One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources.
A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array of items that grant you limited control over the environment, and you start grinding towards your first resource generator, which gives you resources which let you make the second one.
Now you're scaling. Build speed becomes the bottleneck for awhile, you're grinding the farm. Eventually you reach the next tier of generators, and this unlocks new mechanics. Finally at the end of the game you get artifacts of immense, game-breaking power.
Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again.
The lure of mastery is perhaps the most addictive one that could ever be dreamed.
>Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again.
With a friend I played Minecraft for years. Every time we met I would bring my xbox360 controller and we would dig, build, whatever, for hours and days on end.
One week, we decided to go for the nether dragon, at the time newly added to the game. We spent hours farming items, going to hell and losing stuff there, but we went on, arrived on the nether world, spent ten minutes finding out how to deal with the dragon and we killed it. Then we looked at each other and said "oh, now we have finished Minecraft".
Weirdly I've only played vanilla survival but this genuinely sounds precisely like my experience. First we built a zombie farm. Which gave us some weapons and xp. Then a chicken farm, for food. Then a spider farm. Then we found an underwater temple. Guardian farm time! Oooh, and an ender pearl/xp farm, iron farm, gold farm etc etc etc.
We spent days and days in game automating away as much resource gathering as we could. Until the server was basically finished - there really were no more farms to build.
Yeah my next big rush was Factorio. More concentration on the mechanics of building and scaling, less on the awesome graphics and immersion that Minecraft offers.
I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility.
If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.
If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting them for money.
If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money
If you sell in-game items, like weapons or maps, the players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
If you sell in-game cosmetics, like skins, which have no impact on gameplay, the players think you are trying to make every look stupid and you have to pay to look cool.
Video games are inherently manipulative in the sense that the game is designed for you to behave in fun ways and do fun things. Once monetization is in the picture it completely poisons the whole dynamic. It doesn't help that the audience skews young.
If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.
There is only uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support if the marketing is actually deceptive and if there is an actual lack of support.
People have been burned a few too many times by less reputable developers (EA) selling unfinished, deceptive garbage (SimCity 2013) at full price, so a certain amount of uproar and skepticism when it happens again and again is to be expected, I think.
But there are good, reputable companies too who are doing honest business by selling quality games for a reasonable up-front price. I don't generally see people having an issue with that.
See if you can find a lot of people who are unhappy with dropping $60 on Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, for instance.
Also, in the old days of early Internet era, we used to buy games not based on some marketing (in my parts of the world, US videogame marketing didn't really exist anyway), but based on reviews in videogame magazines. Those were pretty honest, and if they weren't, we'd blame the magazine. It was entirely expected that games have varying quality and plenty of bugs. People didn't have a problem with that.
an upfront price made sense in the old days when a relatively polished product was released at launch, perhaps with a couple patches to fix bugs, and with users running their own multiplayer servers.
for better or for worse, the norm has shifted to longer periods of support and servers hosted by the company. it's hard to commit to supporting a game this way when each user only pays once.
personally I like the approach csgo has taken. you get a full game for free (although it was still a good deal at $20, imo) and you can pay for purely cosmetic items. I think this aligns the incentives well; the devs can only get paid by making game that people care about playing, but there's also an unrestricted stream of new players since it's free. plus if you decide your finally done, you can sell all your skins on the market and get at least some of your money back.
I will fully admit that I have only the faintest idea of how modern multiplayer games work, but I agree from my understanding that the old business model of selling a complete game once seems ill suited to that style of game.
(Although, counterexample: Mojang made a fortune out of selling Minecraft, a complete multiplayer game, where you host your own servers, with no paid DLC or hidden catches, but then later came out with the Realms thing where they had optional paid server infrastructure. That's a thing you can do. Not sure how it panned out.)
That being said, my point was that there are still plenty of companies, such as Nintendo, successfully operating in the traditional way without facing much hostility for daring to sell a complete, polished, mostly bug-free product for money.
Therefore I think it is inaccurate to state that "every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility" like the grandparent did.
to be clear, I'm not saying it's totally not viable to just release a good game and charge for it upfront. there is a small number of studios/publishers who have such good brand recognition (or just consistently ship really good games) that they can actually make money this way. it can still work well for games with little ongoing maintenance cost from established companies making AAA titles or indie devs who don't have the same upfront costs.
all I'm saying is that there are other "game-as-a-service" models that can align incentives well between players and devs for ongoing projects without necessarily being abusive.
GGP is sort of right though. gamers are a notoriously difficult group of customers to please, and they don't really have a way to understand the business or technical constraints faced by the makers of their favorite games. the worst of them will be uncharitable and hostile, no matter what you do.
It's not about winning - people will complain because that's what people do. Users complain about free products as well, sometimes rightfully and sometimes with too much entitlement. It's not about the monetisation model.
Creating something and putting it out there for free or for a one-off payment is the cleanest possible model.
Regarding the next game from a game developer, I remember an indie making the point that the feedback from the general public (not the loud minorities only) will mostly be felt on the sales of the next game of series and, to a lesser extent, the next game from this developer.
Exactly. It is only when upfront sale gets combined with season passes AND microtransactions AND lootbox-systems is when criticism gets to arise. Rightfully.
> Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility.
I would say that in almost any business there is always small amount of people who intrepret the pricing and/or the business model of the business with hostility. I think it is quite natural - people would rather not pay for things. However the majority of people are not the ones bitching loudly about it, they pay for services happily and are somewhat content & quiet. The small minority bitches about it and that minority is often quite vocal.
That's because ultimately people have no choice but to either agree to the demands of the vendors or forgo a good or service ("voting with your wallet" doesn't work unless goods are trivial or substitutable, and games are neither). Most of them don't say a thing, because this is how things work and people have a life to live.
That doesn't change the fact that some business models are more abusive and deserving criticism than others, though.
This is the dominant tone of discussion in video game communities. I certainly haven't seen that in other places. No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.
Given the previous claim was that some number of people will treat the business model and monetization approach with hostility I think it still holds true with Disney. They have been much derided for retelling public domain stories, then claiming ownership/trademarks/copyright (event going so far as pushing for changes to copyright law) to give themselves exclusive rights to market. And a lot of criticism of their whole “Disney Vault” approach to selling old VHS and DVD titles where only certain titles from the back catalogue would be available for sale in a given year, so you better buy them up quickly or miss out for potentially another 7 years.
> No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.
Well, yes and no. When it comes to movies in general and movie adaptations of books in particular, like recently the Hobbit, number one complaint I heard (and expressed myself at times) is that they're so desperate for money that it's pathetic, stringing a short book for three movies ending in a way that ensures people will have to go to the cinema not just to continue watching, but also to rewatch the old movies upon release of the new one.
From what I can tell, the sentiment for now is that it's pathetic, not abusive.
