For Cod5 I'd settle for just a decent short campaign over a terrible (long?) one like they had in CoD3.

I bet Gears will have about the same length as the first one. I played through the co op campaign and it was like 6-7 hours or something. How long is it just single player?!
There is no way like Bod said they will focus on their single player more. It sucks for people who enjoy single player experiences more but for people like me who have the selling points with awesome multiplayer its fine. I don't think I will get CoD5 because of the developer and not it being WWII.

I'd kill myself if I had to face more 5 hours of infinite respawn. I'd agree with you if they did it right though.

but I still believe they could make the campaign longer in COD5, competing with COD4 in the multiplayer side will be very difficult IMO.

i doubt very much cod5 and gears2 will be huge single player games.

with a dvd limitation development in mind, they will be as big as thier previous versions, i suppose they could add more story and re use textures and level parts from earlier levels to make up, but imo they will be more or less the same. and cod5 will be shit i can bet on it

well don't forget an important factor... it's that with the arrival of casual gamers in the mix... the normal difficulty is the easy difficulty of before... don't forget to switch it to the next harder option... game difficulty has been lowered in the past 5 or 10 years.... and they (devs) admit it so i'm not dreaming it....

I doubt DVD length is the issue for a game ike CoD 4 there is no reason they can't put it on 2 DVDs if needed

 Don't expect a long campagin from COD5; is treyarch, so you might as well go bust out your highschool history book and find out the Spolierz to the campagin. Multiplayer games sell > single player games (with a few exceptions) so shifting resources sounds like a good idea from a buisness perspective.

Everyone is welcome to their own tastes, but these companies definitely should not have financial incentive to focus more on the single player experience.

When speaking about financial incentive, "should" means "has significant financial motive." Single player campaigns are no longer a predominant selling point for these types of games. It doesn't mean that you don't like them; I'm just saying you're the significant minority, and that from a financial perspective, these companies should follow the significant majority's desires.

Single player lovers are not the primary driving force behind Halo 3, or CoD4, or Gears of War, or Wii Sports, or Wii Play, or Smash Brothers, or Mario Kart, or Mario Party. The only single-player focused franchises to strike it big thus far this generation are GTA, which has added multiplayer components now, and Wii Fit, which I think is still "social gaming" even if it isn't technically multiplayer.

Again, I'm not saying your preferences are bad, or wrong, I'm just saying they're no longer very popular. Emphasis on single player has been decreasing for decades, and within 5-10 years I expect the entire concept of single player to be fairly niche.

I believe that single player campaigns on a game like Gears and Halo 3 are geared for replayabilty since they have co-op as well(Plus Halo 3 had a scoring system). It is not like games have shorter single-player spans than they used to. I have an achievement for beating Contra in under 15 minutes. I understand how you feel but in the old days you would beat a game and then up the difficulty and beat it again. Games cost about the same as they used to so it is not like you are getting fleeced. I would expect a similar or slightly longer Gears 2. And the game rock so hard it is gonna turn everyone's brain to shit.

I do agree that single player games seem to be a niche these days, but I could see that this trend has come to an end, or at least it won't be stronger in the future than it currently is.

I base my opinion on the fact that I have bought or played quite a few multiplayer games and in the future I won't do that, unless I am sure I will like the games' multiplayer features. Current multiplayer games are usually designed for hard-core-players. If you just have time to play games for a few hours a week they are mostly not very entertaining. This gaming trend is growing as well. The short version of this is: "I did it in the past, but won't do it in the future and there are others like me, especially with the growth of casual gamers".

So if games designers want bigger sales for the ever increasing development costs, they must also look more closely at the casual gamers, and perhaps less at the hard-core gamers. Hence, current trend of satifiying hard-core gamers taste for multiplayer games, and especially the way multiplayer games currently work, might change.

I hope Gears will have a longer campaign, I absolutely loved it. Cod.. well whatever, that was boring for me.