I wouldn't say its a dying breed. I think you see more non-competitive co-op games now than competitive multiplayer, especially with the huge success of games like Space Marines 2 and Helldivers 2 and the massive flops of Concord and XDefiant.
Heh. If we're using competitiveness as a measuring stick, Helldivers 2 is absolutely competitive. If you're not geared up with the current meta, you're frequently flamed and kicked. There's a lot of "win or die" mentality there.
If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
Competitiveness and zero sum thinking is so bad in the world of video games, that Helldivers 2's entire run has been marred by over-balancing loadouts in an explicitly coop, PvE game, where balance shouldn't even be a priority.
They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE
ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count.
This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency.
So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika.
They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update.
Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.
Helldivers 2 over-tuned because they wanted to keep things in the difficulty levels they envisioned, and people were simply vocal because they wanted a power fantasy. Space Marines 2 delivered on that desire better than Helldivers 2 did.
I don't think I've ever seen a game company ever manage to put 100% of their changes in a CHANGELOG.
FromSoftware games like to put in cheese border-line bullshit mechanics to make you feel good when you overcome them, even if you have to cheese them yourself. They knew everybody was going to cheese regardless of the difficulty they just made a round-about way of making you feel like it was okay.
Some people like competitiveness in games, and like difficult games, and thats okay if you do or don't. Games need to find a product-market fit just like anything else.
Part of this goes back to skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) systems becoming the standard. It used to be I would just play Counter-Strike on a local server because it had the best ping, by far. The same people were playing there all the time, so there was a sense of community, and I could really see myself improve over time in the stats and match results. With SBMM I get punished for playing better by getting matched against harder and harder opponents so that it feels like treading water, even in "unranked" game modes. SBMM is also an abusable system, as dedicated players will often make several accounts to play on and take advantage of their assumed lack of skill as their matchmaking rank is calibrated, throwing the whole thing out of whack.
They can be as competitive or as casual as you like, are "soft-multiplayer", essentially single player inside a multiplayer economy, and the better ones are non-p2w.
