I wouldn’t say PvP is an “integral part of almost every major video game”, many major games, from casual games like Angry Birds/Candy Crush to games for “hard core gamers” like Fallout or Baldur’s Gate, are single-player only (or mostly) and don’t contain any PvP.
It applies to famous games, and also, perhaps more interestingly, to crowd funding, most of the biggest crowd funding projects are single-player or mostly single-player : Torment: Tides of Numenera, Project Eternity, Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, or non-directly PvP multiplayer like Mighty No. 9. Only game in the top 5 crowd funded games (according to wikipedia) that contains PvP is Star Citizen—and even Star Citizen is mostly backed (AFAIK) by fans of the Wing Commander saga, which didn’t contain any PvP, so I’m not sure PvP is primary reason to back it (I backed it for the single player campaign, not for the online mode).
There are definitely are many popular and commercially successful games containing PvP, like all FPS games or most MMORPG but I think the amount is largely overestimated by people focusing to a subset of games.
most of the biggest crowd funding projects are single-player or mostly single-player
That’s probably because people fund the remakes/sequels of their nostalgia games and in that olden era most good games were single-player. And you don’t need to crowdfund FPS PvP games—there are tons of them available.
I wouldn’t say PvP is an “integral part of almost every major video game”, many major games, from casual games like Angry Birds/Candy Crush to games for “hard core gamers” like Fallout or Baldur’s Gate, are single-player only (or mostly) and don’t contain any PvP.
It applies to famous games, and also, perhaps more interestingly, to crowd funding, most of the biggest crowd funding projects are single-player or mostly single-player : Torment: Tides of Numenera, Project Eternity, Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, or non-directly PvP multiplayer like Mighty No. 9. Only game in the top 5 crowd funded games (according to wikipedia) that contains PvP is Star Citizen—and even Star Citizen is mostly backed (AFAIK) by fans of the Wing Commander saga, which didn’t contain any PvP, so I’m not sure PvP is primary reason to back it (I backed it for the single player campaign, not for the online mode).
There are definitely are many popular and commercially successful games containing PvP, like all FPS games or most MMORPG but I think the amount is largely overestimated by people focusing to a subset of games.
That’s probably because people fund the remakes/sequels of their nostalgia games and in that olden era most good games were single-player. And you don’t need to crowdfund FPS PvP games—there are tons of them available.