Seriously what are so many devs thinking that they got the next big multiplayer hit?

They are all thinking positively. Every dev has high hopes their title will sell well and get rave reviews. Even if they don't have as big a budget as the major devs do. All they want to do is hope their title does well so they can improve and make a better sequel or other games. None WANT their games to shut down. It's the fact that if the game does poorly, they won't be able to maintain the server costs.

I've always felt that multiplayer-only games made by lazy devs who can't come up with a good campaign. Some don't even make an effort to introduce bots.

MP games are mostly divided in two groups: dead and soon-to-be-dead, whereas good SP games live forever.

3Steps how to be a dev and make money
->Create an Battleroyale game for high price (+Kickstarter)
->after 1month sale ,make the game free to play ,get mostly negative reviews.
->Shut down the game &do the first 2steps above again .
Congratulation youre an succesfully Dev now :D

I also don't get why they fail to understand the gaming market of today. They sure will learn their lessons from the oversaturated multiplayer only market and they are supposed to pay the price and will eventually disappear.

One reason is probably because they see so many multiplayer survival games and wager that it has to be foolproof for getting sales.

They forget that it means people have more options, and are more likely to ditch a trashy attempt at one.

The Dream: Being paid to have fun (by making and playing games).
"Some people make a living playing computer games. Just look at all the money Blizzard has! Look at Minecraft! I want to "play" for a living, too!"

The Reality: Those examples are one-in-four-million, and were a result of perfect circumstances. You have a better chance of winning the lottery. Even the guys who "make a living playing games" aren't really making a living playing games. They work extremely hard until the company "fades away," then get other jobs. Blizzard lives off the profits from Starcraft and WoW, so they can afford to lose money trying other things (e.g. Overwatcth). Starcraft took many years and much investment to become a cash cow, and it was largely due to an entire country making it an Esport (Korea). That money was then invested in WoW, an MMO which became successful because its setting had been carefully developed over many years and already had a tremendous fanbase before it ever launched. Minecraft was a "perfect storm," and its success was largely due to being "the first" to break open a new genre of gaming. You don't become "first" in a new market by copying someone else.

The above is my take on it. Your mileage may vary.

Follow-up Question: Why do we see so much devotion to "copying" past success when game creation is an art form (like making movies)?

Answer: Because artists are no longer the ones determining production. Businessmen are.

I think a lot of small companies don't realize how much it costs and how long it takes to actually make and support a multiplayer game and they think that just adding a unique feature is the key to success. So, they make something that technically works for them at a small scale which isn't really that hard with current game engines. They believe they have the greatest "that other game but with a twist" and start advertising it (kickstarter, early access, etc) and at some point they get hit by reality: "it works" is not enough and/or the unique feature is not that interesting.

But I don't think they're lazy as someone said, to me it's just not enough experience in most cases.

People just like to reinvent the wheel. Some are successful, most of them are not. Everyone hopes for the best despite the very low success chance.

A possible workaround to prevent many unfinished or low quality games would be getting rid of the Early Access crap. I understand its core concept but it's just way too exploited by almost everyone. If the game is unfinished it shouldn't be sold, period.

Nowadays people are buying promises not finished products and the disappointment shouldn't come as a surprise.

At this point the moment I hear multiplayer only I immediately lose all interest in a game because you know it's gonna be a repetitive cash cow.

You don't have to be the next PUBG to make money.

You can do several small crappy projects fast and make enough money to keep paying salaries and the bills. Do this enough times and you can probably get yourself enough credit to take out a business loan. Use the money to amp up your production value a bit - maybe the next project makes a little more money.

Not everybody is trying to be the next big success. A lot of people are just trying to get a little bit of the easy money that is flowing in the gaming industry right now. The industry is glutted with money. People buy game bundles like crazy. People pay for microtransactions like crazy. People buy crap games for a dollar - apparently just for the privilege of writing a review about how crappy it is.

And you know, then you get to go to parties and tell attractive people that you are a video game developer.

The problem I have with MP games is that most of them are shooters (not fun for me as MP) and get old really quickly.
I've played Rocket League for a while and had tons of fun.
It takes much more to make an MP game successful than recycled SP maps or heavy advertising. It needs engaging game mechanics, originality, a high replay value and maybe bots too for when you just want to practice alone. But your YMMV.

Just my opinions: There are indie devs that make it big on multiplayer only games and I guess people just want to take the risk to make it big like that, with indie singleplayer games it's kind of the same, unless you have a big budget you're probably not going to be able to make something very interesting that will get played by people for very long. Likely you'll end up with a generic sidescroller or rpg just as overdone as any multiplayer game you'd make. Indie devs can't get away with micro-transactions in single player games either ¯\(ツ)/¯

Psyonix as an example I know of started with SARPBC on the PS3, a forgettable multiplayer game that never gained traction and then a bit later they released a sequel for PS4 and PC. They hit the jackpot, and Rocket League is still a massive loot box cash cow with a massive playerbase over 3 years later that competes with lots of AAA multiplayer games. No indie single player game would gain that kind of traction, even if you make something really unique like Tiny & Big it might not do great, and even if you make something that does do great like A Hat in Time it wouldn't make the money a multiplayer hit would make

Yeah devs should really be focusing on single-player experiences. Nobody plays most of these multiplayer games. Often they look like they could be fun with a single-player campaign :(

Don’t most entreprenuers do the same thing?

you dont get money for People playing your game. you get money for selling it ("thanks ..., i was missing ... games"; "Hey, the game had CARD$!!!" or "lowest discount ever!")