I've certainly seen this opinion around Disney, especially around how much they're milking Star Wars releases, and the recent run of live-action remakes. It's not a universal thing, but "Enormous media company Disney churns out nostalgia-baiting cash-ins" is definitely a complaint that you even see among fairly reputable reviewers.
The biggest example of this was the "rerelease" of Infinity War to add a couple new scenes, and charging full price for people to rewatch a multi-hour movie for 5-10 mins more content.
I hear you on all points. But I would argue that for your last sentence, mature people at least would be satisfied with an upfront cost and a truthful marketing campaign. I think we can all understand that it costs money to make a game.
Yeah, I don't have any problem paying $60 for a game. I haven't paid that much in a long time though, since the vast majority of games I'm interested in are far less than that even when not on sale.
And if you take inflation into account, we used to pay $60 for NES games, which would be closer to $130 today.
> If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.
Between Steam's refund policy and review system this is basically a solved problem.
Oh no, making millions with a literal scam gets you criticized?
Please just stop bringing this up in this context. They literally sold a single player game as multiplayer, along with a plethora of features which were said to be in the game at launch day which where never implemented. See yourself at [0].
The only reason this keeps being brought up is because Sean Murray has extraordinary talent at tickling the medias gamers-are-evil trope. This has nothing to do with payment methods.
No Man's Sky's developers sold a promise upfront, not a game upfront. You see the same thing with pretty much all pre-orders and early access games, not just the crowd funded stuff. It is completely different to selling a complete game for $60 with the customers able to read reviews before purchasing or get refunds after purchasing.
I feel like you're mixing justified complaints ("this game has addictive gambling elements and you're targetting it at children") with less justified complaints ("this completely optional skin which has no effect on gameplay looks cooler than the default but costs money").
I'm mixing them because they are mixed. Go to any gaming community and look at what they're talking about. Justified and unjustified complaints, with the main focus on monetization and how evil the developers are who are manipulating them to pay.
What I want to figure out is how to monetize a game that removes the assumption of bad faith and detoxifies the community. I came to the conclusion that it has to be free. Every other monetization will lead to the abuse we see developers receiving.
The only method you listed that people automatically are hostile to is selling in game items that unbalance a game in the buyers advantage
> players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
Players dont just think this, time after time this has proven true. If the buyable item wasnt better why would anyone buy it?
None of the other monetization methods you lists are objectionable if done right.
If enough people are complaining about the value of your $60 game then maybe it's because you got your price point off and should have instead sold it at a lower price. Not every game is a AAA title.
> If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
You are literally allowed to do it. It does mean more effort to preserve the desired healthy relationships.
I don't think free games actually tend to result in perfectly healthy relationships either; but monetisation just provides a single point of failure for such dynamics.
The Netflix or Apple Music model might work. Fixed price per month for a catalog of games, with revenue shares happening based on play time. This a basically a solved problem for video and audio content, games don’t need to be different.
Video and audio content are not interactive. You never feel active manipulation from static media.
Games in that model will be accused of manipulating players into having as much play time as possible even sacrificing quality. The same addictive mechanics can be used for time instead of money.
That is true, and is also happening in other mediums where the incentives are setup this way. The biggest culprit I’ve seen is recipes. What you want is the ingredients and instructions laid out with minimum fluff. What you get is pages and pages of useless storytelling to improve the metrics of the page so that the page gets ranked better for engagement so that it can sell ads.
If you are honest in your approach to selling games, you will not get overwhelming criticism about ANY of the above game modes.
Full-priced games have tens of millions of sales regularly.
Games that do not hide content behind paywalls can sell cosmetic microtransactions all day long (see: League of Legends or Path of Exile).
Its transparent "money grab for the sake of money grabbing" that gets the rightful criticism. Besides, I have literally never seen any complex indie game being attacked for releasing in the 9.99$-19.99$ space. Never.
> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops.
I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm after? will that item go to me?) to really kick the intermittent-reward circuitry into gear.
Constant small incremental progress is just easier to implement.
Note: This is likely not as neat an analogy/example as I would like, but it seems relevant.
I used to be an actual heroin addict, many many years ago. Finding the next hit every day/every couple of days was nearly as satisfying as the actual rush of the drug itself.
In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nearly entirely, well before I'd actually taken the drug.
> In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nearly entirely, well before I'd actually taken the drug.
Though I've not read any articles on heroin or these long lengths of time specifically, opitates are known to have these anticipatory responses in the brain like the one you describe.
I imagine you saw a bit of a dopamine spike when that message came in. Was it enough to mitigate the physical symptoms at all, or was that purely mental, I wonder?
I wish I could trick my stupid brain like that. (not saying that your brain is somehow easier to trick than mine or whatever. My brain is just stupidly stubborn when it comes to feeling pain)
I'm really very deeply glad you kicked that habit and killed the dragon. This internet stranger is rooting for you :)
Randomness of rewards has been repeatedly shown to increase duration spent with skinner boxes. There seems to be a magic middle spot where the small rewards are frequent enough to avoid disillusionment and the big rewards are infrequent & random enough to feed addiction
mmm, almost all of the most addicting games I know are some variation of small bars filling up over time to unlock more small bars to fill up. I'll give one specific example:
Destiny is a loot shooter (or "looty shooty" if you're in polite company) which has rare drops as part of it's core gameplay. Certain rare guns can only come from high-level activities, and some weapons have randomised rolls that encourage people to re-play those activities to get gear that is marginally better. A lot of the best parts of the gear drop design are lifted from peak WoW. But that alone isn't what makes destiny addictive.
Destiny 1 had "gun leveling" where you would need to get kills on certain rare weapons to unlock the rare features that made them useful, along with individual numbered levels for each gear slot, and that's before you get into the quests and bounties. There was always a reason to hop on, because you always had some new weapon that you could power up to see what it did. Tiny bars filling up.
When Destiny 2 shipped, they dramatically improved the loot system, simplifying the ways people would get drops and making them more consistent overall. But they also tried to remove a lot of the other "grindy" aspects of the game like gun leveling, but the result was the game didn't feel like you had compelling reasons to log in. Fewer bars = fewer hooks.
It's only now that the game has had several significant expansions and added a host of new quests (many of which simply require using certain types of gear in certain activities) that the game is approaching those same levels of addictive.
What you are describing is the most common model of progression. Guns, weapons, characters, skills. Something needs to be leveled. That's fine and great but it also takes the excitement away because all of the progression is 100% guaranteed( you kill an enemy, you get some exp for whatever you are leveling) vs random scarce drops being the main way to progress.
You are talking about different types of players. If what you are saying were true for everyone, then all those top grossing builder/clicker games wouldn't exist.
100% agree on your point about WoW and MMORPGs in general. Progress shouldn't be so formulaic and you need "asymmetries" of sorts between classes and tiers of progression to make every step memorable. I remember how grand raiding and high end content felt in the past but with how accessible that stuff is today( in fact you are expected to raid) the whole game just feels so much smaller despite having more stuff to do.
