Slashdot Mirror
Bill Roper Predicts Major PC Shift
Bill Roper, at Game Convention in Leipzig, Germany, stated in his keynote address that PC Gaming is on the verge of a major shift. From the GI.biz article: "I'm going to get on my PC soapbox for a few minutes...PC games are on the verge of a major market shift, as PC developers and publishers start to move from selling CDs of single-player games to retail outlets, to selling online games to those with broadband connections. We're already seeing primitive multi-platform games on the PC... Players want to get online and play."
Players want to get online and play Not all of us are into multiplayer fps games. When I have time to play, I just want to sit down and play something for a little bit, and I certainly don't want to have to pay a monthly charge to do it.
Last year called and umm... yeah.
Online games are fun, certainly a round of Unreal Tourny or Everquest gets the juices flowing, but a good well written, single player adventure never goes out of style.
I think the biggest problem is that AI is still woefully underwelming for most single player adventure/action games. While games like HL2 offer amazing AI and the enemies are definetly more difficult to pin down, nothing compares to having to fight against online opponents.
When it comes to online RPG's, the problem is that they take too long to build up decent experience, way too much trash talking, and when excitement does happen, you get squeezed out of the battle. They purposely make sure that MMORPG's take long to play so you continue to pay the subscription fees. MMORPG's are based on making the most money for whatever company is offering the product, not necessarily about making the best game possible.
While there certainly is more room in the market for connected and online games, I think the shift has happend and is definetly not as earth shattering as is implied. There isn't really anything to hype about online multiplayer games, they are hear already well established.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Typical, WE know what the consumer whats so that is what we are going to give you (by ramming it down your throat if necessary).
He's predicting something that's pretty much already happened. Nobody gives a damn about an FPS that isn't multiplayer anymore, to the point where, for most new major FPS, the single-player is an afterthought. The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world.
What's he trying to say, that the logical next step on this is games that are distributed exclusively through online channels? I'm sure that's going to happen sometime in the future, but still, saying, "Steam was a good idea, I think more people are going to be doing that in the future," in a roudnabout way hardly seems like much of a prediction.
It may be more like console games in terms of quality as MS released a unified SDK for Xbox 360 and for PC.
I see multiplayer FPS moving towards a soulless future full of maps, rocket launchers, and vehicles. We have all seen what happens to media sources that loose the ability to tell a story - 800 reality show variants and a crappy movies on the big screen.
If any game developers are out there reading this, don't chose the wrong path. Give your games life - write the stories and tell them with the game. *cough* if you need help drop me a line...
Players want to get online and play - not with all of those children and TK-ing a-holes out there. I for one find single-player games much immersive - like sitting by the fire, reading a good book. Multiplayer is like watching a crappy TV sitcom with a bunch of frathouse drunks in a dorm room.
Fsck multiplayer.
Go ahead, mod me down for not conforming.
I think you misread me. I'm not saying that online games with no story are better. I'm saying they're what seems to be making money right now, and they seem to be the direction in which the industry has been headed for quite a while.
Personally, online gaming isn't for me, either. I think that adventure games are where it's at, hands down. But the genre still died, because the industry moved on.
Similarly, I don't think 3D makes a magically great game. Really, I like sprites - they have style. But 2D games are all but long gone, because 3D is what someone has decided is cool.
I think people are missing the point that this isn't just about deathmatches and Everquest. He's talking about a shift in distribution much like digital music. Today all the top titles are things you buy in a store. You get a box, a CD or DVD-ROM, a reference card and maybe a manual. But as more and more people have broadband, the need for that physical medium decreases.
The shareware market has had online distribution for years, of course, largely because the barriers to entry are lower, but also because smaller games are easier to download. Something that's starting to hit a lot now is the online applet/flash game with a downloadable (pay) equivalent, a la PopCap. I know this example's a bit old, but Bejeweled was quite popular before they put it in a box.
Back to multiplayer games, if they require a connection to play anyway, there are really only two reasons to sell the base game on CD. The first is size: If it takes 12 hours to download the client, people would rather drive down to Best Buy, plunk down the cash, and be back home in 30 minutes. The second is visibility: You expect to find games at GameStop. Both reasons are becoming less important, though. If your connection is fast enough, there's nothing to discourage you from downloading a 500MB installer. And as you get used to finding games online, you're as likely to look there as you are to look at the local mall.
Ahmen Brother, ...
I just want to play a game at a reasonable (non-twitch) pace, whenever I want.
If my wife calls me for dinner or the kids, I want to pause the game. Not lose because I just abandon my character/team.
Unfortunatly, the game market is catering to their most vocal buyers (multiplayer) and those with the most time and cash (teen & college).
