Loot boxes, for example, aren’t inherently predatory; they can add an exciting and rewarding surprise element when balanced with noble intentions.
When you sell them, they’re unregulated gambling that children can access.
When designing a battle pass, a designer must answer questions like “How much faster should a premium player progress compared to a F2P player?” and “How long should it take for a player to finish the battle pass?” I’ve seen designers balance it fairly, like by requiring 30 minutes of daily play to complete the free track or $5 to unlock the premium pass.
I still don’t see a way that this could ever be anything other than creating an incentive to play the game for reasons beyond the game being fun, no matter how “fair” it is to the person needing to spend money or not. They’re still artificially creating another body in the matchmaking pool that creates value for someone more willing to part with their dollar. If your player base dries up when you stop offering your battle pass incentives, I’d say that was some artificial retention, and it’s kind of gross.
I definitely didn’t need more reasons to hate live services. The business model has always affected the game design, and a lot of the author’s bullet points could be seen as far back as the arcades, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a better business model for all parties than “sell a good product at a fair price”.
Well, the missing context is that this is how a lot of gaming is tuned regardless. It's pretty basic economy tuning to look at how long a task takes to complete and tune based on that (for games with grind, anyway, think RPGs).
So if you're playing "Perfectly Fair Single Player RPG 3" there's a more than fair chance that the developers looked at the expected completion time of a quest, plugged in that time into some spreadsheet and assigned XP and other rewards to the quest based on that, just to keep the XP curve of the game somewhat predictable. This is a big rabbit hole with a bunch of nuance, but for these purposes we can assume they at least started by doing that flat on all quests.
If you have a F2P game and you're charging for things you can also grind I frankly don't see a much better place to start.
Now, if your premise is that all design for engagement in F2P is gross because it's servicing your business and all design for engagement in paid games is fine because that's just seeking "fun"... well, I don't know that gets fixed. I agree that pay-up-front games can benefit from getting the ugly matter of getting money from players out of the way early, but these days even those games are trying to upsell you into later content, sequels and other stuff, so the difference is rarely that stark.
I think there's a conversation to be had about whether "good", "fun" and "makes people want to engage more" should be seen as the same thing and, if not, what the difference is. It's tricky and nuanced and I don't know that you can expect every game to be on one end of that conversation. Sometimes a person just wants to click on a thing to make number go up, and that's alright.
I think the incentives matter. Diablo II is about making number go up, but Diablo IV has an active incentive to slow you down and make that number go up at a certain rate so that they can upsell you again later. And rather than taking a hardline position, I’d at least ask the question out loud: Is it possible to have a business model for a game other than selling a good product at a fair price and not have it eventually evolve into something gross? Maybe the old shareware model, which is basically just a demo, but other than that, I’m not sure.
I guess it depends on where your line for "gross" happens to land. In my old age I tend to look at old arcades as being pretty gross. Certainly worse than I thought they were at the time.
I'm also not sure if I have a problem with Diablo IV. I think their incentive is for you not to run out of content and bounce all the way off before they can give you more, which is why they retuned it much more generously later. In this case the version of the game that people like more is also the one that did better for them financially. Is that more or less gross?
So I'm not sure I agree on whether the incentives matter. I think the experience I get matters. There is definitely a bad place there in the middle where you feel frustrated playing but won't stop playing, and that's a place where a bunch of the sloppier, grindier games make their money. And I'm not gonna stand here and say that all the upsells in games with a big live service don't make the experience worse. They do, in my book.
But those impacts to the experience are what matters to me, not that they are made as part of a business proposition. Full games in boxes were also sold for money. Live games I enjoy are made for money, too.
I'm more concerned at how live games get to vacuum up all players and keep them on lockdown forever than I am about their moneymaking practices, to be honest. People are worried about the wrong set of incentives here, if you ask me.
That being said... man, do I wish people would put their money where their mouth is. It's all well and good to complain about more expensive pay-up-front games or about overly intrusive microtransactions, but this conversation would be a lot smoother if people actively spending hundreds of hours on those weren't currently spending like 70% of the time and 50% of all the money in gaming. Voting with one's wallet rarely does much, in isolation, but there are absolutely tons of games out there. It'd be nice to see people flock towards the good ones, as per their own standards, and ideally spend some money on those.
I think there's an argument to be made that some level of retention strategy may be a necessary evil in today's market, especially when all your competitors are doing it. No developer wants to run the risk of letting that playerbase dry up. You can have the best multiplayer game in the world, but all the brownie points for playing fair wouldn't mean much if I'm sitting in an empty queue with no one to play with.
It's fine line to walk to make sure players are coming back for the right reasons, but you do want them to come back.
