Livingstone Claims We'll Always Want Single-Player Experiences

He explains demand for single-player games "not simply going to disappear overnight".


Eidos president Ian Livingstone has claimed that gamers will always want high-quality single-player experiences, despite the diversifying industry.

In an interview with MCV Pacific, the man behind Lara Croft said that the increased prominence of social and casual gaming doesn't necessarily threaten demand for core single-player experiences, such as the Tomb Raider reboot.

He explained, "I think people still want a single player experience. The games industry is diversifying and is making new ways of delivering, new ways of playing games. One is certainly not totally at the expense of each other, and I think games as a product and as a service can live happily alongside each other for a long time to come.

"A game like Tomb Raider has historically been a graphically intensive single player experience, and that’s not simply going to disappear overnight. What we’re seeing is an emergence and a growth in the digital area and a new consumer which has come along (the casual gamer, which has almost reached ascendancy), but niche gamers are still going to be here and want content delivered specifically for them."

Livingstone suggested that consoles will remain the natural home for that type of experience for the foreseeable future, due to the intense power needed by the dependent system to run it. He compared this preference to choosing to watch a film at the cinema, rather than view it at a considerably lower quality on YouTube.

"Well, you’ve got to create a game that’s relevant to the platform on which it’s delivered, therefore the graphic-rich interactive experience of console Lara is inevitably going to be different to the experience that you’d expect on a mobile device" he mused.

"The important thing is that they’re all linked by the IP and type of experience you get with that IP will depend on the device."

Given the recent furore surrounding scenes from the Tomb Raider reboot, it's debatable whether the same issues could have been rendered as emotively on a handheld device.

His comments paint a contrasting picture of the diversifying industry when compared with the claim by EA's Peter Moore that the future of games lies entirely in going free-to-play, regardless of content quality.