The Delayed Multiplayer Economy

The Verge reports that Cyberpunk 2077 too, the open world developed by CD Projekt, will receive an update following the first DLC to enable multiplayer.

Now, this makes me think that there are fundamentally 2 types of games: those that are multiplayer from the start (Fortnite, Overwatch, PUBG are the first that come to mind) and those that are single player stories, which are ‘enhanced’ by multiplayer - GTA 5 and No Man’s Sky come to mind.

The fundamental goal is to ‘chain’ the player as much as possible in front of the screen with the same images, making them change game as little as possible. GTA 5 is still widely played around the world, and No Man’s Sky is a complete game (although not exactly how we imagined it) only now.

This idea of making the game ‘complete’ only much later reminds me a lot of the smartphone concept. When I buy an iPhone or an Android smartphone with a certain OS version, Apple and Google engineers are actually already working on a version that will be released at least 2 or 3 years later. The features that will be available in the next version are already ready, but they are released ‘in doses’, both to keep anticipation high for new features, and to avoid suddenly running out of new things to propose.

Multiplayer in a video game like Cyberpunk 2077 is the ultimate update: it crowns the game’s success as a global entertainment platform. GTA 5, at the time, succeeded in this intent. No Man’s Sky did not. But perhaps we would like to enjoy all the game’s features all together from day one, for once.