Yeah, basically every decision from the early game that they later 'smoothed over' turned out to be important somehow. Except for spell and ability scaling with gear, they messed that one right up at the start and didn't fully fix it til the end of Burning Crusade.
I could write an essay on this subject but the two I'll mention now are cross-server dungeon/BG finder (which destroyed much of the social aspect to the game) and loot tokens instead of loot drops.
I would also add that constant, small incremental progress is also easier to monetize and it's also more successful at doing so. Look at the model that Candy Crush popularized. It lures that dopamine hit right in front of you, just within reach - but the "reach" costs 24 candy crush coins or whatever they call it.
I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.
In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money.
There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, except priorities change in the industry. Fast forward 15 years - all the progress and tools, developing practices, experience accumulated in the industry - but no real progress or innovations.
There are still games that push quality mark forward, but mass market is going away from it. Companies like EA have to make a choice: do we fund this game that will sell for 60$ and give 100s of hours of diverse gameplay or do we fund this online game with proven gameplay and sell ingame items for 1$/piece for next 2 years. Both of these games not only differ in terms of money they make, but also in terms of time people spend on them. So EA is better not to fund game 1 at all, to let people spend more limited gaming time on the game that has a potential for more profits.
> developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model
This is not a defence of the current state of the industry, but let's not get too rosy with our nostalgia glasses.
As the content increased and fidelity improved, production costs skyrocketed. The majority of games failed commercially. A commercial failure with a big production budget could (and regularly did) easily destroy a studio. Even a pretty big multi-title studio. The churn and carnage was dramatic.
Then with an alternative distribution and the availability of tools, the race-to-the-bottom pricing was on. Further increasing the pressure on production.
There were always games being released on the single pay model, but it was never a good risk profile for investors. That profile is almost suicidal when the investment is $200m vs $10m.
There is still a healthy single pay tranche to the industry: indie games. And not coincidentally, production costs of a 'triple-I' game are not that dissimilar to the production costs of an average publisher-funded game 20 years ago.
Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content).
Their logic is quite flawless:
Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible with console exclusives, ie. single player games.
> I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.
I think this is fundamentally a problem, because the psychological pressures a game applies to get people to pay for microtranactions are intrinsically opposed to fun and satisfying experiences. Games that successfully monetize on microtransactions do so by putting the "fun" just out of reach, and annoy and bore their users into putting money into the slot to get the result they want.
> There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, except priorities change in the industry.
I think the single-pay model might very well have been an accident of history. Before we had home consoles and PC gaming, the business model for video games was based on recurring revenue: in that case in the form of coin-operated games. Before digital distribution, the only way to monetize a game for PC or home console was to sell a game in a box with enough value inside that customers would be willing to pay outright for it. That was the age of the gaming experience as a development priority: the game itself had to be good enough that players would be willing to pay $50 for the next title.
But now that digital distribution is the norm, it's again possible for game developers to extract revenue from users on a recurring basis, and since that is wildly more profitable and less risky than relying on one-time-purchases, that's what developers are going to focus on. That's only accelerated by the cost of content creation: in order to build a AAA game these days, it takes an army of artists many years to deliver a product. That's a far cry from something like the original Diablo which was made by a handful of people. With that level of financial investment, studios are much less likely to take risks on new ideas, and are more likely to seek alternative means to monetize that investment.
I would also point the finger at Free to Play games simply undercutting the single purchase games and diluting the market for AAA studios big budget games.
One more thought is the idea of the "Forever Game". It seems the longtail development cost of already released games keeps growing. So how do you fund it? Is that a cause or a symptom of the drive toward profit?
The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.
It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate it's users behind those walls on purpose to get big buck for small bang.
For me, personally, I will never buy a game if it has some connection to EA ever. These guys are toxic and just hurt the industry. But people buy and EA delivers. And obviously people don't learn, EA got so much shit from the internet community and people still don't stop buying there games, which, for me, is incomprehensible.
> The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.
It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.
> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible
Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.
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[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...
[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.
This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing.
I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris. I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does.
Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, there's a massive combination of races, ideologies and other factors that all go together to create what feels like a novel/new experience.
In Surviving Mars, your playing field is limited to a 10x10 grid, and you quickly become bogged down keeping ahead of your colonists' needs. The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty. The planet just kind of exists as a map outside your little grid, there's no way to visit or expand, you just send expeditions out and get a text box saying they found x, y or z.
Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars in an exploration/build/research combined with novelty in a truly expansive world, that would be amazing. Setting up your base, digging your habitats, finding volatiles and water and all that good stuff. It would be great, if done well, of course.
But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.
> The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty
That sounds like Stellaris, tbh. Eventually it just turns into waiting for things to complete so you can launch the next war. And without the historical immersion (EUIV, VIC II), or personal connection (CKII) of other Paradox games it just feels like a complicated menu simulator.
A lot of what we do can be explained (or "reduced") to chemical processes that reward or reinforce behavior. Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works, building a birdhouse, playing with your kids, etc?
A key question on the ethics of it all is - I think - whether there is some externality from the behavior that leads to social utility. Reading literature might make you more understanding and empathetic of others' experiences for example. Gambling in a casino, maybe not so much (though certainly it creates jobs, etc).
I'm excited by the idea that neurochemical feedback loops in gaming could create some positive social utility. Certainly the storytelling in a lot of games is artistic and meaningful, but maybe we'll find even better ways to directly channel those brain cycles, along the lines of protein folding games but with more depth. (Neal Stephenson had some interesting ideas for this in Fall or Reamde - can't remember - where an MMORPG had an API similar to mechanical turk where players were rewarded for cognitive tasks in the real world like airport security)
edit: I guess we shouldn't forget that games are fun too, and doesn't necessarily need to be deeper than that to be good.
But modern games are often much more like casino machines than books. There are countless studies over the last decade to make games more addictive. The key step that I hate most is the intentional use of grinding. Not only does it stretch out gameplay, but doing your “chores” (eg gathering materials for hundreds of hours) makes the reward feel more earned. This makes the virtual sword feel more tangible and feeds into a sunk cost fallacy when we consider quitting.
> Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works
Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Great Gatsby 2?"
Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you're grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren't spending more money. Just time.
If it’s a single fixed price, what is incentivizing the developer to make the game more addictive? Purchasing the sequel? Wouldn’t the developer instead be incentivized to make a game with novel and compelling gameplay that isn’t necessarily addictive?
The incentive will be to hype the game up, encourage people to preorder, go on a massive marketing spend, and then don't fix anything broken about it after launch to make sure it's dead within 2 years in time for the new hype cycle.
That's only if you didn't tell the players your game has 10 hours of gameplay, and made them expect it to have much more. I.e. you engaged in dishonest marketing.
If you present the game honestly, then people can evaluate the price you're asking for vs. what's being offered, and they have no reason to complain that it was too short.
