For me single player is number one followed by low pressure multiplayer with friends. Can be co op or PvP but the main thing is casual and low stress. Already have enough of that in my real life.

“Prefer”… when you’re young, you’ve got time to burn online without distractions.

Then you get married, have kids, work a demanding job, and you don’t get time for uninterrupted online play.

Eventually, correspondence chess is the only gaming you have time for! /s

I had just mentioned this in a similar post, but Discord culture has really killed multi-player games for me. Especially guilds in MMORPGs. I remember joining one before 2010 felt like this very regal thing. They were these sacred orders of gentlemen with cool names like “The Iron Wolves”, “The Order of Light”, or “The Knights Templar”. Upon initiation you were inducted into a fellowship and granted access to private forums to stay in touch and keep up with the guild. You’d get to know the more productive members who would forge you equipment and look after you. You would gather in great halls beneath the severed head of the world dragon and discuss official guild business. Somewhere along the way that magic just died.

Now the guilds are all edgy and gamey, like “HATE”, “FURY”, “APEX”, “FIRST IN”, and “METHOD”. Initiation involves two paths. You either remain in relative obscurity in the fringes of the guild, never really growing much or forging meaningful relationships, or you take the other fork; walking closely with the sweaty, most egotistical edge-lords of the guild who don’t actually care about or support you, and spread toxicity throughout the ranks. Both paths tend to require you to live in Discord, partaking in constant banter with a group of perpetually online sigma males. It’s like plugging yourself in directly to the guild hive-mind and permanently altering the game’s atmosphere. You’re just playing “ENVY” now, or whatever your dumb guild is called. I’ve joined guilds that want you to have Discord on your phone so you are connected even while offline. That’s fucking nuts.

Anyway, that garbage doesn’t exist with single-player games. I can read dialogue at my own pace, toggle walk through the entire village to take in the sights/sounds and slow down the pacing, and truly absorb every last bit of that wonderfully thick atmosphere. Single-player games are so much deeper for me.

Take a heavily modded playthrough of Skyrim for example, with camping/tenting mods. Dusk begins to fall and you hear the call of a northern flicker in the forest around you. Better make camp. You find a clear spot outside or town and pitch a tent, raise a tanning rack, and build a fire. Now it’s getting dark. You walk to the river’s edge to fill your waterskin and return with a large salmon to cook over the fire. Now the stars are out. The score is swelling to inspiring highs that move your soul. The aurora dances above you in brilliant colors. You sit beside the fire and thumb through your inventory, deciding which lore book to read first. After some time you study a spell or record your thoughts into your journal, then quell your fire and sleep.

That’s my shit right there. That’s a single-player game.

I prefer RPG, interesting narratives and “experiences”. I also used to be really into multiplayer games like halo 3, MW2, battlefield 4/bad company2 and even rainbow 6 siege. Whats turned me off of all that is aggressive monetization and super competitive sweat fests. It feels like all the fun/soul in those “good oll’ days” games just isn’t there anymore. Peak fun for me was maxed out halo 3 custom games and they just don’t make them like that anymore.

Well that graph sums my situation up. Got old, had a kid, don’t have the time nor inclination to get all sweaty playing against those half my age.

Am I crazy or is 53% not a wild number? For one thing, I play multiplayer games all the time but I much prefer my best single player experience to my best multiplayer experience I would absolutely identify as preferring single player games despite probably playing more multiplayer games.

For another thing, 53% is pretty low, about half of gamers prefer single player. If anything that number should be higher cause I bet the amount of single player games dwarfs multiplayer games (this also would include single player campaigns in multiplayer games).

ha, I’m surprised it’s so high, but I guess we don’t talk to each other.

53% of gamers are over 30. 😂 (This includes me almost 40 😭

Also I think more accurately to me I prefer games where single play can stand on its own. The game just happens to also have multiplayer features w/o half the game being locked out with micro transactions.

I’ll take a wonderful experience over a repetitive “make rank number go up” game any day of the week.

Don’t get me wrong, I played all the online multiplayer stuff, many MMOs, all the FPS games, RTS, you name it. But even in those universes I preferred something like Left 4 Dead over something like Counter Strike. At least with a co-op game like L4D the gameplay was more interesting and felt more immersive. CS, Overwatch, even good old Quake in multiplayer mode just felt so repetitive that I got tired of them after 15 minutes of “get flag, kill enemy, twitch around the map like a hyena on meth”

An old single player rpg with a great story was always going to capture my interest more than those online games. An MMORPG is more like an MMO and less like an RPG. And for games with less of a story to tell, a great platformer or adventure game where there was actual progression and new mechanics/challenges to discover level by level, was just more engaging than running Dust 2 a hundred times a night.

Now a days with games like Witcher 3, BG3, Cyberpunk, Hades, and the like, I just can’t bring myself to plug into those perpetually repetitive online experiences. Especially when if I do want to do some multiplayer, a game like BG3 has a wonderful implementation of it. Something like that is the kind of multiplayer I can get down with.

And also, plenty of others have said it already but I’m old and I got shit to do man. I can’t be gaming on someone else’s clock. Steam Deck has really helped get me back into gaming through. That thing has been a godsend. Knock out a chapter in Justice before I go to bed, it’s like reading a bit of a good book before bedtime. Love it.

Justice is great by the way if you like the Yakuza series but want something a little less goofy. Same studio.

I agree but I’ll also add WITH A CO-OP OPTION

Couch co-op please!!!

I like casual games, I don’t like the competitiveness or stress of some games, I only really play Minecraft multiplayer, and would play SDV MP too if I had someone to play with, but otherwise singleplayer is more relaxed.

I prefer single player over live service. I don’t mind the occasional multiplayer game, but prefer single player story based games.

Honestly I love multiplayer gamers because I like meeting people. There’s plenty of wholesome lobby games and some more intense games both have their benefits. Most people hate intense lobbies because of people who can’t handle the heat and freak out, but it’s really fun holding the team together or seeing someone do that. Both types of games and lobbies are fun to me. I get why people only want single player games though

Particularity on mobile…

I mean I get that mobile gamers dont wanna play multiplayer. But is this representative outside of mobile too?