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The Impact of Episodic Gaming
GameDailyBiz has a piece up looking at what episodic content is, and what it means to the future of the games industry. From the article: "Our age is one of aging. Mainstream gamers are now older on average than they have ever been. When you are single and unemployed, it is easy to play The Godfather for nine straight hours the day the game hits the shelf. When you are married, it becomes tougher. When you have kids, it might be impossible. It is difficult to slice some time for yourself. And in that slice, you have to carve a portion for gaming. It is no wonder casual games that require no more than 10 minutes to play continue to grow in popularity. This is why we are more likely to login to Call of Duty 2 on Xbox Live to play a quick five-minute Team Deathmatch and leave the Lobby."
I hate newspeak. I buy games in order to play them. This has worked fine up until now. I can buy a game for $50 and play it for 4 or 5 years. I'm happy with that.
The main problem I see with this push toward "pay us via subscription" is that there's only room for a handful of successful games with the kind of monthly charge they're expecting. $1/month? Fine. $20/month? Homey don't play dat.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
I hear that. I used to love to play World of Warcraft all day on Saturdays and after work. But since my baby was born, I get to play when she doesn't need attention (for those of you who don't have kids, thats rarely ever). And when I do play, I can't do anything that takes a while to do because before you know it, she's crying and I need to put the laptop down. It really changes things.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
What with all these "getting older" stories? Is the gaming community having a mid-life crisis?
Basically, yes.
Those of us who grew up as the first generation of video gamers are growing older. Sure, there's all sorts of new gamers, but we're starting to see gamers in their thirties who started on video games in elementary school. As a result, there's a lot of navel-gazing about people who still love games but can't play all the games they used to as a kid.
I'm a big console RPG gamer. When I was a kid, I used to regularly rack up over 50 hours on a run through FF4, and I probably played the game from start to finish over 8 times. I'd disdain strategy guides on the first run or two while trying to find everything myself.
Now, as a gainfully employed adult, I'm lucky to have enough time to play through one of my RPGs once. I don't have time to get everything I missed on a second run, so at this point, I'm hitting FAQs from before I start the game and using cheat codes at the end to bypass some of the tedium of finishing side quests. I have a lot of games that I've bought thinking that they'd be great that are sitting on my shelf unopened because I just don't have time anymore.
I also haven't played a good 4X TBS game in ages because I just can't see myself spending a week to finish one play-through.
That's a demographic shift for gamers that does actually mean something in terms of what kinds of products we buy, and since we're the money makers now, the industry is catering to us. That's why you're seeing so much about this.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm your age and single. I have just as much free time as when I graduated college and started working. In fact, I have even more free time since I'm not sucking up at the office and putting in O.T. to get on the boss's good side. I'm in cruise mode at the office.
/.? I know I do. ;-)
The reason you, a single guy with no g/f, have less free time is because you are unorganized. Here, do this. Put 15-minute blocks for the whole day in MS Excel (96 total). Now fill in what you have to do in those blocks. i.e. 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, 1 hour of commuting, etc. The blocks that you have not filled in are your free-time blocks. It may surprise you how much time you have. Maybe you waste time surfing