Competitive multiplayer is how you keep people playing forever

Ian’s talk on how to give a game longevity was enlightening, but I think he missed one of the most important ways a game can retain players: having deep competitive multiplayer. A good competitive game has effectively limitless content because every opponent is different. Creating millions of distinct enemy types in a single-player game so that players never run out of challenges would be prohibitively expensive, but getting millions of people to play against each other is reasonable.

Competitive multiplayer, if designed well, also gives a game an effectively infinite skill ceiling. In a single-player game, if you’re good enough to complete every task the game gives you, there’s no reason to get even better. In a competitive game, unless you’re the best player in the world, you will always be rewarded for improving by being able to beat increasingly skilled players (and improve your ranking, if the game has a ranking system).

In fact, we see that many of the games that keep people playing for a long time do so on the strength of their multiplayer modes. Super Smash Bros: Melee doesn’t have procedural generation, a large amount of handcrafted content, loot boxes, or mods, but it still has a community of dedicated players who have stuck with it, even when sequels became available, because it has strong competitive multiplayer. The same could be said of Starcraft: Brood War (which does have mods, but most people still play the unmodded version). Looking outside of the realm of video games, where we can find games that have had the chance to retain players for more than a few decades because they’ve existed for longer, we find games like Chess and Go that have survived for centuries and have players who have dedicated their lives to them because they create strategically interesting competitive experiences.

I also don’t think loot boxes with cosmetic items can be the primary reason why people keep playing a game for a long time. They probably get some players to play more than they otherwise would, but most people aren’t going to care about cosmetic items if they weren’t planning on playing the game for a long time. There’s no point in doing a lot of work to get a sweet outfit if after you have the outfit you’re not going to use it because you have no more reason to play the game. Furthermore, most players only care about cosmetic items in multiplayer games, because otherwise other people can’t see them. This is why very few people bought horse armor in Oblivion. All of the games that Ian mentioned in the part of his talk about loot boxes were exclusively or primarily multiplayer games, and I think that the ones that are good would have kept people playing for a long time with or without cosmetic items.