Some types of games don’t lend themselves especially well to a multiplayer experience, and yet we often find ourselves playing games that have multiplayer components that feel out of place or unnecessary. Gearbox Software President Randy Pitchford understands that there are financial reasons why this is the case but feels that those who are responsible for making the decisions are “wrong” to force multiplayer into games where it’s not needed.
Because many of the extremely successful games (Call of Duty: Black Ops, for instance) include a wide variety of features, publishers are persuaded that their games need to fill up fact sheets as much as possible to make them look more attractive to gamers.
“Let’s forget about what the actual promise of a game is and whether it’s suited to a narrative or competitive experience,” Pitchford told Edge. “Take that off the table for a minute and just think about the concept-free feature list: campaign, co-op, how many players? How many guns? How long is the campaign? When you boil it down to that, you take the ability to make good decisions out of the picture. And the reason they do it is because they notice that the biggest blockbusters offer a little bit for every kind of consumer. You have people that want co-op and competitive, and players who want to immerse themselves in deep fiction. But the concept has to speak to that automatically; it can’t be forced. That’s the problem.”
