Mario Bautista
Key Takeaways
- 53 percent of gamers prefer single-player games, especially older age groups.
- Younger age groups are more likely to prefer multiplayer games, but this drops off pretty quickly with gamers in their mid-twenties.
53 percent of gamers prefer to play single-player games, according to a new study. The research also shows that older age groups, starting at the of age 25, are more likely to prefer single-player titles, with younger gamers valuing multiplayer.
This is according to a study completed by MIDiA Research. Here, MIDiA has broken down the results by age group and game type, showing us what kind of titles are more popular in each generation, with single-player winning overall.
Gamers Prefer Single-Player Games, Younger Audiences More Likely To Play Multiplayer
As you can see in the graph, games included in the study were split into four groups: PvE, couch co-op, online PvP, and single-player. In the first two age groups, online PvP was the winner, which isn’t particularly surprising given the intense popularity of games like Fortnite.
However, that very quickly stops being the case once we reach gamers above the age of 25. From here, single-player becomes the winner, and the margin between that and PvP only grows the older the gamers in question are.
The data covers multiple countries, with the study being conducted with gamers in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Poland, Turkey, and South Africa. Data was gathered from 2023 to 2024.
Single-player game enthusiasts will likely find this news quite vindicating, given that for several years now, publishers have seemed more enthusiastic about launching live services than offline games. In the past decade in particular, developers previously known almost exclusively for single-player games have drifted to live services, including BioWare and Bethesda. In the former’s case, we’re only getting a sequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition now – ten years after launch – because the studio spent so long trying to make multiplayer games work, including a multiplayer version of Dragon Age 4, which was scrapped in favour of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Despite single-player games being more popular, MIDiA notes that microtransactions in live services are still where the real money is in the gaming industry, While this doesn’t make them risk-free, it does guarantee that a game has a way to keep making money after the initial price tag, something less common in single-player titles beyond story expansions. So, don’t expect studios to go all-in on single-player all of a sudden, even if success stories like Baldur’s Gate 3 help break the narrative that we’re done with these kinds of games.
