People used to game together. These days, you can’t even put a chat window in your online card game because you have to hire moderators to deal with people being assholes to each other and/or would-be child molesters, and that’s a whole lot more expensive than just not letting players talk to each other. Unless you’re World of Warcraft, it just doesn’t pay.
Another data point on this theory. When I was a child “computer games” meant 5 overexcited children screaming and shoving one another off a sofa while at any one time 4 out of 5 of them were nominally playing on the nintendo (mario kart and party were particularly popular). This clearly shifted a lot, because around 2018 I remember returning a new halo game when I found out it couldn’t do split-screen. (It honestly never occurred to me to check, a shooter without split screen just feels, awful).
To me, the new “bowling alone” is “FPS without split screen”.
Meanwhile, split-screen seems to me to be such a patently horrible way to play an FPS that I can’t imagine anyone liking it (and I’ve been playing FPSes since FPSes existed).
People used to game together. These days, you can’t even put a chat window in your online card game because you have to hire moderators to deal with people being assholes to each other and/or would-be child molesters, and that’s a whole lot more expensive than just not letting players talk to each other. Unless you’re World of Warcraft, it just doesn’t pay.
Another data point on this theory. When I was a child “computer games” meant 5 overexcited children screaming and shoving one another off a sofa while at any one time 4 out of 5 of them were nominally playing on the nintendo (mario kart and party were particularly popular). This clearly shifted a lot, because around 2018 I remember returning a new halo game when I found out it couldn’t do split-screen. (It honestly never occurred to me to check, a shooter without split screen just feels, awful).
To me, the new “bowling alone” is “FPS without split screen”.
Meanwhile, split-screen seems to me to be such a patently horrible way to play an FPS that I can’t imagine anyone liking it (and I’ve been playing FPSes since FPSes existed).
Large language models may soon (if not already) make it much easier and cheaper to moderate such spaces, so maybe we’ll see a resurgence of that?