simplistic or not, games are scrapping local multiplayer in exchange for online multiplayer. Gone are the days where you and 3 friends can sit on the couch and all play the same game from one copy of the game. If me and a few friends wanted to play a game now in these times, they'd have to get their own copies instead of us being able to all play with just one copy. Just look at Resident Evil 5 and Left 4 Dead 2. Many people complain about how bad your AI partners are, but the companies don't bother fixing them because they want you to be playing with others, meaning you either play with random people, pester your friends to get a copy so you guys can play, or just suck it up.

And as Drathbone said, there are people out there who do not like playing with random players.

I agree with wildmario and I've said it a thousand times and I'll say it again: Drop the price of new games! Drop the third world business model and begin making profit by selling in volume. They are doing too many things wrong because they are being too greedy, stuff like paying extra fees to unlock stuff that's already in the disc, or DLC that comes just a week after launch meaning it was ready and could've been included in the disc, or charging $4.99 for an extra costume or skin, that's all BS.

Steam has basically taken over the PC market. If you don't believe that, try going to Gamestop or any other retailer and actually find a decent selection of games at good prices. You just can't. The only reason steam hasn't cornered the market is that some people can't handle download times, and that they don't have a complete library. I literally only buy my games from either steam, or Amazon, and I try to stick to digital copies because I don't really want hard copies anymore. I like not having to worry about losing ****, and not having to take my library everywhere in case I decide to play an uninstalled game. If PC sales were so great, then it wouldn't be so hard to find them at gamestop.

In reality, used games only hurt consoles. If companies simply switched to services like steam with cloud based and online authentication, you'd probably see the end of piracy too anyways.

Does anyone not think digital distribution is the future? Once there is a quality distribution system with a nearly exhaustive library, game disks will be a thing of the past. Think about the music industry and iTunes... when was the last time anyone here bought a CD?

The PC has already gone that way with Steam (PS3 is next there)... And storage space shouldn't be an issue as long as you can download a game as many times as you want to - just delete when you are done and when you want to come back to a game, just re-install it!

It will still be a very long time until digital content is the norm. Even though storage space is getting bigger and cheaper, download speeds still vary from person to person. Unless the majority of the U.S. (for example) has high download speed, I don't expect digital distribution to fully replace physical copies any time soon.