"Valve done with Steam" would have been better.

The fact is, it think the industry needs WAY MORE and better single-player focused games and not fewer of them....

/care

I'm done with Valve games anyway.

Declining but not dying. One example: The Witcher 2 will be purely single player, as far as I know.

the only way i will support this is if the coop gameplay is the same quality, but judging from portal 2's coop, i dont think it will be.

Valve shifts. Gaming doesn't. ;)

which is why for now at least i wont be finding a new hobby lol

You're telling me you wouldn't love to play more games with bros on the couch at home instead of over the LIVE/PSN channels filled with morons and idiots?

co-op is fine, and infinitely preferable to playing with the morons and idiots, but if reached a point of being instead of single player rather than as well as (talking overall not just certain games) , then i'd be moving on to something else

Well that's ok then. I hated Quake 3 because it threw away the singleplayer components in favor of co-op/etc multiplayer.

I'm guessing it's a sort of response to what we all had been noticing as trend in gaming? More and more demand for better graphics makes games more expensive to make.

But instead of letting graphics and effects (physics etc) take the backseat, they instead might just be cutting the large amounts of work a single player campaign is. As Coop you need less scripting because, well you can't be sure where player 2, so no making all those awesome sequences for just one player right? Also, to play properly you now need two copies sold, or more.

Then again, the single player quality of most recent titles have been declining. When you realise that Bioshock might actually need to be considered one of the better single player experiences, and then think back to how disappointing it was for people who were used to better material....well, not sure if it's that big a loss if it's the direction otherwise?

I think, what they mean is that they, will not make games only with single player.

I just don't think that is true. I can't really refute your point since you don't explain why you think it is dying...

...but I think a more accurate expression might be that while single player gaming development has leveled out, multi-player gaming has seen tremendous growth.

I have no problem with multi-player only games because I love multi-player gaming. Team Fortress being my prime example.

On the other hand, it is disheartening when a title pops up that offers both single and multi-player functionality, only to find the single-player side to be absurdly short, or used as little more than a primer for multi. I haven't played it yet, but maybe Black Ops is the example I should use... at least from the comments I've read.

Conversely, take Red Dead Redemption which has a nice multi-player function (something GTA never took seriously) but is obviously weighted toward a solid single-player experience with a lot of content to explore.

Weirdly, I don't play multi-player anything on the Xbox. That device is 100% single player in my house. Xbox live is geared toward building circles of friends with your friends that you already know. I'm 44... my friends who do game are more old school and more likely to game on the PC.

Plus, I have found (or at least, it SEEMS to me) that the PC community skews older, which means more mature. I don't run into the 12 year old twats spamming " U R fag" over and over. I tend to be able to find people who are more like me (younger, mostly, but far more civil).

When the average length of most AAA single player campaigns is around eight hours I consider it 'dying.'