Report: Most gamers don't finish videogames

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/17/gdc-most-players-donat-finish-games

Doesn't really surprise me, I've been saying this for years, still: a research conducted on Steam (though I can testify this also goes for consoles, if maybe a little less dramatically) reveals that most gamers never complete the games they buy. Only half of the Steam users who own them have completed Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock Infinite, much less than half has completed the 2-hours Portal (a Valve game no less), same goes for Arkham City. Also, only less than 1 Steam user in 3 has finished the main quest in Skyrim and Borderlands 2.

Don't like to repeat myself, but do you see why single player is being put aside by developers? Because even when games have kickass campaigns, people don't play them. Prepare for a future with nothing but CoD clones and identical MOBAS, people.

consider the quality and the challenge within such games. do they really entice their busy target audience to sacrifice more of their time? One has to ask how good of a job did the industry do approaching the current teens and giving them new franchises that they have more time to indulge in that adult players.

and theres this to consider.

I wouldn't go as far as to call this research. The article pretty much states they just looked at achievements, which on steam are sometimes disabled should the player use console commands or some add-ons...and honestly, who hasn't? Also, if they play in offline mode they won't get achievements. And not all games have achievements, either, so this is going to be a somewhat small selection of high profile titles that they're looking at. High profile titles are more subject to impulse buys...add that to all the sales steam has, and it's likely you have a lot of people buying games that they never would have except that they're really popular and today they're on sale.

The other thing is people who have games on multiple systems. It happens. Bought Witcher 2 for 360 because I wanted to throw money at CDProjekt and was interested to see how well they ported it. If you look at my achievements you'd conclude I never finished it...but that's only because I beat it twice on PC shortly before.

And does anyone else have a problem with judging Skyrim completion by the main quest? Do they realize there are mods out there to change the beginning of the game for those of us that don't want to play a nord hero's storyline? I put over 600 hours into this game. I don't give a shit about dragons...I've got houses to rob, rebel scum to put down, and terror to wreak on the back of my wicked black horse....oh yeah, and game to hunt. I love hunting deer in Skyrim....get yourself a tall grass and no reticule mods... It's like nerdy Cabela's.

Also, I've done my own study, and it turns out that 100% of the people sitting at this computer as this message is being typed did not buy Titanfall specifically because it had no single-player.

In the end it's not going to matter how many people finish the game (however you want to qualify that) as long as people are buying the game.

I didn't finnish any of the Uncharted games.

I finish most of my games. It depends on how good they are, and whether or not there is something much better on my plate. However, every few years, I do end up leaving nearly my entire backlog behind and moving on to almost all new games...

Not surprised. I don't complete most of the games I play.

With Steam sales I'll often acquire PC versions of games I've already beaten on consoles. Sometimes I do it as building an archive for later, sometimes I do this to try the game out to see if it looks better on PC, and sometimes it's just too cheap to pass up in case I might want to play the game at a later date.

My point is, if you took a look at only my Steam library, you could be forgiven for thinking I've only played a few games to completion when in reality I complete far more than I don't. I just don't always complete them on PC.

I believe it, because even on game forums like this one I read comments all the time about people saying they're buying every game that comes out every week, so I know these people aren't completing all these games they're buying. They're too busy getting hyped and buying the next game coming out to beat the ones they already own.

I haven't finished Skyrim yet for some reason and I liked the game. I got distracted playing with mods in the game and then left the game for a while and forgot to get back to it... i will someday hopefully.

I couldnt finish the last couple final fantasy games, i got so bored and lost in them i gave up trying to finish them.

I think gaming has always been like this. Hell, I've completed maybe 15% of the games I own. But I do own a gargantuan amount of games, so...

What does it matter half of the players did and enjoyed it fully, and yet people STILL BOUGHT the game and thats the main thing, I don't complete every game I get because I just don't have the time but I still have respect and bought the game new, loads of people would of completed and loads wouldn't of, and I don't like online games I don't have the time, why does all games need to be competitive online games, why are people so for just online, i mean do you people even have a life, i honestly get about an hour if that a night to play games, i haven't got time to get into online gaming to be fair plus i'm on call 24/7 so it hard to settle into an online gaming session like most.

I finish all the games I play.

