Developers release a variety of multiplayer games, which often fail to attract a large audience and flop. In a recent conversation with Inven Global, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney shared his vision of the reasons behind the failed launches of multiplayer projects.
Sweeney explained that users prefer to play with their real groups of friends, and it's "virtually impossible" to move such a group from an existing game to a completely new project. There are exceptional games, but these are rare.
Only rare mega-hits that appear once every few years succeed. That's why many new multiplayer projects have been failing one after another recently. Users have already formed stable social connections in Fortnite, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, and Apex Legends; they have no reason to leave their friends and go into a new game alone.
Tim Sweeney has a potential solution to this problem. For the Unreal Engine 6, a "cross-game social connections" feature is being prepared. The idea is that users will be able to form groups with voice chat with friends from "game B" while in "game A" and invite them to try a new project.
Another option Sweeney mentioned is the ability to transfer rare items from one game to another. According to the head of Epic Games, this would be an additional economic incentive to try new projects:
If ownership of digital items is linked across games, then rare items obtained in other games can be transferred to a new game, creating a strong economic motivation and justification for users to start playing it. This becomes a platform-level advantage that goes beyond simple entertainment.
Tim Sweeney believes that the social and economic interconnectedness that Epic Games is building into the architecture of Unreal Engine 6 will not only help the next generation of developers create games much more efficiently and technologically, but will ultimately "allow for stronger user retention, dramatically increasing the likelihood of global success."
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