What does "single player gimmick" in your sentences here mean?
You're also at a disadvantage running the graphics on High.
In any game that I want to play at a "competitive" level, I always put the settings to the absolute lowest settings so the computer always gets 100+ FPS.
No reason to even try to optimize. The point is winning, not it looking good. In fact, in some games, the developers have had to go back and make it more fair for higher settings because of low settings hiding tall grass.
If you look at LoL, Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch, they're all kind of the same — fairly flat light, bright colourful characters against a backdrop of pastels and otherwise muted background colours. Texture detailing is discrete and everything almost looks like block colours if you squint. Rainbow 6 Siege, CSGO, PUBG are the same, minus the colourful characters.
Even if those games didn't optimise their engines for performance over visual fidelity, their visual design would make them fairly light weight anyhow.
(Best sources I could quickly find on my phone. Annoying ads warning)
https://www.prosettings.com/zywoo-csgo/
https://www.gamersdecide.com/articles/csgo-best-resolution-s...
As for lowest settings, the CS:GO don't have options to put the game into flat panel mess that is professional Q3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ui0hz6sm0
You're looking at number people logged into an online service and thinking it represents anything about gamers that by definition aren't online. A typical sampling bias.
Overwatch and Valorant alone may have increased female participation in video games by double digit percentages. Also, the TV show for League, which was obviously aimed at women.
All multiplayer only
steam, ubisoft connect, origin, blizzard launcher, and rockstar are all online today, even for single-player games. I'm not sure where a significant number of non-platform-delivered games would even exist in 2022, I haven't bought a single game that didn't use steam or another platform from a vendor in ages.
The exception being GOG I guess, and to be fair there's a decent number of new-ish titles on that (horizon zero dawn) and I always make an effort to buy titles there when possible, but even still GOG's marketshare is minuscule in comparison to steam.
so no, actually, I disagree that there's some large repository of single-player games that are not showing up on steam or another equivalent.
(do PSN/XBL keep public player count stats?)
There are more single-player games than multi-player, but overall more hours have been spent (or are currently being spent) on multi-player games. For example, someone might play BioShock Infinite once and complete the story in under 15 hours and then never touch it again, but easily rack up hundreds of hours in Apex Legends.
As you've said though, there's a sampling bias. Going by the "current players online" metric might diminish how many players are playing single-player games without being online.
A multiplayer lives and dies by its community, so it makes sense that multiplayer gamers would coalesce around a relatively smaller number of games.
Multiplayer games are also designed far more around player retention. The unpredictability of human opponents, combined with various design decisions meant to keep players engaged, means that a multiplayer gamer may primarily play the same game for years. A solo player reaches the end of their game, maybe they even exhaust all the side content and achievements, but then they move on to the next single player game.
When I've seen this written it's often explained as to do with the fact that single-player is a much more curated experience, where the developers can stage-manage where you go and even where you look, and discard resources they know you won't see again.
That's why single-player often looks way better than multiplayer, where a) the experience isn't that curated and b) fps matters much more.
“In /my opinion/, this doesn’t add enough to the game experience to justify the performance penalty. Also, my hardware isn’t strong enough to use it. Therefor it’s a gimmick! Herpa derpa!”
That may actually be giving too much credit. It’s probably more like “I don’t like it so it’s a gimmick that no one else should enjoy”