I'm as guilty as they come. I've started so many only to put them on hiatus. I'm focused on working on one, maybe two games, at a time now so I truly finish games and shorten my backlog. It's a work in progress. Hoping to complete at least half of my list by the end of the year. It's mostly RPGs, so it'll take awhile.

Also, Steam wouldn't know if I complete my games or not, since I play the campaigns in offline mode...

not only do I call b.s. on the "research", but, if I concede the point, it merely proves that developers don't know how to produce games that are great throughout.

as well, people who don't enjoy multiplayer games aren't going to suddenly pick it up if there are less single-player games, which, btw, I also do not agree with.

and, lastly, it doesn't even matter if people "finish" a game or not. what's important is whether or not they bought a game as a form of entertainment in the first place.

This doesn't surprise me since I look around on trophy data for random people as well as the total percentages. I don't know how many times I've seen people will literally dozens of unfinished games that they have played. While I'm still not surprised, I just don't understand. I know I can be a bit of completionist, trying to earn all the trophies for most of the games I play, but I don't get why a lot of people don't do the bare minimum and finish a game.

There are a handful of games I barely got into and of course never finished, but it's a very few games. And almost none of which I actually paid for. Do people actually just start playing a game for 10 minutes, get bored, and never play again? Because according to some trophy data I've seen, a significant amount of people seem to do this.

Single player isn't being put away by any developers and i don't understand why you keep trying to make it look this dark.

There are plenty of single player games out there and in the future also you really think that developers give a shit about what you do with the game after you bought it, all that counts is that you buy it.

I have to agree with the statistic and am actually not surprised. Games in many cases are becoming more challenging, which can be a really good thing. The problem is, most of these "challenging" games are directed more towards adults, people that have undeniably limited time for the most part. A challenging game means there are parts that you will need to retry, which everyone does, but when you take into account the responsibilities of that person (Job, family, etc.) it doesn't leave a lot of play time. Eventually, they either give up or took so long that another anticipated game has released and they've dropped one game to play another.

Personally, I have over 30 games in just my 360 collection, 10 of them I've never completed not really due to giving up, I just have a wife and full-time job that demands my more immediate attention. In every case, it took me so long that something else I've wanted has released, and the game has been forgotten about til I'm short on cash and need to hock it to pay for another game.

Making single player content is expensive. Why waste money when more than half the people never touch it? You need to look at things in perspective.

I finish every single game that I own.....

Well, there are some exceptions. I didn't finish GTA4 because that last mission frustrated me too much.

I have not finished Fallout 3 so far because it is simply boring.

Every other game I own has been finished.

Even the ones that I sold or borrowed: Medal of Honor 2010, RAGE, Halo: CE Anniversary, etc.

Further evidence that all games should follow Titanfall's example.

I finish all my games and only play the sp.

That's a shame. I'm not one of them, thankfully. I always try to finish my games unless I really don't like it.

@Black_Knight_00:

and, I would counter by saying that the majority of gamers are single-player only gamers and that the majority of single-player only gamers don't touch multiplayer a vast majority of the time.

as well, getting all the achievements/trophies has nothing to do with playing through an entire game, in most instances. (and, if they are then the devs who designed the achievements are idiots and have no creativity at all.)

I have no idea how you've drawn that conclusion. Servers are incredibly expensive to maintain. All that needs to be done to single player is patch the bugs, whereas multiplayer servers need constant maintenance. Plus, if they did that, they'd lose the "half" that do actually touch it. I don't see a problem with making multiplayer games for those that like it, but saying that half of potential customers aren't worth worrying about and discontinuing single player campaigns would just hurt the industry.

Because they know that even though people may not play it, the company will still make money off of it.

Do you think single player grows on trees and developers only need to patch what nature did wrong? Single player content is disastrously expensive to make in this age of AAA games: you need to develop AI, write a mountain of scripting, hire actors and writers. These are all expenses that multiplayer-only games do not require. It's only natural that a gaming company would cut the production costs of its games by removing expensive features that are no longer in demand. This is not a matter of opinion, it's business 101: you reduce production costs whenever possible while still satisfying the market's demand. That's why if the trend of not playing single player continues, companies will eventually remove entirely. That's exactly what happened with Titanfall, they flat out said so.

Is there anything that researchers don't take statistics on? There will always be room for good single player games. Sure FPS games put up numbers in sales, but it's the single player games that attract the most attention and stand out the more. Besides, there could be a number of reasons people don't finish games. Boredom, life, distraction by a newer game, etc. Plus, not every gamer plays online.

