Is the big budget FPS campaign Dead?

[DDC]

I used to enjoy these games--the linear 6 to 15 hour single-player or coop spectacle FPS campaign. They used to be dime-a-dozen. However, it seems like this style of game is officially dead. First, they started going increasingly open world, but linear campaigns were still being released in a reasonable amount. Eventually, I noticed that these games were essentially gone, other than the annual Call of Duty release. Then Modern Warfare 3 failed to include a true campaign, instead melting bits and pieces of multiplayer scenarios together into some bizarre Frankenstein thing that they called a campaign. And with that, it seems like the big budget FPS campaign is dead.

There has been a resurgence of single-player FPS games in the form of indie boomer shooters, but they aren't really the same kind of game. I also recently tried Terminator: Resistance due to great user reviews and it being a terminator game, but it was terrible. It had quests, looting, "choices matter," and empty wide-open levels. I miss games like the classic COD campaigns, Riddick: Butcher Bay, etc. that dominated from the early 2000s through 2020.

[1998]

Maybe this is one for you? Obviously not AAA big budget, more like AA.

[wndrbr]

The graphics, animations, cinematic scripted scenes - this type of games requires the publisher to put in a ton of money, and they never generated enough revenue to be profitable. That's why they kept coming up with means to monetize them or prevent piracy. Console-exclusive spectacle shooters, mandatory competitive multiplayer, micro-transactions, etc. Pretty much all of these games in the past twenty years were trying to become the next Call of Duty killer. Once it became clear that CoD level of success cannot be reached, the attempts have stopped. BTW this problem is not even exclusive to the FPS genre, the third-person dudebro cover shooters also died.

The last big budget singleplayer FPS games that i've played were Metro Exodus (which already went open-world) and Wolfenstein The New Colossus. The rebooted Wolfenstein series was actually an exception since it was a rare fully singleplayer FPS game (no multiplayer, no MTX) that somehow sold well. Then in 2016 Trump won the elections, his victory broke minds of every darn western videogame developer, which resulted in the next Wolfenstein game going woke, and the series crashing and burning.

[wndrbr]

Modern AAA videogames are bloody expensive to make, due to both the DEI hires, the bloated software, and the graphical roadblocks/diminishing returns.

Half-Life, a triple-A game from the late 90s, was made by a couple of dozens nerds, with a budget of like $5M, in two years. And they even had to do an internal reboot after their first build was deemed uninteresting by the playtesters.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023) had a budget of $315M and was made by thousands of devs. And they didn't even have to build everything from scratch, they were using Spider-Man 1 (2018) as a basis.

No wonder no one wants to make singleplayer-focused shooters with spectacular campaigns. The industry became unsustainable and needs to die.