Phil Spencer Says Story Games Are Rare for a Reason
Phil Spencer was recently interviewed by The Guardian on the future of game development. Spencer’s response: the new model is service-based gaming, where DLC, multiplayer, and season passes are king. But where does that leave story-driven single player games, like the popular Zelda: Breath of the Wild? Spencer had this to say:
“The audience for those big story-driven games… I won’t say it isn’t as large, but they’re not as consistent. You’ll have things like Zelda or Horizon Zero Dawn that’ll come out, and they’ll do really well, but they don’t have the same impact that they used to have because the big service-based games are capturing such a large amount of the audience. Sony’s first-party studios do a lot of these games, and they’re good at them, but outside of that, it’s difficult – they’ve become more rare; it’s a difficult business decision for those teams, you’re fighting into more headwind.”
It’s true: more and more studios are adopting titles that have longevity, and that longevity lives in multiplayer and stringing along DLC in seasons. Players looking for that complete story in their single-player experience find titles few and far between, and the rumor blogs, Twitter nuggets, and a bunch of digging in anticipation goes on for years.
So after this truth bomb was dropped, Spencer had to face the Twitter mob that awaited him. He clarified his statement, backed up by his love for single-player story games:
@DannyCarreer It's healthy to disagree. I love playing SP games. Point is majority of play today is in service games, that's just a fact.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) April 28, 2017
Spencer’s love of the SP game continued, saying he wants to find a way to help developers who want to focus on story-driven games:
@RaphaelDeVarona We should want SP success, imo. Liking great examples doesn't mean genre is healthy. I want to find models/tools to help.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) April 29, 2017
Going back to The Guardian interview, the title of the article is “we need to create a Netflix of video games.” This could be what Spencer is referring to, modeling story-driven games into seasons of your favorite show – where a whole season is released and you wait for the next chapter of the story. Spencer referenced Telltale Games’ model with The Walking Dead and Square Enix’s HITMAN Season DLC as being a good prototype for story-driven games to survive and thrive in the modern video game landscape. There may be a fine balance to be had between the amount of content and the gap waiting for the next chapter that will satisfy both the gamers and the developers.