It depends on the game and on how it's advertised. And I personally prefer 10 fun hours than 25 padded to hell and back. Other than Portal, there's also the latest Wolfenstein game, which had less than 10 hours of gameplay.
> Look, if an ADULT spends $500 of their hard earned money to buy Fortnitebux or Smurfberries or whatever, I don't know what business it is of yours. If an adult wants to spend cash on beer or DLC or opera tickets or loot boxes, it's their right.
I was ready to write an angry 10,000 word response on the importance of private property and the free market system. But reading this paragraph de-escalated the situation enough for me to realize this article was only a general overview of the industry they work in.
The basis of free markets is that on balance people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge than other systems do.
Markets perform better than other allocation systems for many things. It's an observed principle rather than something that was directed from above.
Some economic models assume people are rational because on aggregate it works for those models.
Mostly market systems have substantially outperformed centrally controlled systems.
If you take a descriptive (vs. prescriptive) view of the free market, you have to include all observations.
Yes, we've observed that under free market, "people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge", at least on many occasions. We've also observed countless of occasions when they'll make a worse choice. Sometimes idiotically worse choice. We've observed the cases where those choices, aggregated, cause wide-spread suffering.
So many people were asking a question - why does free market work perfectly in some cases, but fails so badly in others? That's where the "rationality" and "full knowledge" things come from. Economists have figured out that these are necessary conditions for the free market model to work the best. When you make people behave irrationally, or refuse to give them full knowledge, the free market model results in suboptimal outcomes.
Free market isn't a silver bullet. It's a process that gives particular outputs for particular inputs, and we've been mapping the relationship between its domain and codomain for a while now. We know that the more rational participants and the more symmetrical information come in, the more ethically positive transactions come out. This can be seen in both theoretical models and in practice.
Now when the game industry is "researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut [players'] rationality", what that means is that they're weaponizing the free market to fuck fellow human beings over.
It’s a flavorful point of view but it really is about IAP. Only truly mad people go out and defend virtual slot machines, and that’s definitely the virus (smallest reproducing harmful life form) of the game industry.
I have a lot of (my own, highly speculative and uncertified) thoughts on this, and if you'll indulge me in some cynacism I'll try to highlight what doesn't feel quite right.
If you're curious about how this is developing, try Black Desert Online. It's a really remarkably polished game that is truly unique. It's a PvP action fighting game encapsulated by an immersive RPG with a load of different ways to play the game.
It's almost terrifyingly well crafted.
There is a startlingly well designed progression system pivoted around raising your attack and defense rating to fight against other players in the various fields of battle. In every one of the sub routines within this intricate Skinner Box there is an efficiency modifier which can be metered through the use of USD,
All of these sub routines inevitably connect at the central purpose of pumping black stones, or as I'll refer to them, probability stones into your gear with a chance of either raising their rating, lowering their rating, or in certain cases destroying them completely. Sometimes the undesired outcomes can be negated through further remittance of USD, for this and certain other mini-games as well.
There is a tightly controlled exchange of goods through a central system (which collects a tax unless you pay for a buff every month), with only a small number of consumable items being transferable between players.
You are utterly economically isolated in the game.
This is not a new phenomenon, but I think it's clearly evolving.
Casinos were built on it, and so are many of these so-called "Korean MMOs".
Pearl Abyss has enjoyed massive success and, to my dismay,
has purchased CCP Games, developer of EVE Online.
I hope these system designs are less insidious than my experience has led me to believe.
Edit: I'll add that I've read supposedly regulatory action is being taken, I read somewhere that China was or is imposing a rule for disclosure of probabilities in at least some circumstances. Not confident on veracity.
Curiously, in certain regions there are apparently varying or no limits on purchase of "cash shop" items, while in others (like NA) there are. Also worth noting that within the game, players who've paid the most into the cash shop are called "whales".
Edit2: Last I looked they boast a player base in the 2-3 million range.
Compare this to a game like Beat Saber, where you can play any level, at any difficulty, in any order, and the computer just keeps track of your score. 99% of the game state is in your brain, so the only way to progress is by learning how to interpret the patterns and coordinate your body. It's also anti-addictive, because playing for more than a few hours is physically exhausting.
> In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.
I dunno, calling people unsophisticated drug dealers because their game designs don't value the same dimensions of fun as your game designs seems pretty judgemental.
> This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.
Bad, sloppy, breathless writing. Reiterating the central metaphor for pages on end doesn’t make it right. It’s like the author really wanted to vent with their preferred insult for more successful game developers and needed a few pages of folksy pop-psych nonsense to justify it.
If there’s any kernel of truth here, it’s nothing new. Likening commercial online games to drugs is as old as “Evercrack”.
One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources.
A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array of items that grant you limited control over the environment, and you start grinding towards your first resource generator, which gives you resources which let you make the second one.
Now you're scaling. Build speed becomes the bottleneck for awhile, you're grinding the farm. Eventually you reach the next tier of generators, and this unlocks new mechanics. Finally at the end of the game you get artifacts of immense, game-breaking power.
Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again.
The lure of mastery is perhaps the most addictive one that could ever be dreamed.
>Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again.
With a friend I played Minecraft for years. Every time we met I would bring my xbox360 controller and we would dig, build, whatever, for hours and days on end.
One week, we decided to go for the nether dragon, at the time newly added to the game. We spent hours farming items, going to hell and losing stuff there, but we went on, arrived on the nether world, spent ten minutes finding out how to deal with the dragon and we killed it. Then we looked at each other and said "oh, now we have finished Minecraft".
We never played it again.
Weirdly I've only played vanilla survival but this genuinely sounds precisely like my experience. First we built a zombie farm. Which gave us some weapons and xp. Then a chicken farm, for food. Then a spider farm. Then we found an underwater temple. Guardian farm time! Oooh, and an ender pearl/xp farm, iron farm, gold farm etc etc etc.
We spent days and days in game automating away as much resource gathering as we could. Until the server was basically finished - there really were no more farms to build.
So we started a new one :)
Yeah my next big rush was Factorio. More concentration on the mechanics of building and scaling, less on the awesome graphics and immersion that Minecraft offers.
I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility.
If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.
If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting them for money.
If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money
If you sell in-game items, like weapons or maps, the players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
If you sell in-game cosmetics, like skins, which have no impact on gameplay, the players think you are trying to make every look stupid and you have to pay to look cool.
Video games are inherently manipulative in the sense that the game is designed for you to behave in fun ways and do fun things. Once monetization is in the picture it completely poisons the whole dynamic. It doesn't help that the audience skews young.
If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
Upfront sale is not like the others at all because it doesn't interact with addictive behaviour in the same way.
It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.
There is only uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support if the marketing is actually deceptive and if there is an actual lack of support.
People have been burned a few too many times by less reputable developers (EA) selling unfinished, deceptive garbage (SimCity 2013) at full price, so a certain amount of uproar and skepticism when it happens again and again is to be expected, I think.
