[DivisionSol]

It all boils down to $$$, of course.

1. You cannot touch the sacred cow $60 game price. You can go lower, you cannot go higher.

2. Reoccurring revenue & upsells/addons are every business' wet dreams. The game is done, sell it at $60 and shift 9/10ths of the team onto the next game. 1/10th of the team remains in bug-fix/content-churn mode to fulfill whatever season/battle pass scheme they're peddling. Release a new game with the same stuff ~2-4 years later.

3. Singleplayer games are dead because studios haven't figured out to get cheap secondary/ternary monetization out of them (for cheap.) A lot easier to make a digital hat than keep your design/narrative team making expansions.

To address the actual post: Amazon is hopping on because they have the technical capabilities... Unfortunately they don't have the game-industry/consumer-oriented know-how to make this a success. It's going to be a 'neat tech demo' but they'll never get a foothold because it's not solving an actual problem consumers are having at the moment.

[viraptor]

> 3. Singleplayer games are dead

That kind of became a meme last year (?) when EA exec mentioned it as a reason for scrapping a title... a few months before they released some top-earning single player games that pretty much proved it wrong.

There will always be single player games. We just got an explosion of multiplayer in the last decade because lots of people have networks which can support it, some new genres became popular (battle royale), and skins are good for monetization. But single and multi player can coexist just fine.

[bpicolo]

> You cannot touch the sacred cow $60 game price. You can go lower, you cannot go higher.

Several AAAs for the upcoming gens are going higher.

https://www.businessinsider.com/video-game-price-increase-60...

[iamjake648]

> 3. Singleplayer games are dead

While they certainly aren't as common as they used to be, this is quite a stretch. Some of the Playstation's most popular exclusive titles have been single player games: Ghost of Tsushima, Last of Us 2, God of War, etc. Same thing for Nintendo: Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey.

[hellotomyrars]

1. $70 is going to be standardized for the next generation. Also $60 may have stayed the price of a AAA product but most big budget games have plenty of ways to let you spend more money, even outside of live services games

3. "Singleplayer games are dead" is a myth that people have been repeating as a mantra for over a decade now. Yet some of the biggest AAA releases are still purely singleplayer experiences. Singleplayer games aren't dead. They never died.

[dyingkneepad]

Regarding point 1, it is wrong. Every new game has the $60 version, but also has the ultimate/deluxe/premium/season-pass/whatever version that costs up to $90 or $120 that you can buy on day one and often will even give you extra content on day one. The $60 purchase is not the full product anymore.

[IdiocyInAction]

> 1. You cannot touch the sacred cow $60 game price. You can go lower, you cannot go higher.

I am merely 23 years old yet I still remember when I used to pay 50€ instead of 60€ for new games on Steam/Retail. And now it's going closer to 70€ for some games. For consoles, I've seen anything between 60€ and 90€. So, at least in Europe, this doesn't seem true.

> 2. Reoccurring revenue & upsells/addons are every business' wet dreams. The game is done, sell it at $60 and shift 9/10ths of the team onto the next game. 1/10th of the team remains in bug-fix/content-churn mode to fulfill whatever season/battle pass scheme they're peddling. Release a new game with the same stuff ~2-4 years later.

That's definitely true for the megabudget games like GTA. There still seems to be a sizeable niche that for pure single-player experiences though, for which I am glad. I find them to be far from dead; there are tons of upcoming SP games I am excited for and I see no reason for this trend to end anytime soon. There are also still expansions. I mean, there's a lot of AAA SP games on the market and coming out.

> 3. Singleplayer games are dead because studios haven't figured out to get cheap secondary/ternary monetization out of them (for cheap.) A lot easier to make a digital hat than keep your design/narrative team making expansions.

The problem with secondary/ternary monetization is that the market will probably saturate quite soon; most people aren't going to pump money into 5+ live service games at once.