I think there’s also an argument to be made that all of this desire to suck up our attention has made it more difficult for the same developers to market their next game, since their potential customers are all preoccupied with something they haven’t stopped playing. It’s extremely natural for most people to fall off of a game after its initial release, and it’s definitely going to happen once they take their thumbs off the scales.
Now you have a prisoner's dilemma. A lot of studio's need to take their thumbs off the scale at the same time, or you're just sending your customers to someone else.
I’ve been looking for deathmatch shooters for a long time, like what we got from the late 90s to the mid 10s. There are very very few. I don’t care if I or anyone else move on quickly, because I primarily want to play with my friends, and the deathmatch mode typically came alongside a campaign and maybe co-op modes. That’s not a prisoner’s dilemma, and the market hasn’t really been making games like that anymore. Same for things like arcade racers akin to F-Zero or Burnout.
From the Risks and challenges section of their Kickstarter:
We understand that backing a Kickstarter campaign carries a certain level of risk for our backers. With our seasoned team at the helm, we’ve meticulously planned every aspect of the game’s development to adhere to strict budgets and timelines, all while prioritizing the best player experience possible.
Our extensive network of trusted studios and partners further fortifies our ability to deliver on our promises and ensure the utmost quality for our project. Your support means the world to us, and we’re dedicated to going above and beyond to ensure your satisfaction throughout this journey.
Why didn’t they include the point about needing additional investment beyond their Kickstarter target for the project to be viable?
I know first hand that JRPGs are a hefty projects to make, but I’m a little surprised they opted for shutting it all down and not going for Early Access to continue funding, especially as the idea seemed popular.
I can only guess that means the game is still in a pretty bad state.
Kickstarter is not a preorder site. The risk of Kickstarter is the same as investing in anything else, that whatever you’re funding goes belly-up and you lose what you invested
The point of that is to allow risky projects the opportunity to succeed in comfortable financial circumstances.
Risky projects are risky because there’s a potential financial loss to funding them. This is one of those times
Cases like this abuse the system to scam people while using the ToS to skirt legal implications. So it is fraud, just dressed up as a gambling.
If they put all the KS money towards the game unsure how it’s fraud. The fact that they couldn’t finish with the funding they got from KS is the risk that all KS projects come with
Again, it’s not a preorder site, there is no guarantee that someone who pledges on KS will receive anything. I’m just saying to adjust your expectations and pledgers should think about the risk when they’re putting down money
While it is fraud, it’s murky waters when you realize this is what every Kickstarter does. Gamers don’t easily fathom the full sum of what it costs to pay qualified artists for a full development cycle. Kickstarters have only existed to prove to investors that there’s monetary interest in a concept.
I mean when a small team with no budget can make a good demo that sells the idea but then can’t complete the project with years and houdreds of thousands what is going on? I backed like 8 kickstarters and only 3 made it out and 1 is saying they are about to be done after 7 years. Also one of the successful one’s shut down because of not enough post launch monetization. I’m still going to help with stuff i believe in after many failures but just not as enthusiastically.
Well, turns out people need to feed their families, keep a roof over their heads, and games are hard. 300k isn’t a lot of money to actually keep the lights on at a studio. Also keep in mind, depending on the tools you use, you could end up giving a portion of your game sales to the engine dev, then on top of that you have steam who wants a 30% cut for selling your game on their store. That’s maybe 50-55% left after all that depending on other bills and sales to fund anything after profits are left over.
I could be wrong here, but this feels like a larger trend of trying to consolidate profits. Cut out anything/anyone “unnecessary”. Similar to the whole AI trend.
I did pro game dev for like a decade and worked on AAA titles as an outsource, learning a lot of their tricks. I am now back in uni to learn programming and make indie games for the rest of my life.
Has this not been the state of the games industry for the most of time? Small bedroom coders get a break, build a studio, fire out some games, get bought out of grow huge. The founders move on and start a new studio, rinse, repeat. The games industry has always appeared pretty democratic in that specific regard, barrier to entry is pretty low compared to most other industries.
As for the over performance of older games, have they noticed they get cheaper and less shit than on launch?
This is a bit of a side point, but this quote seemed off base to me:
“People are paying for these games!,” he exclaimed. “This is not happening for … books.”
50 Shades of Grey was an all-human alternate-history Twilight fanfiction that was largely plagiarised.
There are also entire genres that are becoming successful for independent authors, mostly self-publishing on Kindle Unlimited like LitRPGs (basically fantasy novels with videogame-like systems) or Jane Austen variations (like Pride & Prejudice retold slightly or very differently).
I think the Long Tail of the Internet is changing a lot of industries, creative or otherwise, not just indie games.
gamedeveloper.com
Najnowsze