But there are good, reputable companies too who are doing honest business by selling quality games for a reasonable up-front price. I don't generally see people having an issue with that.
See if you can find a lot of people who are unhappy with dropping $60 on Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, for instance.
Exactly.
Also, in the old days of early Internet era, we used to buy games not based on some marketing (in my parts of the world, US videogame marketing didn't really exist anyway), but based on reviews in videogame magazines. Those were pretty honest, and if they weren't, we'd blame the magazine. It was entirely expected that games have varying quality and plenty of bugs. People didn't have a problem with that.
an upfront price made sense in the old days when a relatively polished product was released at launch, perhaps with a couple patches to fix bugs, and with users running their own multiplayer servers.
for better or for worse, the norm has shifted to longer periods of support and servers hosted by the company. it's hard to commit to supporting a game this way when each user only pays once.
personally I like the approach csgo has taken. you get a full game for free (although it was still a good deal at $20, imo) and you can pay for purely cosmetic items. I think this aligns the incentives well; the devs can only get paid by making game that people care about playing, but there's also an unrestricted stream of new players since it's free. plus if you decide your finally done, you can sell all your skins on the market and get at least some of your money back.
I will fully admit that I have only the faintest idea of how modern multiplayer games work, but I agree from my understanding that the old business model of selling a complete game once seems ill suited to that style of game.
(Although, counterexample: Mojang made a fortune out of selling Minecraft, a complete multiplayer game, where you host your own servers, with no paid DLC or hidden catches, but then later came out with the Realms thing where they had optional paid server infrastructure. That's a thing you can do. Not sure how it panned out.)
That being said, my point was that there are still plenty of companies, such as Nintendo, successfully operating in the traditional way without facing much hostility for daring to sell a complete, polished, mostly bug-free product for money.
Therefore I think it is inaccurate to state that "every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility" like the grandparent did.
to be clear, I'm not saying it's totally not viable to just release a good game and charge for it upfront. there is a small number of studios/publishers who have such good brand recognition (or just consistently ship really good games) that they can actually make money this way. it can still work well for games with little ongoing maintenance cost from established companies making AAA titles or indie devs who don't have the same upfront costs.
all I'm saying is that there are other "game-as-a-service" models that can align incentives well between players and devs for ongoing projects without necessarily being abusive.
GGP is sort of right though. gamers are a notoriously difficult group of customers to please, and they don't really have a way to understand the business or technical constraints faced by the makers of their favorite games. the worst of them will be uncharitable and hostile, no matter what you do.
It's not about winning - people will complain because that's what people do. Users complain about free products as well, sometimes rightfully and sometimes with too much entitlement. It's not about the monetisation model.
Creating something and putting it out there for free or for a one-off payment is the cleanest possible model.
But then it's an incentive to make a good product to get good sales on that game and the next
Regarding the next game from a game developer, I remember an indie making the point that the feedback from the general public (not the loud minorities only) will mostly be felt on the sales of the next game of series and, to a lesser extent, the next game from this developer.
Exactly. It is only when upfront sale gets combined with season passes AND microtransactions AND lootbox-systems is when criticism gets to arise. Rightfully.
> Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility.
I would say that in almost any business there is always small amount of people who intrepret the pricing and/or the business model of the business with hostility. I think it is quite natural - people would rather not pay for things. However the majority of people are not the ones bitching loudly about it, they pay for services happily and are somewhat content & quiet. The small minority bitches about it and that minority is often quite vocal.
That's because ultimately people have no choice but to either agree to the demands of the vendors or forgo a good or service ("voting with your wallet" doesn't work unless goods are trivial or substitutable, and games are neither). Most of them don't say a thing, because this is how things work and people have a life to live.
That doesn't change the fact that some business models are more abusive and deserving criticism than others, though.
This is the dominant tone of discussion in video game communities. I certainly haven't seen that in other places. No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.
Given the previous claim was that some number of people will treat the business model and monetization approach with hostility I think it still holds true with Disney. They have been much derided for retelling public domain stories, then claiming ownership/trademarks/copyright (event going so far as pushing for changes to copyright law) to give themselves exclusive rights to market. And a lot of criticism of their whole “Disney Vault” approach to selling old VHS and DVD titles where only certain titles from the back catalogue would be available for sale in a given year, so you better buy them up quickly or miss out for potentially another 7 years.
> No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.
Well, yes and no. When it comes to movies in general and movie adaptations of books in particular, like recently the Hobbit, number one complaint I heard (and expressed myself at times) is that they're so desperate for money that it's pathetic, stringing a short book for three movies ending in a way that ensures people will have to go to the cinema not just to continue watching, but also to rewatch the old movies upon release of the new one.
From what I can tell, the sentiment for now is that it's pathetic, not abusive.
As a creator would you rather be viewed as incompetent or malevolent?
The former.
I've certainly seen this opinion around Disney, especially around how much they're milking Star Wars releases, and the recent run of live-action remakes. It's not a universal thing, but "Enormous media company Disney churns out nostalgia-baiting cash-ins" is definitely a complaint that you even see among fairly reputable reviewers.
The biggest example of this was the "rerelease" of Infinity War to add a couple new scenes, and charging full price for people to rewatch a multi-hour movie for 5-10 mins more content.
Plenty of accusations of Disney plagiarising most of their work over the yeas from public-domain fairy tales though.
I hear you on all points. But I would argue that for your last sentence, mature people at least would be satisfied with an upfront cost and a truthful marketing campaign. I think we can all understand that it costs money to make a game.
Yeah, I don't have any problem paying $60 for a game. I haven't paid that much in a long time though, since the vast majority of games I'm interested in are far less than that even when not on sale.
And if you take inflation into account, we used to pay $60 for NES games, which would be closer to $130 today.
> If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad.
Between Steam's refund policy and review system this is basically a solved problem.
No Man's Sky developers can't say the same.
Oh no, making millions with a literal scam gets you criticized?
Please just stop bringing this up in this context. They literally sold a single player game as multiplayer, along with a plethora of features which were said to be in the game at launch day which where never implemented. See yourself at [0].
The only reason this keeps being brought up is because Sean Murray has extraordinary talent at tickling the medias gamers-are-evil trope. This has nothing to do with payment methods.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...
They did finally implement the multiplayer among other things.
No Man's Sky's developers sold a promise upfront, not a game upfront. You see the same thing with pretty much all pre-orders and early access games, not just the crowd funded stuff. It is completely different to selling a complete game for $60 with the customers able to read reviews before purchasing or get refunds after purchasing.
I feel like you're mixing justified complaints ("this game has addictive gambling elements and you're targetting it at children") with less justified complaints ("this completely optional skin which has no effect on gameplay looks cooler than the default but costs money").
