Lots of games add an "Online Multiplayer" mode to their games nowadays to extend gameplay hours and replay value way past its normal hours which legitimize high price costs for a game. It has gotten to a point in game development that multiplayer is the main focus of the game and not the campaign or single-player experience. With that in mind, many publishers market their games as an involving multiplayer experience and want the consumer to buy the game for the multiplayer side. It's true that multiplayer orientated games are really fun and exciting and worth buying for just that mode; however, there's a problem when one buys a multiplayer orientated game and finds that no one plays it.
It has happened one too many times to me where I buy a game hoping to have a fun time with other gamers online only to find little to no players whatsoever playing. To name a few in the past, I have bought Homefront, Brink, Red Orchestra 2, Nexuiz, and Breach to find little to no players online. The last game I got lucky on was Awesomenauts which still has a community (thankfully). I faced that same problem when deciding to buy Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 just this past Sunday where Steam had a free weekend and sale for the game. During the free weekend, 100,000+ players were on and finding a game was no problem. Even with a sale price, the game cost $40 which is no pocket change when such a large part of the game revolves around multiplayer. I still really like Call of Duty and was pleased with the experience I had over the free weekend and decided to buy the game. The next day, the player count had dropped all the way down to 9000 players (at least it's OVER 9000!). Still, I've been playing the past few nights and was able to get into games fairly easily albeit everyone playing were high prestige and much more experienced than me compared to the free weekend. So this time I got lucky. But it looks like I face that dilemma again with two games on sale today: "War of the Roses" and "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier".
Source: Youtube Channel ubisoft
With "War of the Roses", I can try out the game from the free weekend to see if I like the game, but I won't be able to gauge how many people will stick around for the multiplayer after I purchased the game. For $5, I won't be losing out too much compared to having spent $40 on Call of Duty. For "Ghost Recon Future Soldier", I'll have the single-player campaign to play. But the sale includes a bundle with 3 expensive DLCs for multiplayer. The problem is, will there still be people playing multiplayer? Again with the multiplayer trap. The DLCs at normal price cost $35 while the sale brings it down to $29 and the bundle chops it down to $9. That sounds like an awesome deal, right? The problem is, you could be paying $9 for a mode that's unplayable because no ones on to play it. The bought "Binary Domain" under similar circumstances and ending up finding only one person on multiplayer which wasn't enough to play a match. That game had an interesting single-player experience, but paying for the DLCs was regrettable. I don't know if there are any sources or sites that allows players to figure out how many players a game's multiplayer gets on average each day, but it'd be nice to know if I'll be able to play multiplayer in a game before buying it (especially when it's nothing but multiplayer). So the purpose of this article? Do your research and be sure to check on forums and such to be sure there are players regularly online for a game if you plan on buying it for the multiplayer experience. Players should be able to get refunds on games they bought with zero players online.
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