The director of Baldur’s Gate 3 has took to social media to slam critics who claim that single-player games are dead, as it’s the quality that counts whether a medium is successful.
The entire video game industry has been criticized over the past year due to the sheer number of layoffs at seemingly every studio. It doesn’t matter whether a game is a hit, meets expectations, or bombed spectacularly, as people are getting laid off regardless of what they produced.
Naturally, this has led some pundits to claim that single-player games are dying, partly due to how they don’t produce the same revenue as a live-service game with a big audience. Not everyone agrees with this assessment, especially not the creator of one of the biggest games of the decade.
In a post made on their Twitter/X account, Larian Studios founder and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has commented on the criticism of the single-player genre, especially those who claim that it’s dying.
That time of the year again when big single player games are declared dead.
Use your imagination.
They’re not.
They just have to be good.
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) March 18, 2025
It’s easy to say that games just have to be good when you’ve made the most acclaimed video game of all time, but is that enough to support the claim that games just need to be good to be successful. Both Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth are prime examples of this, having reviewed extremely well, but underperformed in terms of sales (though the PlayStation exclusivity didn’t help there.)
Meanwhile, multiplayer games have dropped like flies over the past few years, with high-profile failures, like MultiVersus and Concord failing to attract an audience. These weren’t terrible games: they just failed to attract a playerbase in an industry that’s full of options for different experiences.
Having a string of 10/10 reviews and fans raving about a game online certainly helps it in the long-run, but that’s not restricted to genre or the number of players involved. No one can ever predict when a game will be a hit, and a high-quality title doesn’t always guarantee multiple millions of sales.
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Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/baldurs-gate-3-director-calls-out-single-player-game-critics/