I think it's partially because high-level business considers effective research "beneath them". Sure, you can go hire people to go on the interwebz and see what the kiddies are saying in YouTube comment sections (or wherever they get their ideas) or you can do some focus testing (because THAT always works well), but nobody ever seems to come up with the simple idea of hiring people who actually consume their product. What better way to find out what people like in a video game than hiring people who play video games? I'm a low-level office drone and I can figure this out just fine; people get paid six- or seven-figure salaries to figure this out, and somehow can't manage. This isn't even an idea exclusive to multiplayer games, or even the video game industry. Get to know your employees and talk to them; I'm sure they'd love to be part of the next big thing!

And, as many are saying, I'm sure that a big part of it is apathy, too; they're making lots of money, so why stop doing what they're doing? If the consumers are still willing to shell out twice the game's original cost in microtransactions. server fees, DLC, and all the other costs that go with it, then why not be hostile to them? My best friend and I were forged in the fires of the same horrible work environment, and before we got out, she'd often give a very sound piece of advice: you teach people how to treat you. DLC becomes a thing, and there's outrage over being charged full price for an incomplete game, and then more for for the finished product, but people still kept buying it all. Episodic gaming became a thing, doubling, tripling, and beyond the cost of a game, and people were outraged... and still kept buying. Now, loot crates are the newest flavor of awful, but do you think that's hurting sales? Nope; not enough to make a difference, if everyone is still doing it. On the horizon, is video game streaming, where you play games like you watch Netflix; everything's online, and you have absolutely zero ownership over anything, so one day, your game goes poof forever. Do you think that will prevent people from buying the latest consoles? I've been through a lot of abuse in my life - physical, verbal, and more - mostly during my childhood, where I had no control over any of it, and because of these experiences, it ASTOUNDS me that here and now, when we do have a say, because nobody is holding us upside-down and shaking the money from our pockets, we continue to condone this behavior; to ask, "Another cigarette burn, please, this time on my other shoulder... OOO, and maybe could you cake some dirt in my hair, while you have me on the ground? That'd be a lovely accessory to all of those kidney punches that you're so gracious to charge only $3 apiece for!" As long as we care about that shiny new game more than our consumer rights, we'll be hurtling toward those dystopian futures you hear about, where big corporations have more power than the federal government, but hey, maybe they'll rename New York City to Midgar; that'd be cool, right?

because mojan came and they did, and the pubg guys came and they did, and epic came and they did... its like the lottery but with better odds.

Telling a programmer there's already a multi-player game that looks like X is like telling a songwriter there's already a song about love...
Yet, every songwriter is sure his song will be the next mega selling world hit.

I can't even think anymore about playing MMORPG games.. I loved Ultima Online around 1999-2000 and played World of Warcraft but hey those were really big things..
It's probably a matter of microtransaction and hoping to make some money, it's not hard to believe that such a game genre is dying.. it's too hard and gets annoying and monotonous even if it's a huge game like ultima or wow or whatever else, I mean playing every day the same thing over and over.. anyways I'll keep on reading all the comments, it's really not my genre =P
Khalaq has a great point in his answer above

I asked myself the same before, but thought my personal opinion is skewed by not having time nor will to dedicate myself to any multiplayer/coop games at all anymore because of work. Last thing I finished in that manner was Borderlands 2. Sure, I tried playing some games alone and with random people, mostly what I got from bundles like Battleborn, Destiny 2, Overwatch... I dunno, it's fun for a while but then you encounter a team off friends who use private voice chat and well, it's not fun anymore. And even if I was playing a MMO/multiplayer of any kind... it would be one game, not 10 of them at the same time. Soooo... who are all these games for? Like you said, singleplayer game can be run and enjoyed 10 years later - even if by only some people who don't mind it being dated and all... but multiplayer?

Do you mean *why are they?
Probably bad financial models based on the well known products rather than the failures, mixed with passionate people who think they can make something that isn't cookiecutter.
Or perhaps they expect to make enough cash from whales to break even and stay working until they strike it big enough to make something they would be passionate about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQsc14gDPbk

I think they just want to cash in on the big trend before the train leaves the station for good. We've seen the same with all the war-themed shooters, then with all the MMOs, then with all the blocky sandbox games, now it's the same with the Battle Royale genre... It's easy money, or so they think.