Why Multi-Player Games are Winning Over Single-Player Formats

In the late 1970s, when videogames were all the rage, restaurant chains across the US started to install them at their premises. And so began the era of multiplayer gaming, where a limited number of players competed on the same screen, and recorded their high scores, along with their initials, in a much sought-after list. Kids would frequent arcades to play games with their friends.
Later, with technological advancements and the likes of Intel launching the world’s first microprocessor, multiplayer game formats came to the foreground. Today, the multiplayer gaming format is a prominent branch of the rapidly evolving online gaming sector, generating revenue of $19.9 billion in 2016, and forecasted to achieve a 568 petabytes data volume by 2020, according to figures released by Statista.

The Gradual Shift Due to Multiple Factors

It initially started off with a few single-player online games adding on a bonus multi-player mode, but the increasing popularity for games like World of WarCraft made the industry realise that successful games don’t require the single-player mode at all. For developers, building a multiplayer format was cheaper and easier than designing a massive single-player game, with big linear and open-world levels, according to an article on Forbes.
Revenue has also been a factor in this shift towards multi-player gaming. Piracy had been plaguing the online gaming industry for a long time and is still doing so on different levels. This is because the earlier multiplayer games required people to get their own copies of the game, their own system and subscriptions, which helped in increasing the revenues for distributors. They were also rewarded with robust in-game micro-transactions, in the form of more maps, more weapons and the requirement for more costumes, according to GAMERANT.
From the player’s perspective, the multiplayer mode provided a bonding experience that was unique and fun at the same time. Technology has, however, evolved and games are now able to tell stories through interactive technology, which makes playing with friends much more appealing than playing alone. People prefer playing games against humans than CPU-controlled enemies. In fact, in a poll conducted by The Washington Post, in collaboration with University of Massachusetts, over half the gamers aged 14 to 21 considered friendship as an important aspect for playing games, of which more than half agreed that they had made at least one friend through gaming.
It is due to such factors that leading mobile game aggregator, Sgame Pro™, is concentrating on providing players with the chance to experience single-player games in multi-player formats, while rewarding players for spending time on these games with its utility token, SGM.
Founder and CEO of Sgame Pro™, Gip Cutrino, says that the Sgame Pro™ platform will allow players to play traditional single-player games in asynchronous multi-player formats, where the ‘Proof-of-Play’ protocol will help in determining which players get rewarded with the SGM tokens. These tokens can be used across the platform to buy both digital and physical assets usable in games. This way, both game publishers and players can benefit.

To know more about the upcoming ICO, visit sgamepro.io and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.