With Gamescom, some of our colleagues had the opportunity to interview Peter Moore, Chief Ooperative Officer at Electronic Arts. Among other topics, Battlefront and the lack of a real single-player campaign were discussed with him. According to him, the reason for the absence of such a campaign can be summed up easily: few players would have touched it! A little more detailed explanations:
- When you start developing a game years before its release, you have to make choices by trying to consider what the video game market will be like when it comes out.
- Often times, the market and expectations for video games change between early development and release.
- The example of Star Wars The Old Republic is given: at the start of development, the subscription model was widespread while at the release the free-to-play model with micro-transactions was more in tune with the times, c This is why they had to modify the game to include them, however keeping the subscriptions that some players wanted to keep.
Apart from these "intuition" considerations about the future, he was challenged on the fact that single player AAA games generally sell better than multiplayer games. “On multiplayer games, not many people play the single player mode,” he said, relying on the fact that the data would show this.
Personally, it was the single player mode that brought me to Battlefront 2, and it was on this one (campaign or conquest) that I had spent most of my time. And you ? Do you play the single player mode of a multiplayer oriented game?