When I don't finish a game it isn't because I am drawn into its multiplayer, it is because I don't find it interesting, or because I have other games to play at that moment.

Everybody who pvps in dark souls for example, has finished the game. I enjoy a good single player experience as much as I enjoy a good multiplayer session.

So yeah, developers need to focus on single player more.

How do you get to that argument from what this article says? So what if a lot of people didn't finish skyrim? It has sold over 20 million copies with no multiplayer feature in sight. You think Bethesda is sitting around their studios like "boy we fucked up! We should have done deathmatch." No.

This says nothing about people's desire for single player games, and, as has been pointed out multiple times, this in no way constitutes research on the subject. It's anecdotal, based on looking at achievements. And its a speech delivered by two guys who do multiplayer for a living. Don't you think maybe there might be a conflict there? Two guys looking to justify their business model to people wondering why they should pay full price for limited game content?

@Black_Knight_00:

You're taking one line out of everything I said to prove a point? Look, some people love multiplayer and that's all they play, then there's people like me that love solo and are only interested in playing online multiplayer when friends are involved. Yes, Titanfall was a big hit, but the people who don't care for the online-only campaign are drowned out by the the hype and the positive media. The day that games give up a deeply involved story for multiplayer is the day I give up gaming.

Have you got an xbox 360 or Xbone? If you do, go online and enter a lobby of any multiplayer game. Then go into yours "players met" menu and check the achievements of those random people in that lobby. You will see that most of them have started the single player campaign, did a couple levels and abandoned it. Repeat the experiment until you have sufficient evidence.
Keep in mind that Xbox achievements don't lie: even if you got them offline, they are automatically uploaded and updated to the server as soon as you login.

So you want me to go into a multiplayer lobby to gather data about single player experiences? You realize that there isn't complete overlap between PvE and PvP communities...that in fact these groups of players tend to not mix, as seen by how MMOs make a point to offer entire servers dedicated to separating these groups of players.

Your "experiment" is like going to C-PAC, not seeing democrats and concluding that fielding a democratic candidate is pointless.

The fact is, single player games still sell, and more importantly, they sell without choking out the competition. You want to make a multiplayer game, good luck. For every Titanfall there are tons of mp games that are completely forgotten in a couple weeks, precisely because of people going back to CoD or Halo or whatever their game of choice is. You might invest more in a single player game, but there's less direct competition...there's more room to sell.

Some facts about the game on that list:

Skyrim: 20 million in sales. Mass Effect 2: over $200 million in revenue. Arkham City - the most requested game on Gamefly in 2011, beating out CoD: MW3, while also being the seventh best selling game of that year.

This speech was written and delivered by multiplayer oriented developers to justify their business model. It's bullshit...data without parsing. You're reading too much into it logically. But you are reading it the way the speech writers want you to.

@Ish_basic: What part of "if the trend continues, they will eventually" am I failing to convey?

You mention current sales as though they were in any way relevant, while I am looking at things in perspective.

Its not that expensive and certainly not more than making a game multiplayer.

But i dont get where you are getting your dark views from? what is it that has you convinced that any developer is moving away from singleplayer? because i sure havent seen any proof.

Don't speculate about things you don't know about.

I fail to see the point. That lots, maybe even most didn't finish it is irrelevant, they all paid for it. It's an odd statistic that some not very bright or less scrupulous developers might twist to fit the narrative that people don't want single player games but that still won't make it applicable to everything.

I've finished very few of the games I've bought in the last 5 years, not because I don't like single player (I pretty much only buy my games for single player or local multiplayer) but because most have little to no actual gameplay progression outside of the opening tutorial and they get dull and repetitive very, very quickly at which point they hit the shelf of no return and I go back to playing good games.

Not too surprising. Although I know I'm not normal for beating nearly any game I buy, from speaking to my buddies I've assumed it was common for others to usually not finish a game.

What kind of bloody answer is that? But thanks for showing that you are just full of hot air and base your assumptions about single player on nothing but your own feeble imagination.

And please do show how a multiplayer game is cheaper than developing a singleplayer game.

What you meant to say was probably that developing a single-player with MP costs more than developing it purely for MP, which is true but not what you wrote.