I have plenty of cash. (That happens when you get older.) What I don't have is plenty of free time. And my friends don't have free time either. If we want to get together it is on the weekends (usually withthe wife & kids). Maybe 5 minutes of IM at night.
None of use have the desire to arrange a 3-4 hour play session across multiple time zones. If I want to play a game I want to play it NOW, and stop NOW. Not at some pre-arranged social time. I also don't have time to deal with mad l00t 3lit3 13 year olds talking trash in some pick-up game.
People like me are being ignored by the market.
It is to be expected. The movie industry stopped caring about anyone over 19 and any weekend after the opening weekend a long time ago. That is just what the game industry is doing now.
My reaction? You know I never finished Planescape: Torment. Maybe I should do that now. Instead of playing Dungeon Siege 2 (which has gone all Diablo on me. Yeah being in that beta cooled my desire for the game.).
This is exactly what we've been hearing for how many years now? In fact, this whole statement is a dupe from a different source than a thread from a few months ago, but it's still the same topic. And to this thread I wil say again...
... about one-half years ago, and Theif III came out in the distant past of less than a year ago. </SARCASM>
Yes, multiplayer will be the death of single player games. God knows that the Thief, Splinter Cell, and Half-Life series were crushed with dismal sales due to their total lack of on-line gameplay. Splinter Cell has been hit particularly hard to the point that it's last game was sold in the oh-so-distant past of
This whole attitude of online being the next plateau of gaming has been talked about for years, and game sales will do not support that number, particularly on the PC level. And, no, a game that has some on-line features does not count if its main audience is the single-player fan.
Personally, I'd be more willing to play on-line if (A) game companies would stop acting like all that we want is human-vs-human deathmatch -- bullshit, I prefer team vs. bots to fill in the gaps when necessary, particularly on LAN games; (B) there were ways to filter out "I'm only 13 and we lost so you guys sux0rs and I rulez" (which is the main reason why I gave up on the standalone RtCW:ET); (C) game companies didn't charge me like crazy every month for the privilege (WoW); (D) the game gives me a decent single-player version in the event that for whatever reason the network is down or the servers are overwhelmed *coughBlizzardcough*.
Sometimes I'm just in the mood to immerse myself in a good, single-player, all-by-myself, first-person, graphical novel, like Theif or Splinter Cell. Sometimes I'm in the mood for just laughing with games like Sam and Max or Armed and Dangerous. The notion that I might need to do that on-line and only on-line is preposterous.
How does this relate to OS/2 like my subject indicates? It was only recently that IBM killed it after a decade of people predicting that it would die less than a year after each prediction. Single-player games have been getting the same treatment from editors and "insiders" for years now. Fortunately, the heads of the gaming companies don't seem to be nearly as tunnel-visioned as Lou Gerstner, and I think that recent sales numbers of games with single-player strengths prove that. Sorry, but I don't see MMO replacing single-player. Balancing it out, perhaps. Shifting primarily to MMO? I don't see it.
So, no, Mr. Roper. ALL players (as inferred by your statement) don't want to get online an play. SOME players want to get online and play. Put away your broad brush, s'il vous plait!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Okay, you do have a point. Statements like "people want to get online and play" can be misconstrued. He certainly could mean "they want to get online [to download the program] and play", but this is not the first time that people in the industry have blustered <TED KENNEDY>Hello? People want to play online! They want to play with other humans! They don't want single-player games! Hello?</TED KENNEDY> We've been getting hit with the "online is the way to go" dogma so much lately that it's easy to assume intent.
Back to multiplayer games, if they require a connection to play anyway, there are really only two reasons to sell the base game on CD. The first is size: If it takes 12 hours to download the client, people would rather drive down to Best Buy, plunk down the cash, and be back home in 30 minutes. The second is visibility: You expect to find games at GameStop. Both reasons are becoming less important, though. If your connection is fast enough, there's nothing to discourage you from downloading a 500MB installer. And as you get used to finding games online, you're as likely to look there as you are to look at the local mall.
I see a few issues with that, however.
- No resale value. With a box and a disc, you can sell it on eBay whenever you're tired of it. Most facilities won't let you do that with a CD-R or DVD-R, even if you legally downloaded the contents and you are absolving yourself of all material related to the game.
- No real incentive for "extas". A lot of games lately have been coming with "collectable" material - DVDs, t-shirts, and so forth. You can't do that on-line.
- Most games come on multiple CDs and in some cases multiple DVDs. Even with a broadband connection, that will take a long time.
- Some ISPs cap downloads. If you start to download a game that takes up 2 DVDs and you go over your monthly allocation, you're going to get hit with a fee (if not a temporary disconnection) for using too much bandwidth even though you did so legally.
