EA’s Star Wars ‘pivot’ is a vote of no confidence in single-player games

Yesterday’s sobering Star Wars news is just the latest nail in the coffin for a beloved but increasingly unsustainable style of video game: big-budget cinematic action games designed as linear single-player experiences.

Electronic Arts announced yesterday that it is refocusing the Star Wars project that had been in development at Visceral Games, an unannounced action-adventure title with a linear story campaign. EA Vancouver is taking over with a new direction, assisted by other EA studios, while EA is shuttering Visceral Games entirely and looking to shift the studio’s developers elsewhere inside the company.

The news itself is shocking — Visceral had been working on the game for at least three and a half years, and had shown brief glimpses of it — but it’s not surprising to people who follow the games business. In announcing the decision, EA executive vice president Patrick Söderlund described the industry as “evolving faster and more dramatically than ever before,” and pointed to market trends as part of EA’s reasoning. If you read between the lines, it’s not hard to figure out why this happened.

Visceral Games/Twitter

It’s the economy, stupid

Electronic Arts is second only to Activision among third-party game publishers in terms of market capitalization. The company holds the exclusive rights to the video game license for Star Wars, one of the most enduring, popular and valuable brands in all of entertainment. Multiple Star Wars titles are in development at EA — the publisher will release Star Wars Battlefront 2 in a month, while independent studio Respawn Entertainment is working on an unannounced game — but it sounds like the company felt it couldn’t make the economics work for Visceral’s project.

Here’s the most telling section of Söderlund’s announcement:

In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design.

Plenty of games still get released in stores as $60 boxed products, but these days, the story rarely ends there. Most publishers plan to supplement retail games with add-on content, whether through expansions in a season pass or virtual trinkets via microtransactions. The latter is increasingly prevalent; the marketplace has been moving toward the free-to-play model for years. And one of the business’s “fundamental shifts” is that we’re now at a place where seemingly every other high-profile new release this fall is raising players’ hackles with an exploitative microtransaction scheme.

That includes EA’s own Battlefront 2, which had a multiplayer beta earlier this month that gave people a look at the game’s loot crates. The setup — in which players can speed up progression by purchasing loot boxes with a real-money currency — drew ire from beta testers. The feedback spurred EA to reassure prospective buyers that it will work to balance Battlefront 2 in a way that will “ensure the game is fun for everyone.”

Image: EA DICE, Motive Studios/Electronic Arts

The original Star Wars Battlefront was a multiplayer-only game; it received a lukewarm response primarily for that reason, with critics and fans clamoring for a story campaign (and more multiplayer content) in the follow-up. EA is aiming to deliver on both fronts with Battlefront 2, which contains a full solo campaign with slick cutscenes. But as ever, the multiplayer component — and its attendant microtransactions — is EA’s attempt to make sure that “players will want to come back to and enjoy [the game] for a long time to come.”

You can complain all you want about the infestation of microtransactions in full-price games, but it’s worth understanding why they’re becoming more pervasive: The economics of this strain of AAA game development dictate publishers’ decisions in this arena. Budgets have skyrocketed in the high-definition era, right along with players’ expectations. Meanwhile, the retail price of a “full game” has stayed at $59.99 since the Xbox 360’s launch kicked off the previous console generation in 2005 — 12 years ago. That makes it more risky and challenging for publishers to justify pouring tens of millions of dollars, not to mention the work of hundreds of developers over multiple years, into a project that may not strike a chord with customers.

EA’s decision to “pivot” Visceral’s Star Wars project remains remarkable because of the existing investment, however. After three or four years of development at Visceral, EA Vancouver and elsewhere inside the company, the game represented a huge sunk cost for EA. Crunching the numbers on the chances of the title’s eventual success — it wasn’t scheduled for release until sometime in EA’s 2019 fiscal year, which ends in March 2019 — must have indicated to EA executives that it wasn’t worth it to keep throwing money into a game focused around a linear single-player campaign (i.e., a game that wouldn’t be conducive to long-term monetization).

