Each year, Call of Duty sends other releases around it running for the hills–or at least next year, anyway. The ridiculously popular multiplayer mode’s blast radius extends months after the initial release. This year’s iteration, Black Ops, is no different in that respect. The millions of people who bought it on Xbox Live alone will be playing it for months to come.
One little change, though, could have a big ripple effect. In the multiplayer menu, there’s an option to skip the initial menus altogether and boot straight into multiplayer; none of the start-up logos, and no option to hit the single-player mode.
Say what you will about Activision, but this is a great read of their audience. They know exactly what sells their games. While so many games are adding multiplayer on as an afterthought – Dead Space 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – to varying effect, this change to Black Ops makes it clear just which mode is the afterthought in the Call of Duty games.
No, I'm not saying anything about Call of Duty's multiplayer demographic, why?
As someone who prefers a well-crafted single-player game to competitive multiplayer, I find this immensely frightening. While I don’t think this is exactly a death knell for the solitary gaming experience, it certainly shows where the money is right now, and it would be surprising if this trend didn’t continue.
So here’s the next question: will the next Call of Duty title be multiplayer only? Why even bother with the single-player if it’s something most players skip over? I imagine the campaign accounts for a majority cost of development and a minority of revenue. I think a multiplayer-only Call of Duty is just over the horizon, and I’m worried what sort of monsters will follow it.
A sight sure to become more and more common.
With companies like Bethesda Softworks, Platinum, Ubisoft, and Bioware stubbornly continuing with their single-player RPGs and action games and doing pretty well with it, it’s not like gamers won’t be able to find single player experiences. It’s just hard not to feel all doom-and-gloom when a game that sells more than most of the year’s other releases combined sells so well on the merits of its multiplayer alone.
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