I'm mixing them because they are mixed. Go to any gaming community and look at what they're talking about. Justified and unjustified complaints, with the main focus on monetization and how evil the developers are who are manipulating them to pay.
What I want to figure out is how to monetize a game that removes the assumption of bad faith and detoxifies the community. I came to the conclusion that it has to be free. Every other monetization will lead to the abuse we see developers receiving.
I'd argue that the upfront model leads to higher quality games. They're actually fun to play rather than simply being addiction machines.
What if you end the game on a cliffhanger and sell a sequel?
The only method you listed that people automatically are hostile to is selling in game items that unbalance a game in the buyers advantage
> players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy.
Players dont just think this, time after time this has proven true. If the buyable item wasnt better why would anyone buy it?
None of the other monetization methods you lists are objectionable if done right.
If enough people are complaining about the value of your $60 game then maybe it's because you got your price point off and should have instead sold it at a lower price. Not every game is a AAA title.
> If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
You are literally allowed to do it. It does mean more effort to preserve the desired healthy relationships.
I don't think free games actually tend to result in perfectly healthy relationships either; but monetisation just provides a single point of failure for such dynamics.
Yeah, giving away your game completely free has similar problems to being a maintainer of free open source software.
The Netflix or Apple Music model might work. Fixed price per month for a catalog of games, with revenue shares happening based on play time. This a basically a solved problem for video and audio content, games don’t need to be different.
Video and audio content are not interactive. You never feel active manipulation from static media.
Games in that model will be accused of manipulating players into having as much play time as possible even sacrificing quality. The same addictive mechanics can be used for time instead of money.
That is true, and is also happening in other mediums where the incentives are setup this way. The biggest culprit I’ve seen is recipes. What you want is the ingredients and instructions laid out with minimum fluff. What you get is pages and pages of useless storytelling to improve the metrics of the page so that the page gets ranked better for engagement so that it can sell ads.
But won’t people get bored and just stop playing? I wonder if songs have gotten longer since the rise of Spotify and Apple Music.
Then you could get games that are long for no reason
Meanwhile, Jeff Vogel (author of this article), has always had a 1-year refund policy on his games. He says it is rarely used.
People still complain about free games.
There's one of the lesser-known rules of the internet - if it exists, there is an outrage about it.
If you are honest in your approach to selling games, you will not get overwhelming criticism about ANY of the above game modes.
Full-priced games have tens of millions of sales regularly. Games that do not hide content behind paywalls can sell cosmetic microtransactions all day long (see: League of Legends or Path of Exile).
Its transparent "money grab for the sake of money grabbing" that gets the rightful criticism. Besides, I have literally never seen any complex indie game being attacked for releasing in the 9.99$-19.99$ space. Never.
> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops.
I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm after? will that item go to me?) to really kick the intermittent-reward circuitry into gear.
Constant small incremental progress is just easier to implement.
Note: This is likely not as neat an analogy/example as I would like, but it seems relevant.
I used to be an actual heroin addict, many many years ago. Finding the next hit every day/every couple of days was nearly as satisfying as the actual rush of the drug itself.
In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nearly entirely, well before I'd actually taken the drug.
Brains are crazy.
> In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nearly entirely, well before I'd actually taken the drug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system#Anatomy
Though I've not read any articles on heroin or these long lengths of time specifically, opitates are known to have these anticipatory responses in the brain like the one you describe.
Brains are indeed totally crazy.
I imagine you saw a bit of a dopamine spike when that message came in. Was it enough to mitigate the physical symptoms at all, or was that purely mental, I wonder?
Genuinely mitigated the runny nose, aches and pains in my back, etc.
I wish I could trick my stupid brain like that. (not saying that your brain is somehow easier to trick than mine or whatever. My brain is just stupidly stubborn when it comes to feeling pain)
I'm really very deeply glad you kicked that habit and killed the dragon. This internet stranger is rooting for you :)
It's mental either way.
Randomness of rewards has been repeatedly shown to increase duration spent with skinner boxes. There seems to be a magic middle spot where the small rewards are frequent enough to avoid disillusionment and the big rewards are infrequent & random enough to feed addiction
It's called a variable ratio reward schedule [1]. It's at play in slot machines for example. Very effective at getting rapid and persistent responses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Gambling_%E2%80%...
Huh, I've always heard "intermittent reinforcement" used to mean this, rather than just any not-every-time reinforcement. Thanks!
mmm, almost all of the most addicting games I know are some variation of small bars filling up over time to unlock more small bars to fill up. I'll give one specific example:
Destiny is a loot shooter (or "looty shooty" if you're in polite company) which has rare drops as part of it's core gameplay. Certain rare guns can only come from high-level activities, and some weapons have randomised rolls that encourage people to re-play those activities to get gear that is marginally better. A lot of the best parts of the gear drop design are lifted from peak WoW. But that alone isn't what makes destiny addictive.
Destiny 1 had "gun leveling" where you would need to get kills on certain rare weapons to unlock the rare features that made them useful, along with individual numbered levels for each gear slot, and that's before you get into the quests and bounties. There was always a reason to hop on, because you always had some new weapon that you could power up to see what it did. Tiny bars filling up.
When Destiny 2 shipped, they dramatically improved the loot system, simplifying the ways people would get drops and making them more consistent overall. But they also tried to remove a lot of the other "grindy" aspects of the game like gun leveling, but the result was the game didn't feel like you had compelling reasons to log in. Fewer bars = fewer hooks.
It's only now that the game has had several significant expansions and added a host of new quests (many of which simply require using certain types of gear in certain activities) that the game is approaching those same levels of addictive.
What you are describing is the most common model of progression. Guns, weapons, characters, skills. Something needs to be leveled. That's fine and great but it also takes the excitement away because all of the progression is 100% guaranteed( you kill an enemy, you get some exp for whatever you are leveling) vs random scarce drops being the main way to progress.
You are talking about different types of players. If what you are saying were true for everyone, then all those top grossing builder/clicker games wouldn't exist.
100% agree on your point about WoW and MMORPGs in general. Progress shouldn't be so formulaic and you need "asymmetries" of sorts between classes and tiers of progression to make every step memorable. I remember how grand raiding and high end content felt in the past but with how accessible that stuff is today( in fact you are expected to raid) the whole game just feels so much smaller despite having more stuff to do.
Yeah, basically every decision from the early game that they later 'smoothed over' turned out to be important somehow. Except for spell and ability scaling with gear, they messed that one right up at the start and didn't fully fix it til the end of Burning Crusade.
I could write an essay on this subject but the two I'll mention now are cross-server dungeon/BG finder (which destroyed much of the social aspect to the game) and loot tokens instead of loot drops.
I would also add that constant, small incremental progress is also easier to monetize and it's also more successful at doing so. Look at the model that Candy Crush popularized. It lures that dopamine hit right in front of you, just within reach - but the "reach" costs 24 candy crush coins or whatever they call it.
I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.
In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money.