- On-line means that you have to go to the web site. In-store means that you can see a game right in front of you that you never knew existed. So, keeping games on-line might mean higher advertising costs for the game companies to let people know about the game. Will that balance out the material (shipping, printing, media) costs? I don't know, but it certainly could limit exposure to the general public. There have been a number of games from independent publishers that looked good enough on the shelf for me to buy them whereas I never would have thought to look for them if the game was only distributed on-line.
Now, admittedly, none of these individually will be of a significant impact, but combined they could have a significant impact on whether or not people decide to buy online as opposed to in-store. It's still much easier for my to impulse-shop at a store instead of on-line.The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Of course, as always, the reason why MMO games are being pushed as a replacement for Single Player games is because of marketing. Some greedy scumbags in suits think that the key to affording more ivory backscratchers for themselves is to make players pay monthly fees for games they want to play, forever. In other words, you won't be able to fire up a game like, say, Starcraft anymore unless you've paid your monthly subscription fees.
Of course, MMO games don't appeal to me, because I'm an old man who doesn't feel like being hassled by a bunch of foul-mouthed barely literate 12 year olds any time I want to sit down to play a game. (Always a risk with MMO games). I either want to play a game by myself or only with people I've thoroughly screened first. Oh, and I'm a parsimonious fellow who refuses to even have a monthly contract for my cellphone, so I'm not going to have a monthly contract just so I can play a decent RTS or RPG. I can always go back to boardgames, why I hear that Avalon Hill is back...
It reminds me of a few other gaming shifts. The one that I took most personally was the shift from "2-D" games to "3-D" games. (I'm using quotes here because, of course, there are no 3-D games. What they mean is the shift from sprite based games to games that use polygons to model 3-D objects which are then displayed on a 2-D screen.)
Much like, MMO versus Single Player games, there was no reason that this needed to be set up as an either/or proposition. Some games, like FPS's, since they were always designed to create the illusion of a 3-D environment actually use polygons well. Other game genres were completely annihilated by Nintendo+Sony's marketing needs during the 32 Bit generation, because they were replaced by spinoffs (such as Mario 64 or that horrible "3-D" Megaman game that we do not speak of. Oh and of course development dollars were wasted bringing Samurai Spirits and King of the Fighters into "3-D," horrible!!!) Why was it done? Easy, in order to prove that the Playstation and N64 were great leap forwards in technology over their predecessors. So, popular series were tossed on the bonfire or replaced by spinoffs set in a "3-D" environment. (Yes, I'm aware that Nintendo helped preserve "2-D" gaming with the GBA and Sony of Japan were more willing to allow "2-D" games than the bastards at Sony of America... but as I'm an American and Sony works so hard to enforce region coding, this means nothing to me.)
But I digress. The only MMO I've been remotely interested in is Guild Wars, because it isn't metered. Even so, I'd prefer a finished version of Vampire:Bloodlines please.
The good news is that I hear that Dawn of War: Winter Assault is going to focus on having an excellent single player gaming experience in addition to its multiplayer content, which was a little weak in the first game. I've already pre-ordered it, of course.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
oddly enough online distribution is not only more economical its also more more secure from pirates, cds are relatively easy to crack due to a limited number of cd-copy protection measures while downloadable games are free to create new security measures and drm at a whim.
Overrated. Jeez, the fucking mods are clueless. Must be an "MM0RPG rUl3z, d34thm4tch rUl3z, single playaz sucks" idiot trying to push his agenda through metamoderate-immune censorship...again.
To be fair, Half-Life wouldn't have been even close to as successful as it has been without its multiplayer component. How many people would be playing Half-Life three months after release if it wasn't for its multiplayer mode? Out of the over hundred thousand people playing some form of Half-Life at this moment, I would guess that less than 1% are playing single player, while the other 99% are playing Counter-Strike or another Half-Life mod.
Personally, I'd be more willing to play on-line if (A) game companies would stop acting like all that we want is human-vs-human deathmatch -- bullshit, I prefer team vs. bots to fill in the gaps when necessary, particularly on LAN games; (B) there were ways to filter out "I'm only 13 and we lost so you guys sux0rs and I rulez" (which is the main reason why I gave up on the standalone RtCW:ET); (C) game companies didn't charge me like crazy every month for the privilege (WoW); (D) the game gives me a decent single-player version in the event that for whatever reason the network is down or the servers are overwhelmed *coughBlizzardcough*.
A. Almost all multiplayer FPS games, all RTS games, and all RPG games have game modes where you can play cooperatively against bots.
