EA DICE's upcoming Star Wars Battlefront will have a singleplayer option in the form of one-off co-op missions aagainst swarms of AI foes, but it's not going to feature a full story campaign.
According to EA COO Peter Moore, the reason for this is because players simply wouldn't bother playing any story mode all the way through. Here's an excerpt from a recent interview with Gamespot:
Gamespot: I totally understand that you have to think ahead when planning games. I was more thinking about Battlefront with more crude algebra, in that, triple-A games with single-player traditionally sell better than those with multiplayer.
Moore: So, there's two phenomena with that statement. The first is that yes, you might be right. The second is that very few people actually play the single-player on these kinds of games. That's what the data points to.
Hmm. Personally I think Moore's underestimating how much people love this franchise. He might be right that traditional Battlefield campaigns aren't what fans buy those game for (though to be fair, that's usually because they're crap), but I'm sure there's a massive audience out there for a big-budget Star Wars singleplayer story.
Star Wars: Battlefront comes out on November 17. Would you prefer it had a singleplayer campaign?