Not quite the same thing, but one thing I have seen is players that stream slower-paced games chatting with remote viewers.
On Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Vormithrax, is well-known for this, and watching his videos has often been recommended on Reddit as a way to learn the (quite complicated) game, as he tends to walk people through what he’s thinking about while playing.
Obviously, that doesn’t work with every game genre; they have to be able to field suggestions and questions from viewers while concurrently playing. But for turn-based games, I think that it can work well.
There’s that game with untextured polygonal graphics about naval combat that’s aimed towards having several players running a carrier. Dammit, what’s the name of that?
If their main concern is layoffs – which it sounds like, at least from the article text, though I don’t know if that’s just the author’s take or not – I doubt that the union is going to have much leverage. CDPR isn’t laying people off for fun; the whole industry is seeing a major decline in investment at the moment.
Video Game VC Funding Slumps as Publishers Battle Covid Hangover
Funding opportunities dry up with game companies cutting jobs
Total peaked when people were still indoors because of Covid
VC groups invested $700.3 million in gaming in the third quarter, the lowest total since the second quarter of 2020, according to data from PitchBook. The industry attracted more than $2 billion in every quarter for two years ending in mid-2022.
The past few weeks have been marked by layoffs and studio closures by game companies. Epic cut 830 jobs, while Sony Group Corp.’s Naughty Dog and Worms maker Team17 have also let go dozens of workers.
The Swedish video-game holding company Embracer Group AB, which bought up dozens of gaming companies starting in 2020, is now canceling games, eliminating jobs and closing studios. The company is looking to sell Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment.
Since the beginning of 2023, there has been an abundance of layoffs that have hit the tech and gaming industry like a storm. Disney, Take Two, Unity, Twitter (now ‘X’) and even Microsoft have faced massive layoffs since January, and CD PROJEKT RED is the latest to follow this unfortunate and growing trend.
Redfall studio job listing indicates returning focus to single-player
A job listing for Redfall studio Arkane Austin appears to indicate that the Dishonored and Deathloop studio could be returning to single-player games soon.
Honestly, the proliferation of widely-available Internet access and the fact that multiplayer games can be harder to pirate has, IMHO, tilted things a bit overly towards multiplayer games. That’s not to say that multiplayer games can’t be fun, but there is a lot to like about single-player games.
They don’t go away forever once the player base drops off.
On the PC, modding provides for a lot of life for many games. Modding competitive multiplayer games tends to run into issues with people cheating.
More-broadly, it’s not a problem if someone cheats in a single-player game, but it’s usually a problem for single-player, so all the anti-cheat infrastructure has to come along in multiplayer games.
For competitive multiplayer games, providing an even playing field is important, so using a controller with more buttons tied to game functions – a nice quality-of-life improvement – becomes a problwm, whereas it’s fine in single-player games.
Single-player games can be played offline.
Single-player games don’t have issues with connectivity interruptions.
While it’s true that playing against or with a human can be a good way to provide “AI” for other characters, humans aren’t getting better at filling that role, whereas the advance of computing power and software improvement permits for games to have better AI. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement, but most first-person shooters have drastically more-interesting enemy AI than they did in the 1990s, and the technology isn’t going to generally go downhill. If someone makes a good “AI engine”, then many games benefit from improvement.
Single-player games are normally free to let the player pause what’s going on and deal with things In The Real World. If you’ve got an infant who needs their diaper to be changed, say, it’s not an issue. Multiplayer doesn’t generally deal so well with that.
It’s not as bad with centrally-controlled servers, which is the norm these days, but multiplayer games do have security concerns – you’re letting random other people affect your computer via software that probably isn’t very well-hardened.