Livingstone: Demand for single-player games "not simply going to disappear overnight"

Eidos president Ian Livingstone doesn't expect single-player triple-A experiences to go away even as other kinds of gaming become major business ventures.

In an interview with MCV Pacific, Livingstone said the emergence of casual, social and "games as service" models doesn't necessarily threaten the core single-player gaming market of Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider.

"I think people still want a single player experience. The games industry is diversifying and is making new ways of delivering, new ways of playing games. One is certainly not totally at the expense of each other, and I think games as a product and as a service can live happily alongside each other for a long time to come," he said.

"A game like Tomb Raider has historically been a graphically intensive single player experience, and that’s not simply going to disappear overnight. What we’re seeing is an emergence and a growth in the digital area and a new consumer which has come along (the casual gamer, which has almost reached ascendancy), but niche gamers are still going to be here and want content delivered specifically for them."

Livingstone said next-generation consoles are the natural choice for that kind of experience, and described a preference for games requiring serious horsepower as like preferring to see movies at the cinema rather than on YouTube.

"You’ve got to create a game that’s relevant to the platform on which it’s delivered, therefore the graphic-rich interactive experience of console Lara [Croft] is inevitably going to be different to the experience that you’d expect on a mobile device," he noted.