Solo is going the way of the dodo

EA isn’t immune to this trend, because it’s affecting everybody. A number of major AAA single-player games from the past couple of years have failed to meet sales expectations, including Bethesda Softworks’ Dishonored 2 and Prey, Square Enix’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2. What’s even more worrisome is that all of those games are open (rather than linear) in their design, even the ones that aren’t open-world experiences per se.

Visceral’s Star Wars game was being helmed by Amy Hennig, who directed multiple Uncharted games at Naughty Dog prior to joining EA in April 2014. It sounded like the Visceral title was intended to be Star Wars à la Uncharted. But solo-focused cinematic action titles like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Horizon Zero Dawn and Rise of the Tomb Raider seem to be a dying breed (and even Uncharted 4 includes an online multiplayer component that is supported by microtransactions).

The platform holders — Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo — are some of the only companies still willing and able to invest the exorbitant sums required to make these kinds of games, along with outliers like Take-Two Interactive and its Rockstar Games subsidiary. (Note, however, that Rockstar’s terse announcement of Red Dead Redemption 2 mentioned a “brand new online multiplayer experience,” and that Grand Theft Auto 5’s online component continues to be a lucrative undertaking for the publisher.) Japanese companies are still putting out titles like Dark Souls and Resident Evil 7, but in most cases those companies aren’t operating at the same scale as, say, EA.

Open-world multiplayer games in the AAA space require similar levels of investment, but they offer many more opportunities for monetization after a customer’s initial $60 purchase. So why wouldn’t a publisher aim to make a multiplayer game that could keep players engaged over months or years, as opposed to 10 or 20 hours? Let’s go back to what Söderlund said today:

Importantly, we are shifting the game to be a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency, leaning into the capabilities of our Frostbite engine and reimagining central elements of the game to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore.

Call it the Destiny-fication of video games: If that doesn’t sound like EA Vancouver will be taking a swing at replicating Bungie’s success with moon wizards, we don’t know what would. Hell, EA is already doing this with another one of its internal studios, BioWare, whose next new intellectual property is the cooperative sci-fi action game Anthem. And perhaps it didn’t help that the publisher is also funding Respawn’s Star Wars project, which is a third-person action-adventure title.

Bungie/Activision

Streaming is killing the linear single-player campaign star

Story-based single-player games are also threatened by another recent development that the game industry has to contend with: online video. Whether it’s YouTube and captured gameplay footage or Twitch and livestreaming, the ability for players to watch an entire game being played online (for free!) hurts the commercial viability of this genre much more than, say, multiplayer titles.

It seems undeniable that some people — and it may be a small percentage of players, but they do exist — see enough of a game on platforms like Twitch and YouTube and decide that they’ve had their fill, that they don’t need to actually spend $60 on it. Sure, you could watch somebody play through Destiny 2’s story campaign, but there’s so much more to do in that game even if you do that. If you watch a full Let’s Play of something like Uncharted 4, you’ve pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. Of course, plenty of players use these methods to get an idea of what a game is like in action before buying, but major publishers like EA don’t need that kind of marketing.

Insofar as AAA publishers continue to make games with linear single-player campaigns, they will likely push those experiences in the direction of the aforementioned open-world (or open-world-esque) games. That genre’s emergent design means that anything can happen, which makes a series like Dishonored conducive to livestreaming while leaving open the possibility that people watching it on YouTube or Twitch may still want to spend money on it.

Visceral Games/Electronic Arts

Hope springs eternal

The future for linear single-player games is bleak, to be sure, but it’s not all bad news. These kinds of titles are still coming out for now — consider MachineGames’ Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, which launches next week. And there’s a chance that major publishers will figure out a way to make the development of these games sustainable, perhaps by finding the right balance with microtransactions for cosmetic items (hi, Overwatch!).

In the meantime, pour out a pint of blue milk for Visceral Games and its vision for a game from a bygone era.