Infogrames Phil Harrison Believes Single Player Only Games No Longer of Interest To Consumers [We Strongly Disagree, How About You?]

With more and more ISPs explicitly or implicitly capping total downloads per subscriber at a handful of gigs a month, I’ve got this sinking feeling that net-hungry applications like social games are in for rough sledding.

First, there’s the software and content updates. For each game, they’re typically hundreds of megabytes in size, and are released monthly or more often. Not counting the pay-to-play extensions and new features.

Then there’s the in-game network load. First-person shooters with large teams can generate a lot of packets. Voice chat adds significantly.

Total these up, and a gamer can burn through several gigs of network usage very quickly. What’s a gamer to do when the monthly usage is nearing the cap and the choice is between an on-line NetFlix movie and another round of cops and robbers in GTA 4?

Perhaps network games will become more local as more households have in-home networks and multiple computers capable of supporting modern net-centric games. LAN parties will transform into kids in the neighborhood linking their house networks together, and will become part of the domestic landscape.

I think it’s a simplistic view of the gamer to assume that because we can play networked games, we won’t play solo games. It’s like a playing card manufacturer declaring that they’ll only release decks for Texas Hold’em, despite the clear and present interest in Solitaire.

I can see a game maker view of network games as a lower cost/better return in that the players invest time, effort and help build the game through playing online – imagine the coding required to make a single player WoW game with diverse guilds, scripted NPCs and AI. The features of the game environment that a human brings far outweighs the AI at the moment.

That said, there’s also the downside of humans in games – I’ve quit more than a few matches in TF2 because of the voicechat spam and I have Barrens chat autoblocked on every server I venture into in WoW.

There’s also the nature of game – playing for social company (WoW/CoH), sports style engagement (TF2), casual gaming (Audiosurf) or to relax (UT2K4) is different from playing for a storyline (Halflife) or skill development (Ninja Reflex). There are more than just single motives for movies, tv and reading, so why would there just be one way to video game?