I wonder how Sony is making God of War, Days Gone, Spider-Man, Detroit Become Human, The Last of Us 2, Death Stranding. These are all single player titles (some might have a multiplayer component, but it's not the focus) with cutting edge graphical fidelity and no doubt huge budgets.

This is the same tired narrative a lot of publishers trot out when they try to justify things like lootboxes and microtransactions in single-player games and shoving pointless online elements into said games. Calling the costs of making games too high is just poor handling of the development process is bullshit, since we've seen examples of how single-player games with moderate budgets can be very successful in the current market place.

We don't even have to very far back to find an excellent example of this: Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, a game made with a modest budget looked great and achieved great success in the market, despite not being one of the so called AAA games.

The real reason the economics of single player games are "complicated" is because there's more POTENTIAL profit to be made in online games and with microtransactions. So of course they want to make all the profit, not just do well enough. If the publisher can't justify making single-player games because they are supposedly too expensive, then that's entirely their fault for trying to make nothing but big budget blockbusters and cultivating a landscape where every game has to look amazing to get mainstream attention.

He's not completely wrong. If you are going to make a state of the art single player game, like Horizon: Zero Dawn, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Quantum Break or FFXV, you are reliant on very good sales to make your money back. In that regard, the ever improving graphics is a boot on single player game development, and will continue to be, until we can reduce the amount of people it takes to make a state of the art video game.

But not all games need huge budgets - Nintendo is a master at making single player games with relatively low budgets, and Microsoft's own Ori is another example.

It´s sad that maybe those of us who prefer single player games might be becoming dinosaurs, but I think the "death" of single player games is melodramatic... thing is, with a few exceptions, they´ll start being more common in the indie and AA spaces, while most 'AAA 3rd parties' keep chasing that online multiplayer, GaaS, loot box filled open world high.

Thank god Sony and Nintendo still have a big focus on them.

GaaS multiplayer based experiences are just as risky or possibly even more so than singleplayer experiences. Consumers are becoming more weary and infuriated with each passing "AAA" title that incorporates loot boxes and microtransactions due to their egrigieous nature. It'll become even worse because not only must that title actually be decent (very few exceptions apply) it must be sustained with a large remaining dev team and ample cash flow to support it.

Look at Evolve, Battleborn, Lawbreakers. Flop, dead, 10 people playing.

Microsoft has a sad attitude in my opinion. I only play good singleplayer-games :) And games that have an incredible singleplayer inclusive a great multiplayer / online mode like Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 3/4 and The Last of Us.

good singleplayer(&story)-games are very successful in the last years/months. Persona 5 was delivered over 1.8 million times. the new ip Horizon Zero Dawn sells in the life 6-7 million times. Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, FF15 and many other titles have amazing sales figures. Uncharted 4 has ca 10 million units, i think. Even japanese games like Ni-Oh and Nier Automata well over a million.

One of the big reasons why many players do not want a xbox. And many nintendo-fans prefer a PS4, the reason is simple: The PS4 has a lot of singleplayer and multiplayer/online-games. The Xbox One does not -.- Added to this is the great support for japanese-games, jrpgs and anime-games on PS4. And what does Microsoft do ? Microsoft has delete games like "Scalebound", that makes the player angry.

My conclusion/thoughts: The next few years are very hard for Microsoft because they simply offer too few games for the players. And interesting is .. the new xbox one .. has for the people no meaning. Many PS4 exclusive games look better graphically than all xbox one-exclusives. (God of War, Last of Us 2, Death Stranding, Horizon Zero Dawn, Spiderman ect..)! MS has no desire, everything without love (in the last 4-5 years). Hard words, I know. But many people think so - even me.

Games on a console are always risky, but a good service based game can make up for 10 failed game projects. In the industry there are "whales" that will buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of microtransactions.

Exactly. + they helped several smaller, single-player focused games in the past as well like Sunset Overdrive and Re-core. Neither was a huge breakout, but I doubt anyone lost money on those.

State of Decay 2, Super Lucky Tale and Or.

Three games that will be published by MS and fit your description.

It sure doesn't fit Microsoft's description in light of this recent interview.