There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, except priorities change in the industry. Fast forward 15 years - all the progress and tools, developing practices, experience accumulated in the industry - but no real progress or innovations.
There are still games that push quality mark forward, but mass market is going away from it. Companies like EA have to make a choice: do we fund this game that will sell for 60$ and give 100s of hours of diverse gameplay or do we fund this online game with proven gameplay and sell ingame items for 1$/piece for next 2 years. Both of these games not only differ in terms of money they make, but also in terms of time people spend on them. So EA is better not to fund game 1 at all, to let people spend more limited gaming time on the game that has a potential for more profits.
> developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model
This is not a defence of the current state of the industry, but let's not get too rosy with our nostalgia glasses.
As the content increased and fidelity improved, production costs skyrocketed. The majority of games failed commercially. A commercial failure with a big production budget could (and regularly did) easily destroy a studio. Even a pretty big multi-title studio. The churn and carnage was dramatic.
Then with an alternative distribution and the availability of tools, the race-to-the-bottom pricing was on. Further increasing the pressure on production.
There were always games being released on the single pay model, but it was never a good risk profile for investors. That profile is almost suicidal when the investment is $200m vs $10m.
There is still a healthy single pay tranche to the industry: indie games. And not coincidentally, production costs of a 'triple-I' game are not that dissimilar to the production costs of an average publisher-funded game 20 years ago.
Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content).
Their logic is quite flawless:
Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible with console exclusives, ie. single player games.
I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.
In an alternate reality, 3D TV really took off and split screen was replaced by polarized-screen. Wouldn't that have been neat?
https://www.tweaking4all.com/video/gaming/split-screen-game-...
Wow super neat, you reminded me of a family member who has a 3D TV!
And with modification this technique also works with laptops and colorized glasses!
gaming intensifies
A couple things I want to respond to:
> I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.
I think this is fundamentally a problem, because the psychological pressures a game applies to get people to pay for microtranactions are intrinsically opposed to fun and satisfying experiences. Games that successfully monetize on microtransactions do so by putting the "fun" just out of reach, and annoy and bore their users into putting money into the slot to get the result they want.
> There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, except priorities change in the industry.
I think the single-pay model might very well have been an accident of history. Before we had home consoles and PC gaming, the business model for video games was based on recurring revenue: in that case in the form of coin-operated games. Before digital distribution, the only way to monetize a game for PC or home console was to sell a game in a box with enough value inside that customers would be willing to pay outright for it. That was the age of the gaming experience as a development priority: the game itself had to be good enough that players would be willing to pay $50 for the next title.
But now that digital distribution is the norm, it's again possible for game developers to extract revenue from users on a recurring basis, and since that is wildly more profitable and less risky than relying on one-time-purchases, that's what developers are going to focus on. That's only accelerated by the cost of content creation: in order to build a AAA game these days, it takes an army of artists many years to deliver a product. That's a far cry from something like the original Diablo which was made by a handful of people. With that level of financial investment, studios are much less likely to take risks on new ideas, and are more likely to seek alternative means to monetize that investment.
I would also point the finger at Free to Play games simply undercutting the single purchase games and diluting the market for AAA studios big budget games.
One more thought is the idea of the "Forever Game". It seems the longtail development cost of already released games keeps growing. So how do you fund it? Is that a cause or a symptom of the drive toward profit?
The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.
It's not that I disagree with you, but some payment models are justified and comprehensible. On the other site, its pretty obvious that especially companies like EA make use of that and try to gate it's users behind those walls on purpose to get big buck for small bang.
For me, personally, I will never buy a game if it has some connection to EA ever. These guys are toxic and just hurt the industry. But people buy and EA delivers. And obviously people don't learn, EA got so much shit from the internet community and people still don't stop buying there games, which, for me, is incomprehensible.
> The difference from now to then is, that games offer endless online service and these also needs neverending development, bug fixing and people even demand new content. These costs are not simply covered by retail price.
It's a problem they created on purpose, so they shouldn't get to use it as a justification for their practices. It's not that players need "endless online service"[0] that needs "neverending development, bug fixing"[1]. It's that the companies figured out doing it this way gives them access to much more money, so they created the problem and used their marketing budgets to make it a new normal.
> but some payment models are justified and comprehensible
Yeah, but some feel like they're justified by self-serving arguments, in a case of creating a problem to justify getting paid for solving it.
--
[0] - Which actually isn't endless, but works just for couple years until the next game in the franchise is made, or the studio gets bored, or bought out, or...
[1] - Tangential, but I still don't buy the whole "bit rot" thing as a natural phenomenon. I'm starting to believe that our industry has accidentally become good at making everything so fragile that it justifies endless work just to keep things running.
This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing.
I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris. I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does.
Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, there's a massive combination of races, ideologies and other factors that all go together to create what feels like a novel/new experience.
In Surviving Mars, your playing field is limited to a 10x10 grid, and you quickly become bogged down keeping ahead of your colonists' needs. The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty. The planet just kind of exists as a map outside your little grid, there's no way to visit or expand, you just send expeditions out and get a text box saying they found x, y or z.
Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars in an exploration/build/research combined with novelty in a truly expansive world, that would be amazing. Setting up your base, digging your habitats, finding volatiles and water and all that good stuff. It would be great, if done well, of course.
But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.
> The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty
That sounds like Stellaris, tbh. Eventually it just turns into waiting for things to complete so you can launch the next war. And without the historical immersion (EUIV, VIC II), or personal connection (CKII) of other Paradox games it just feels like a complicated menu simulator.
I appreciate the direct mention of his motivation for writing.
>I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.
I've been reading Vogel's writing for something like 25 years now, and it always repays the time. He's entertaining but thoughtful with it.
First heard of him reading this which is very nearly 25 years old.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.mac.games/-ShSyZ8bv...
A lot of what we do can be explained (or "reduced") to chemical processes that reward or reinforce behavior. Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works, building a birdhouse, playing with your kids, etc?
A key question on the ethics of it all is - I think - whether there is some externality from the behavior that leads to social utility. Reading literature might make you more understanding and empathetic of others' experiences for example. Gambling in a casino, maybe not so much (though certainly it creates jobs, etc).
I'm excited by the idea that neurochemical feedback loops in gaming could create some positive social utility. Certainly the storytelling in a lot of games is artistic and meaningful, but maybe we'll find even better ways to directly channel those brain cycles, along the lines of protein folding games but with more depth. (Neal Stephenson had some interesting ideas for this in Fall or Reamde - can't remember - where an MMORPG had an API similar to mechanical turk where players were rewarded for cognitive tasks in the real world like airport security)
edit: I guess we shouldn't forget that games are fun too, and doesn't necessarily need to be deeper than that to be good.
