In the last two decades, the first-person shooter has been a bread and butter release for publishers and gamers alike. Every gamer has fond memories of hours spent blasting bad guys through the hero’s eyes. For publishers, these games have shown enormous capability to drive big-time sales. In the mid-to-latter half of the 90′s, the technological capability of home consoles took off and allowed the FPS genre to shine. These games were largely built around lengthy solo campaigns, and featured little-to-no multi-player support.
In the early 00′s, the Battlefield series was one of the first titles to really forsake the single-player experience (which was essentially the multi-player with AI instead of human opponents). By crafting massive 64-player servers and a competitive and engaging multi-player experience, Battlefield 1942 was an early model for advancing online-FPS play. Today, owing no small thanks to the rise in highspeed broadband availability, the standard has flipped as the first-person shooter has become a predominantly online-focused experience. The multi-player experience is a huge draw for gamers, so much so, that Activision is rolling out an entire service catering to hardcore online players.
It makes sense then that well-executed online-play would drive franchises. Gamers crave a competitive online experience. Of the four franchises featured below (Battlefield, Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Halo), only Halo has delivered a consistently lengthy single-player experience with every release. Battlefield’s Bad Company series (the fifth game in the series) was the first in the series to feature an actual single-player campaign, whereas Call of Duty made its bones in WWI-era single-player before the more recent Modern Warfare iterations put an emphasis squarely on the multi-player experience.
This week’s data point of the week featured a look at how high-volume online gamers are playing some of the last decades’ most popular first-person shooter franchises. It should come as no surprise that those that play online at least an hour everyday and prefer to play first-person shooters, play Call of Duty the most. It’s become one of the top-selling franchises in video-game history and is frequently cited as one of the most played games in our New Media Measure studies. Battlefield’s newest release, Battlefield 3, drops on Tuesday, which should create a very interesting competition over the holiday season for supremacy in the Online-FPS sphere.
