PS5 Players Spend Much More Time Playing Single Player Games Than Multiplayer Ones, Leaked Documents Suggest

Insomniac Games’ data breach last month was a devastating one, with over 1.3 million internal files being stolen and shared on the internet by ransomware hackers. The leaks revealed details on multiple games that the studio has planned for the next several years, and at the same time, internal data and metrics for all of PlayStation at large that hadn’t been made publicly available were also shared.

That data is continuing to filter through even now, and those going through it have found engagement numbers that show how single player and multiplayer games have performed on the PS5 in the three years since it released. As shared by Twitter user @FunkyClam (via Exputer) an internal Sony business update presentation from February 2023 showcases that PS5 users have spent far more time playing single player games than multiplayer titles.

One particular slide breaks down the total gameplay hours by the collective PS5 userbase month-by-month, and as per that slide, every month since the console launched, its user base has spent the majority of its time player single player games, generally accounting for more than 50% of the playtime for the month- and often much more than that, like in December 2022, when out of a total of 1.6 billion gameplay hours, 59% were spent in single player games, 20% in free-to-play multiplayer titles, and 21% in multiplayer titles for which a PlayStation Plus subscription is required.

Another slide does a similar breakdown but combines the user bases of both the PS5 and PS4, and the results are still similar, with single player engagement consistently tracking higher than multiplayer engagement in every single month from January 2019 to February 2023. In February, for instance, PS5 and PS4 users collectively put in 3.6 billion hours of gameplay, of which 2.4 billion were in single player games, 914 million in free-to-play titles, and 595 million in PS Plus-gated multiplayer titles.

Nailing a successful live service model that has the legs to sustain itself for a prolonged period of time isn’t something that many developers and publishers have managed to do, of course – in fact, the majority of them have failed – but multiplayer games by their very nature tend to be played by large numbers of people and for significant amounts of time.

To see single player games consistently proving more popular among the PlayStation user base might come as a surprise to some, then- but then again, it’s a user base that has traditionally proven to be a strong audience for single player experiences.