But modern games are often much more like casino machines than books. There are countless studies over the last decade to make games more addictive. The key step that I hate most is the intentional use of grinding. Not only does it stretch out gameplay, but doing your “chores” (eg gathering materials for hundreds of hours) makes the reward feel more earned. This makes the virtual sword feel more tangible and feeds into a sunk cost fallacy when we consider quitting.
> Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works
Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Great Gatsby 2?"
Note that the comment didn't say books vs games. A video game can be art, and a book can be entertainment.
I had the same feeling after playing Sekiro (And I read a lot)
Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you're grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren't spending more money. Just time.
If it’s a single fixed price, what is incentivizing the developer to make the game more addictive? Purchasing the sequel? Wouldn’t the developer instead be incentivized to make a game with novel and compelling gameplay that isn’t necessarily addictive?
The incentive will be to hype the game up, encourage people to preorder, go on a massive marketing spend, and then don't fix anything broken about it after launch to make sure it's dead within 2 years in time for the new hype cycle.
If your game only has 10 hours of gameplay, people will complain that it's too short. Then your game gets bad reviews and you don't eat.
So you need to have more gameplay, and that's either through cleverly addictive game mechanics or a ton of expensive to produce content.
Plenty of games have less than 10h of gameplay, and an even bigger amount of games have less than 10h of non grind gameplay. Portal is a good example
That's only if you didn't tell the players your game has 10 hours of gameplay, and made them expect it to have much more. I.e. you engaged in dishonest marketing.
If you present the game honestly, then people can evaluate the price you're asking for vs. what's being offered, and they have no reason to complain that it was too short.
It depends on the game and on how it's advertised. And I personally prefer 10 fun hours than 25 padded to hell and back. Other than Portal, there's also the latest Wolfenstein game, which had less than 10 hours of gameplay.
> Look, if an ADULT spends $500 of their hard earned money to buy Fortnitebux or Smurfberries or whatever, I don't know what business it is of yours. If an adult wants to spend cash on beer or DLC or opera tickets or loot boxes, it's their right.
I was ready to write an angry 10,000 word response on the importance of private property and the free market system. But reading this paragraph de-escalated the situation enough for me to realize this article was only a general overview of the industry they work in.
Well, the article provides some good points why a free market system does not work.
The basis of free markets is that participants act rational and have full knowledge.
Yet here we are researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut their rationality...
The basis of free markets is that on balance people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge than other systems do.
Markets perform better than other allocation systems for many things. It's an observed principle rather than something that was directed from above.
Some economic models assume people are rational because on aggregate it works for those models.
Mostly market systems have substantially outperformed centrally controlled systems.
If you take a descriptive (vs. prescriptive) view of the free market, you have to include all observations.
Yes, we've observed that under free market, "people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge", at least on many occasions. We've also observed countless of occasions when they'll make a worse choice. Sometimes idiotically worse choice. We've observed the cases where those choices, aggregated, cause wide-spread suffering.
So many people were asking a question - why does free market work perfectly in some cases, but fails so badly in others? That's where the "rationality" and "full knowledge" things come from. Economists have figured out that these are necessary conditions for the free market model to work the best. When you make people behave irrationally, or refuse to give them full knowledge, the free market model results in suboptimal outcomes.
Free market isn't a silver bullet. It's a process that gives particular outputs for particular inputs, and we've been mapping the relationship between its domain and codomain for a while now. We know that the more rational participants and the more symmetrical information come in, the more ethically positive transactions come out. This can be seen in both theoretical models and in practice.
Now when the game industry is "researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut [players'] rationality", what that means is that they're weaponizing the free market to fuck fellow human beings over.
Was there rationality in the first place, ever? Just a casual glance at the stock markets gives an answer.
Indeed, one could argue that in reality, most market participants are irrational, emotional and never have full knowledge.
It’s a flavorful point of view but it really is about IAP. Only truly mad people go out and defend virtual slot machines, and that’s definitely the virus (smallest reproducing harmful life form) of the game industry.
I have a lot of (my own, highly speculative and uncertified) thoughts on this, and if you'll indulge me in some cynacism I'll try to highlight what doesn't feel quite right.
If you're curious about how this is developing, try Black Desert Online. It's a really remarkably polished game that is truly unique. It's a PvP action fighting game encapsulated by an immersive RPG with a load of different ways to play the game.
It's almost terrifyingly well crafted.
There is a startlingly well designed progression system pivoted around raising your attack and defense rating to fight against other players in the various fields of battle. In every one of the sub routines within this intricate Skinner Box there is an efficiency modifier which can be metered through the use of USD,
All of these sub routines inevitably connect at the central purpose of pumping black stones, or as I'll refer to them, probability stones into your gear with a chance of either raising their rating, lowering their rating, or in certain cases destroying them completely. Sometimes the undesired outcomes can be negated through further remittance of USD, for this and certain other mini-games as well.
There is a tightly controlled exchange of goods through a central system (which collects a tax unless you pay for a buff every month), with only a small number of consumable items being transferable between players.
You are utterly economically isolated in the game.
This is not a new phenomenon, but I think it's clearly evolving.
Casinos were built on it, and so are many of these so-called "Korean MMOs".
Pearl Abyss has enjoyed massive success and, to my dismay, has purchased CCP Games, developer of EVE Online.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam...
I hope these system designs are less insidious than my experience has led me to believe.
Edit: I'll add that I've read supposedly regulatory action is being taken, I read somewhere that China was or is imposing a rule for disclosure of probabilities in at least some circumstances. Not confident on veracity.
Curiously, in certain regions there are apparently varying or no limits on purchase of "cash shop" items, while in others (like NA) there are. Also worth noting that within the game, players who've paid the most into the cash shop are called "whales".
Edit2: Last I looked they boast a player base in the 2-3 million range.
As a recovering gaming addict, the author doesn't realize behavioral addictions can lead to a person becoming suicidal.
Or doesn't care. Or cares and has no idea how to live an ethically sustainable and interdependent life.
Me: I can't see how people can put money into a slot machine or a video game and take pleasure from that.
Also me: gcp compute model.fit(epochs=20) watches error trend downwards
Most people find pleasure in it once they do it. But perhaps it's not for everybody.
Have you ever tried?
Compare this to a game like Beat Saber, where you can play any level, at any difficulty, in any order, and the computer just keeps track of your score. 99% of the game state is in your brain, so the only way to progress is by learning how to interpret the patterns and coordinate your body. It's also anti-addictive, because playing for more than a few hours is physically exhausting.
Great talk from the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs
> In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.
I dunno, calling people unsophisticated drug dealers because their game designs don't value the same dimensions of fun as your game designs seems pretty judgemental.
> This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.
Bad, sloppy, breathless writing. Reiterating the central metaphor for pages on end doesn’t make it right. It’s like the author really wanted to vent with their preferred insult for more successful game developers and needed a few pages of folksy pop-psych nonsense to justify it.
If there’s any kernel of truth here, it’s nothing new. Likening commercial online games to drugs is as old as “Evercrack”.