Baldur’s Gate 3 Leader Shares Perspective on the “Single-Player Games Are Over” Debate

The death of single-player video games has been a hot topic for several years now–one that Larian Studios founder and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke weighed in on recently. Posting on his X account, Vincke explained how he doesn’t believe that traditional single-player experiences aren’t dead yet.

“That time of the year again when big single-player games are declared dead,” Vincke posted. “Use your imagination. They’re not. They just have to be good.”

This lines up with previous comments made by Vincke, as in an interview with GameSpot, he revealed his thoughts on how other studios could replicate the success of Baldur’s Gate 3. At The Game Awards last year, Vincke also gave a speech on how the winning formula for a game was “stupidly simple” but somehow kept getting lost.

“A studio made their a game because they wanted to make a game they wanted to play themselves,” Vincke said. “They created it because it hadn’t been created before. They didn’t make it to increase market share. They didn’t make it to serve as a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets.”

While multiplayer and live-service games are undeniably popular, they can be heavily risky for studios due in part to established titles that have cornered large chunks of the market. For every Fortnite there are multiple live-service games that have quickly lost momentum after launch, with titles like Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League being notable examples. Even smaller games aren’t immune, as last week Spectre Divide developer Mountaintop Studios announced that it and the game were shutting down.

While not every single-player game is a guaranteed success either, last year did see numerous titles do well both critically and commercially. Metaphor ReFantazio was one of 2024’s best games and Sega said that it had exceeded its initial sales forecast. In the US alone, the best-selling games of the year included Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Dragon’s Dogma 2, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It is worth noting that games with a heavy multiplayer appeal–like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and multiple sports games from EA and 2K–did feature prominently in the top 20 list, but they didn’t dominate it entirely.

As for 2025, the year so far has been marked by two games that have seen healthy sales numbers so far. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 had reached 2 million copies sold as of February 13, while Capcom’s Monster Hunter: Wilds sold 8 million copies in three days.