I've asked this question on c/gaming, but I'd love to see what KotakuinAction2's members think of this topic:
In an age where every game genre from shooters, strategy, fighting, and racing games are seeing a decreased emphasis on single-player content and in some cases, obstructing the single-player experience through mechanics like forced Internet connections to save progress, I want to ask this community:
Do you think the increased push behind esports and dedication of more resources to it has ruined gaming?
I've noticed that developers have been increasingly neglecting the offline experience and sometimes making some features exclusive to the online modes.
Take how Rockstar stopped adding content to the single-player mode of GTA V, Blizzard and Respawn omitted single-player modes from extremely popular games like Overwatch and Apex Legends, and how racing games like GT7 and the upcoming Forza 2023 are forcing everyone to play online to "prevent cheating", even those that would never touch multiplayer.
Do you think that this has done more damage to gaming in the long run? Do you see things ever trending back toward a more balanced approach where both single player and multiplayer gamers are equally accommodated?
How do you think developers can know that they're alienating a big part of their player base by focusing so extensively if that's how you feel?
Would love to see your thoughts on this topic.
I think e-sports is more of a symptom of the decline in game innovation than a cause. Multiplayer game design has at its core the appeal to game designers/publishers of turning players' efforts into content, for free, and E-sports is the pinnacle of that.
Simulated opponents are technically difficult to make fun and challenging and even the best efforts struggle to be realistically challenging on an even footing, they need clever and interesting asymmetrical design to accommodate their flaws in interesting ways. Otherwise you just end up making things bullet sponges to provide some semblance of difficulty. But a multiplayer game can be perfectly symmetrical and inherently balanced because both the player and the opponent theoretically have the same limitations, it's much easier to design.
Another facet of the online push is to give publishers more control over how you use their software, if they add grind to a single player game to sell microtransations to skip it people can just mod it out or use cheat engine. But if it's online only with cheat protection checks it's much more difficult. And if they release a sequel that is inferior to the original they can just kill the servers for the original to force migration over to the sequel anyway.
The root cause is a profit driven design to make games just barely appealing enough to pay for, with the minimum amount of effort, and a consumer base who are on average too stupid/weak-willed to forcibly incentivize publishers into making higher quality products to earn their custom.
But there a slight silver lining to that, since the average online gamer you will meet is functionally illiterate and borderline retarded, we're soon approaching the point where AI opponents can reliably emulate that, and that takes some of the incentives back from multiplayer as easy content generation.