Shadowrun Dev. Blames Immature Gamers For Online Gaming’s Limited Popularity

In an ideal world online gaming would be done by rational, courteous people grouping together for the challenge of the game and the experience of playing with a larger group. There’d be no complaining about team balancing and no hacking programs. It’d simply be skill against skill in a sportingly friendly fashion. Unfortunately it’s not a perfect world so many online games are filled with foul-mouthed invididuals who casually spout out epithets, racial and ethnic slurs with complete impunity. Shadowrun developer Bill Fulton has insisted that these people are to blame for the low participation in online gaming amongst console owners, and specifically for the low sales of his game. He claims that “non-gamers simply don’t love games enough to put up with the crap they get online”. While I will agree that being called various names is annoying, since there’s the capacity in most games to mute other players or to simply turn off the volume of your tv altogether, it’s more likely that online gaming is lower for other reasons. First of all when it comes to the Shadowrun game specifically, we’re dealing with a license that was dropped by its parent company in 2001 and probably hit its peak popularity in the mid-90s. Secondly the game was given rather poor reviews overall, which is most likely the reason it didn’t do so well. Online-based games do better with ongoing support and additions of new maps, gameplay types, etc. Secondly, many gamers prefer certain games that only work well in single player. Games like Oblivion and Mass Effect don’t work as well in a group setting when a storyline focuses on a singular character. Games like Halo or Call of Duty function better when you’re simply a cog in a machine devoted to a singular purpose. In console gaming most online games are non-persistent and simply go from match to match with players honing their skills but not achieving any particular goal overall like in PC MMOs. Many gamers like a good storyline or prefer the more cinematic feel of an epic quest. That’s why many gamers eschew the enjoyable albeit repetitive style of online console games. Throw in the fact that many games have a well-polished single player campaign and a rather poorly executed multiplayer and you’ll understand exactly why many gamers and non-gamers alike are playing solely on their own.