B. While I agree that certain games are plagued with immature assholes, you can almost always find servers, clans (I remember several clans in some of the FPS games that I've played, who didn't accept members below the age of 30), or communities that don't have that problem.
C. While I agree with this, you are paying for a unique experience that can't be provided without very expensive infrastructure running the game.
D. This issue is only a problem with some MMO games. I don't see why they should put in a single-player that drastically increases their development costs, even though it would be used very rarely.
The thing is, the online market will continue to expand. More and more players and more and more games will have multiplayer modes. Most genres of games benefit from having some sort of multiplayer mode, be it competitive or cooperative. Distrubution methods will shift until you usually (or maybe even exclusively) buy games online and download them without having to go out to a Best Buy or wait for a box to be shipped to you. However, this will never get rid of singleplayer games. Some people do prefer to play by themselves (although I guess that this will eventually be perceived in the same way as solo-Golf or solo-Basketball is; it's something to do when there's no one to play with or to practice your skills). Some genres (point-and-click Adventure games, for example) don't really work well multiplayer. Singleplayer games, like Half-Life 2, are much more cinematic and immersive when played solo. Singleplayer games will never die, but they'll eventually become much less popular than multiplayer games.
"He's predicting something that's pretty much already happened."
False. It's something that keeps getting predicted, but never actually happened. It's been almost a decade of hearing that bullshit about how MMOs and online play are the wave of the future, but in practice it never happened.
"The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world."
False. Single-player console MMORPGs routinely outsell any MMO, WOW included.
The MMO market is now at 10 million users world-wide. There still are more people playing on the GameCube alone, which never had _any_ kind of internet connection, than that.
Now also add PS2s, GameBoys, PSPs and everything else that _is_ a gaming platform and used offline. Simply put, the number of people playing SP games on those simply _dwarfs_ the MMO and online FPS markets combined.
So nope, sorry to burst your bubble, the vast majority of gaming still happens off-line.
Yes, l33t CS clansmen and the like are an awfully loud (and sometimes obnoxious) minority, and like to pretend that the whole world revolves around them. But the keyword is: minority. Just because someone makes an awful lot of noise, doesn't make them the majority or anything.
So basically just because _you_ don't give a damn about SP games any more, please don't pretend that the rest of the world does the same. The numbers still are on the SP side.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Again, just because that's what _you_ like, doesn't mean that's what everyone else plays. At the moment _far_ more people play SP games than all online games combined.
There's a lot more to gaming than fps, rts and mmo, you know. And not everyone plays for a challenge. In fact, your average "casual gamer" just wants to have a relaxing evening, not compete head on with immature 12 year olds and be told that he's "owned" or whatever. And they're an increasingly large part of the market.
Some of us, for example, play for a good (semi)interactive story, which is something that MMOs and online fps/rts are _awful_ at. I won't even try to be diplomatic about it: they do a piss-poor job of telling any kind of story to start with, and adding other players in the mix only makes it worse. It's hard to actually suspend disbelief in a medieval story, when people around you talk about the Spice Girls or whatever other stuff.
The thing about internet play being the future, and SP going the way of the dodo, is being waved around for about a decade now, and still shows no sign of becoming more than wishful thinking.
Which it is. It's the publishers wishing everyone started paying $15 a month, instead of just a one-time $30. (That is, if they don't wait and get it from the bargain bin for $10.) The whole talk isn't because everyone wants to play a MMO, but because publishers want you to pay for a MMO.
When EQ hit 400,000 subscribers paying a total of $4,000,000 a month, everyone started wanting that kind of a money printing license too. It's not that it ever was more than a _minority_ of gamers, it's that it's a very profitable minority. They keep giving you money every month.
MMOs vs the regular game market, is like owning a goose that lays golden eggs vs having 100 regular geese. With the latter you still sell more eggs (game copies), with the former you have higher profits. So everyone and their grandma wants to get a slice of that market. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Go ahead, mod me down for not conforming."
Actually, since most of the world's gaming still happens offline in single-player, I'd say you're very much conforming to the norm.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, I don't think they're following the most vocal buyers, and couldn't care less about how much time you have. It's more like following the mirage of money.
The thing which you probably realize is that copies sold and ROI are completely different things.
There were genres which had an increasing number of buyers, e.g., Adventures, yet for a while skirted with extinction. For half a decade everyone actually preferred to sell less copies of a FPS instead of making and Adventure.
Why? The ROI was higher for a FPS. A FPS for a while didn't have to have any story, scripting whatever. It was _very_ cheap to just license a graphics engine, throw together a few maps and skins, and call it a game. By contrast, scripting a complex adventure cost a lot more. So you could actually sell less copies of a FPS, yet actually make more money out of it.
