[mountainb]

For PC, at least judging from Steam charts, single player gamers are a substantial minority, but still a minority in terms of what games are popular. CP2077 is the only single player game currently in the top 10, and there are only a couple other primarily SP games in the top 20.

[izacus]

At no point of history have multiplayer gamers outnumbered singleplayer gamers. Even for MP focused titles like StarCraft 2, the majority (iirc the number was around 54%) of customers never clicked on the multiplayer button once.

You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.

[Der_Einzige]

Sounds like you haven't paid attention to the gaming industry since eSports took off.

Overwatch and Valorant alone may have increased female participation in video games by double digit percentages. Also, the TV show for League, which was obviously aimed at women.

All multiplayer only

[paulmd]

> You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.

steam, ubisoft connect, origin, blizzard launcher, and rockstar are all online today, even for single-player games. I'm not sure where a significant number of non-platform-delivered games would even exist in 2022, I haven't bought a single game that didn't use steam or another platform from a vendor in ages.

The exception being GOG I guess, and to be fair there's a decent number of new-ish titles on that (horizon zero dawn) and I always make an effort to buy titles there when possible, but even still GOG's marketshare is minuscule in comparison to steam.

so no, actually, I disagree that there's some large repository of single-player games that are not showing up on steam or another equivalent.

(do PSN/XBL keep public player count stats?)

[ac29]

More single player gamers maybe, but far more multiplayer hours.

[izacus]

What does that even mean?

[Sohcahtoa82]

Exactly what he says.

There are more single-player games than multi-player, but overall more hours have been spent (or are currently being spent) on multi-player games. For example, someone might play BioShock Infinite once and complete the story in under 15 hours and then never touch it again, but easily rack up hundreds of hours in Apex Legends.

As you've said though, there's a sampling bias. Going by the "current players online" metric might diminish how many players are playing single-player games without being online.

[babypuncher]

I don't think that is a good metric. There are far more single player games available on Steam than multiplayer.

A multiplayer lives and dies by its community, so it makes sense that multiplayer gamers would coalesce around a relatively smaller number of games.

Multiplayer games are also designed far more around player retention. The unpredictability of human opponents, combined with various design decisions meant to keep players engaged, means that a multiplayer gamer may primarily play the same game for years. A solo player reaches the end of their game, maybe they even exhaust all the side content and achievements, but then they move on to the next single player game.