this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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I recommend taking a look at the full original article, the summary linked here may be a bit misleading. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single-player-games
This breakdown chart, in particular is very interesting. https://www.midiaresearch.com/storage/uploads/paragraphs/dbdbaba91de72cd615d8be1a0119cfca
Turns out that yes, slightly more than 50% of the people they surveyed prefer solo, but that's distorted by older people going HARD towards that option. Every segment below 45 years old skews slightly towards multiplayer, although the split between what type of multiplayer is pretty even.
Gotta say, I HATE that PvP is the preference across all age groups among multiplayer fans. Outside of asynchronous competition, leaderboards and fighting games I profoundly dislike realtime PvP.
The Kingdom of Loathing guys (Jick and Mr Skullhead) had a development approach to keep their game system balanced. They felt that players had different primary motivations/enjoyment in the game and they wanted to make sure there was something for everyone. They divided players into four groups: Hearts, Clubs, Spades, and Diamonds.
Hearts enjoyed the social aspects of the game and would use the chat system and clans extensively.
Clubs were the PvP crowd and weren't happy unless there were meaningful opportunities to battle other players.
Spades are explorers and look to every nook and cranny of the environment, and are interested in underlying game mechanics (this is me).
Diamonds are collectors and completists. They will scour environments to ensure they got everything and do all the sides because they want all the stuff.
Yeeeah, the motivations stuff for game design is very popular right now with devs big and small. It kinda rubs me the wrong way, although it's hard to articulate exactly why.
I think it sits at an intersection of still wanting to look at players as behavioral data, but at the same time being sorta generic and too broad to inform much of anything specific. Still, that's not to say you can't do good work using it.
The reason why it might be fucked up is that while the KoL guys might design such a system to create game design that is fulfilling to all these groups, the MBA in charge of the development of an AAA game is going to be "how do we best monetize all these motivations", as in "how do we exploit all these disparate personalities to make this game as fucked up addictive as possible for everyone".
There are remarkably few MBAs acting as creative directors, but it's true that the place where the motivations framework thing is most popular is triple A games as a service stuff. Honestly, it's mostly used as a way for creatives just doing game designery things to explain how the game designery things align with the marketingy things and the businessy things. That's part of why I don't love it, it doesn't really do much, it's mostly a translation layer.