That's a flawed premise. I'm a huge proponent of single player content, but if you see me online in COD you'll see that I haven't beaten the last 3 COD games. That's not because I don't like SP, it's because in COD specifically I think the multiplayer is more interesting -and- the quality of COD SP campaigns has been on a downward slide for a while now. At that point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Game developers think nobody cares about their SP content so they spend less time on it, resulting in a lower quality SP product. After a while, the customers actually stop caring about the SP because it's not as good as it used to be.

That being said, I really don't think achievments tell the whole story, and I think this is far more true of Steam achievements. I have something stupid like 600 games in my Steam account and I've probably beaten less than 50 of those. Sure, offline mode and disabled acheivments skew the stats a bit but I doubt they are a significant factor. More importantly, I think the overall nature of Steam's digital distribution model throws this all out of whack. Like Ish_basic pointed out, there are games I have in my Steam library that I own because I got them cheap or as part of bundles that I didn't beat on Steam because I already beat them on other platforms. Also, are they factoring games that had at least been played once? What about all the games I got as part of a bundle that I never even tried because I have no interest in them? Do they count against me? Does time of ownership count? Does it factor in how long someone has owned the game? Obviously I will not have beaten a game I just bought, regardless of when it was released.

What's more important is how much time/enjoyment did the player get out of that single player content. I spent over 200 hours and had created three characters Dark Souls before I got around to finishing the last boss and starting my new game plus. I only finally got around to finishing Skyrim around mid 2013 because it was so much fun dicking around in that game.

But most importantly, the presentation was NOT about how story and SP content doesn't matter in games. It was called "Death to the Three-Act Structure" and it was about how the standard storytelling structure used in movies doesn't necessarily work well with most types of games. The whole point was that games are not movies, so this model doesn't necessarily fit unless you have a nice, cinematic-ly linear game like Uncharted (which they praised as working very well with this structure). The presentation actually praised the story structure in games like The Walking Dead and TLoU for having a more episodic "ebb and flow" and they suggested this as an alternate method for telling a compelling story in games.

-Byshop

I've done so. Go back and read. Or don't, as always. It's not like dvader is wrong about you, you know.

The core conflict with SP vs MP I see in the rise of multiplayer is.... Some devs decide they don't want to "gradually distribute and introduce content and mechanics to the player over time "

because thats one of the bedrock principles narrative single-player is founded on and how games tell stories in which characters develop.

In non interactive stories you are introduced to characters and setting, then their problems, their actions and the consequences of their clashes building up to a climax. All of that is distributed gradually with the biggest suprises held off to the end.

In books and films you just learn about a person, in games you get new moves and do new stuff.

When there is no narrative or progression, they can say, we'll either give you all the goodies up front (so there's nothing to anticipate but pwning someone online) or we'll lock it behind this paywall and you'll just have to play for cash.



I think there are a lot of artists and devs that are victims of this modern 'consolidated-social-entertainment' worldview in the creative industries these days. Games suddenly don't have to be long and deep anymore. They shouldn't go further than SF vs Tekken. Blockbuster movies can be nothing more than spectacle driven product placements with no point to em. It gets nauseating sometimes.

I finish my games, but with a timely fashion with some. But it isn't surprising, most play multiplayer aswell

No surprise to me. I currently have a big back-list of games I've never finished. Too many games to play is my excuse.

Just because I haven't played them doesn't mean that I won't be. The only ones that I don't play that I bought end up being clunky beyond belief.

I always finish games . Even if I don't like a game , I still try my best to finish it for some reason . There may be 2 or 3 games that I may have not finished because the game was unplayable , full of bugs and bad optimization .

As for this survey , this doesn't prove that most gamers don't finish games . Many may have been still playing it , or due to bigger library they might return later after finishing few other games . I myself mostly don't move to other games until I've finished one .

It is still good to see that due to sales , lot of people buy these games even if the genre of the game is not their favorite .

BTW Mass Effect 3 isn't a steam game - how are they getting steam achievement numbers for it?

It's Mass Effect 2

• The Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 1 - 66%
• Mass Effect 2 - 56%
• BioShock Infinite - 53%
• Batman: Arkham City - 47%
• Portal - 47%
• Mass Effect 3 - 42%
• The Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 5 - 39%
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 32%
• Borderlands 2 - 30%