Interesting read this, an interview with Aaryn Flynn here of Inflexion Game (Nightingale). Talking about the pull of Fortnite, GTA Online and the other big hitter live service games and the difficulties it causes launching games today.
For me, I have only a handful of friends that are still into games enough to dedicate time to organising playing multiplayer together. For everyone else, and this is an age thing really, no one has the availability at the same specific time or energy left in their busy family lives to put the effort in to organise playing the same thing at the same time.
I'm not the main target market these days though so I'm sure this isn't a problem for the younger audience. That said what is a shared issues between the different age groups is the accessibility of the game. In my weekly Fortnite squad, 2 are on PC, one on Xbox and one PS5, no one is going to move platforms as PC is the best one because we all prefer that platform we use or are bought into it that much we will never switch. This means we can only play crossplay games, immediately limiting what we can play to a tiny fraction of games.
On top of that, the chances of us all taking a risk and all 4 of us buying the same game at the same time is very low, no one wants to encourage another to spend, only to find they don't like it and then you feel guilty. This means we only play free to play multiplayer games, limiting the range even more. Any game anyone suggests ,there is a version of it in fortnite anyway (racing game, lego crafting, Among us clones etc), so why leave Fortnite?
What are other peoples opinions on this and how can paid multiplayer games break into it that audience? Is an all platforms launch with crossplay essential for you also? what about free to play V paid? It is possible as we have seen with helldivers 2 (notably cross platform on day1 other than xbox), Palworld etc, but generally the audience doesn't stick around and gets drawn back to their go to big live service games again.
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