The same applies here. The reason it feels sometimes like the publishers would love to ditch buyers like you and me completely, and everyone makes yet another MMO, is simple: MMOs are a money-printing machine.
On the average, people stay on a MMO for about 6 months. Some stay longer, some stay less, but on the average that's how long it takes before someone gets sick and tired of it. So if you sell the game to them for $30, give them a month "free", and charge $13 for the other 5 months, that's a nice $95 you got off a single person who bought your game. (And even more with expansion packs.) By contrast, with a SP game you only milked them of $30 once.
If you think 3x the revenue was already reason enough to go MMO, wait, it goes better. Out of those $30 for selling a game, a lot goes to the retailers. The rest usually goes just into covering the development costs. The average PC SP game doesn't actually make a profit: most in fact make a loss. MMOs, on the other hand, tend to actually make a profit.
But wait, it gets even better. Normal SP games tend to drop in price in a few months, maybe a year. Most money come from the initial couple of weeks, and after a year or so you're at most making money in homoeopathic ammounts out of it. If at all. On the other hand, MMO subscription costs don't tapper off. If someone's just picked a copy of, say, UO now, after a whole 8 years from its launch, they'd still pay the nominal monthly fee.
In a nutshell, that's the mirage that makes all publishers rush to make another MMO. They don't care if you're vocal or have time. They just care about how much money they can make off you. With MMOs even out of a smaller market, they tend to make more money. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Of course, MMO games don't appeal to me, because I'm an old man who doesn't feel like being hassled by a bunch of foul-mouthed barely literate 12 year olds any time I want to sit down to play a game. (Always a risk with MMO games)."
Actually, in MMOs, and assuming that you do stick to the non-PvP servers, that's practically a non-existent problem. The vast majority of people I've met online in a MMO was actually friendly, and tended to say "please" and "thanks".
Basically I'm not saying that you should play a MMO (I prefer a good SP game myself), but I _am_ saying that not everyone online is a Counter-Strike player, you know. (Now I know that not everyone is like that, but, for whatever reason, that game did attract a whole lot of immature twits.)
In-your-face "I 0wnz j00!" kinda people tend to gravitate towards games where they can actually "ownz j00". They want to prove that by competing _against_ you. They don't stay long on a game where they can't in fact go against you. The less they can do to you, the quicker they'll move to something more competitive.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
She likes some games, Hates others. She like multiplayer. She likes single player. She likes Realistic, She likes cartoony. She likes cute. She hates Scary.
Except for that last one, I find her representative of the overall community. It's the GAMEPLAY! Not the Genre, Not Multi-Single Player, Not the Graphics, Not the Medium, Not the Cutscenes. pause.
eg.. LOTR 2 towers on GC. She loves playing co-op hates the 5 minute cutscenes./pause
Whatever the medium, we're gamers, we buy games. This "prediction" is about as good as saying in 1984 that PC games will encounter a "major shift" away from being shipped on floppy disks and using single button joysticks.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Thank you, I thought I was going to have to shoot him down myself. You might also have added that Splinter Cell has a pretty good online play component via Xbox Live.
:)
I'm not sure I agree with your final statements though. I have a perfectly good net connection yet I play a lot of single-player stuff. Multi-player (even co-op) puts me on edge and triggers my competitive instincts; I can't sleep for a couple of hours afterwards. But I can load up Unreal Tournament or Total Annihilation against some fairly easy bots and have a fun but relaxed game.
Plus some people just plain like winning. You play against humans, you lose ~50% of the time.
p.s. A co-op point and click adventure would be pretty interesting, and easily technically possible - maybe you should patent that one
Oh MY GOD. IT'S A BLINDING FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS! SHIELD YOUR EYES!
Seriously, "lots of people like playing online games", that does not equate to an interesting article
This is not news, Counterstrike has had millions of players for years. MMORPG's aren't particularly more advanced than in the days of ultima online. It's just pretentious "game critics" think that they're being sophisticated by talking about it while throwing in a few words like "deep social structure" and saying how every minute fad is THE FUTURE OF GAMING.
People aren't going to start only playing online game, its going to remain around the same level as it is now unless for some bizarre reason the new generation of gamers grow up to actually play games in their middle age.
I'm sick of people acting like online gaming has reinvented the wheel just because microsoft have started charging people to play online games.
Uh ... and I'm supposed to be concerned about the "shooting down" from someone who has to post as Anonymous Coward? Yeah. Watch me quake in fear that you might have had to shoot me down yourself in disagreement.
If you post AC, don't expect anyone to put too much weight on your argument.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.