Multiplayer games financially more viable?

[Bad Jim]

MP games are, at least as far as FPSs go, way easier to develop.

you have no narrative to develop, no complicated levels to construct to portray that narrative, no NPCs or Mobs to create to place in it and no AI or narrative related coding.

all you do is make some player and weapons models, add the sound and basic physics, rules and scoring structure and stick em in what is usually quite a simplistic environment they run around in (despite how pretty it might look. never forget the construction tools and engine do a great deal of the work in that department) and the players generate all of the enjoyable gameplay by interacting directly with each other.

you really have to screw up the basic ruleset or mechanics badly to make one that isn't "fun" if you have a bunch of peebs in there with you.

as an added bonus a lot of the time players make extra maps & mods etc and extend the game themselves. partly because these basic multiplayer building blocks aren't actually all that hard to make which is why you'll see way, way, way more multiplayer maps & mods etc than you'll ever see fan made maps, conversions or expansions for a single player game.

that's why ultimately hobbyists made Counterstrike and Team Fortress Classic, impressive tho they were, and a dozen other multiplayer mods for Half Life rather a fan made equivalent of something like Opposing Force or Blue Shift.

seriously if any of you had ever mucked around with the likes of ID source code releases you'd be disgusted at the fact they try and sell multiplayer FPSs as full price software nowadays.

compared with single player games there's virtually nothing to them.
its like making a FPS with all the hard to make bits removed.

I don't think development costs work the way you think they do. It may cost less to implement the basic funtionality of a multi player game versus single player, but the real cost is the cost of competing with other successful games. COD : Black Ops still cost $20 million or so. They wouldn't have spent that much without a reason.

Franchises drift from single player to multiplayer because it is fairly trivial to add a multiplayer component to a single player game. The game might cost 10% more to make but there is essentially another game in the final product. There is a good chance it might be more fun than the single player.

Adding a single player campaign to a multiplayer game gives a developer three options:
1) Make it double the development costs.
2) Make it very short.
3) Make it almost entirely from existing multiplayer assets, adding few cutscenes, special items or anything else that might make it stand out as a single player game.
. . so there is little chance of a multiplayer franchise switching to single player.