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The Manifesto on the Evils of GameTap
Gamasutra sits down with Manifesto Games co-founder Greg Costikyan to discuss how the revolution is coming along. They explore the group's business model, the retail market, and the dangers of GameTap. From the article: "They don't worry me, particularly; I'm skeptical that their business model is sustainable. But basically, my argument is that they can afford to offer so large a number of titles for a $10/month fee largely because the major publishers view older games as worthless, since they cannot be sold through conventional retail any longer, so they're willing to accept a small share of rental revenue. But I also believe that PC games, in particular, are going to move online in a big way over the next few years and will eventually disappear from game stores — PC games are responsible for just 6% of their revenues, and take up a lot more shelf space than that justifies." Mr. Costikyan further explores this last concept in a post on his site called, simply, Why GameTap is Evil.
I signed up for them when they first lauched it was ok but not alot of games i liked. After 1 month i tired to cancel. This guys took a page from AOL and offered me a free month to stay i said ok and then next month i called again, and agiain anouter free months (did this for 6 months) Theres some gems in there but paying for it and warcraft just was too much.
I see end of software box stores as a good thing overall. Because they are by nature very conservative on what they sell. They will avoid Linux and Mac titles, because other stores are not big Linux and Mac Sellers and people when they choose PCs they see what the store has most of. With software being online and more and more titles online software wont be for the computer ellete so if you want linux and you see all the software titles available for linux then you may be able to choose the OS based on their merits vs what has the most crap.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The poster says that GameTap's business model is bad. Well, what can I say. It seems to be working well for them, so it can't be all THAT bad. He also has this fatalist view that GameTap is going to take over the world somehow and force the brick and mortar shops to disappear.
Let's say that is does. Is this a bad thing? I feel that buying a game directly from the game company, say through Steam or one of those download services, is GREAT. The company that makes the game gets more money for what they worked for, instead of the publisher taking a big ass cut. Sounds good to me.
He also seems to feel, somehow, that game companies are all going to be releasing their new games under a GameTap subscription service, only getting a marginal amount of money from the monthly subscription fee. That's a bit insane. What company would release, say, Doom 3 under a subscription service like GameTap when they can make a buttload more money selling it as a single product?
When demand falls and they're not making much THEN they might move their product to a subscription service.
This whole article, AFAIC, is a bunch of FUD.
Love sees no species.
There isn't much market for smaller developers to keep creating games; the large existing back-catalogues of stuff already out there fill the niche -- everything that can be done on a screen within an indie developer budget already has been, pretty much.
Would someone whose sole business is the rental of old video games start to see increased competition from services like Nintendo's Virtual console and microsofts arcade? Seems t me that these would be a far bigger risk to revenue for Gametap than anything, as its direct competition from people who hold more more cards in this game. Just a thought...
Mr. Costikyan's assertion that software, games in particular, are not like fruit, in that they do not have an "expiration date", is flat-out wrong. I think they have a very definite shelf-life, which directly corresponds to both the platform they run on and the available hardware.
A game written for DOS should not still sell for the same price it did when it first came out. A game that only plays on a console that hasn't been sold in years should not be the original price. If one extrapolates Mr. Costikyan's comments to other industries, such as automobiles, it's akin to saying that an 82 Pontiac should be the same price now as it was then. That, despite the engine, braking system, interior pieces, safety systems, etc., all being subpar by today's standards. If you apply it to the electronics industry, it's like saying an 8086 should still cost $2000.
That's nonsense. If a game doesn't work under XP/Vista/OS X/whatever OS you run, doesn't work with your fancy new gaming controller, doesn't play on the current consoles, then why should it's value not be reduced? Sure, the gameplay itself hasn't changed, but if you can't run it, then it's intrinsic value depreciates. Whether or not that's fair to developers is another issue, but everything gets outdated. I wouldn't spend as much for a copy of Windows 3.1 as I would for a copy of XP, and it's the same thing with games.
Evil? Really? Because their business model may be more desirable to consumers than traditional distribution channels?
You don't say. I always thought that was called "success". I guess I was wrong.
6%? Where did he get that magic number from?
I guess if you count all game systems for all time, even before PC's really had commercial games... That might be true.
But there are some companies that ONLY make PC games. Some of the largest PC games don't have a console version. (WoW and other MMOs, for the biggest example. Quite a few RPGs.)
But then, we all know that 95% of statistics are made up on the spot.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Ok I didn't finish the article because the first part has me slapping my forehead.
"My belief is that's as it should be. The value of a game has--well, not nothing to to with its age, because, say, there's not a lot of point in buying a game that only runs under DOS today. And I'm not at all sure I'd want to buy the original Civ, at this point, either (though a great game it was); I'd want the most recent version. But in general, a game is a game, and it surely doesn't lose 80% of its value in the course of a year."
But surely It does loes 80% of it's value. It's called supply and demand. Ok so supply of a game over the course of it's first couple years of release is relatively constant. Now since demand for a game is greater in the beggining a publisher can charge a premium price. Over time demand wanes but the supply is the same so the price must drop so people will buy it. It's a pretty simple concept. He also goes on to rant that somehow gametap is a bad model because it deprives game publishers of their due. It's providing easy access to games that are no longer is to obtain. So if a publisher gets only a small portion of the game, they aren't being shorted out of the full MRSP. Nobody is going to pay that, they are getting a small portion of money that they would never have seen. So in essence publishers are benefiting from Gametap. Of course I'm using economic princples and logic which don't make for assnine and "entertaining" blog posts.
The whinefest "Games are Not Fruit" is a total joke.
And then a few paragraphs later...
Oh right. Unless, like you pointed out, they're on an older OS or a sequel comes out. Dumbass.
The market is changing. Adapt or die, Costikyan, and take your ugly-ass website with you.
It seems that Costikyan is of the same mind as the music industry that thinks we should still pay full brice for a Beatles album which is nothing but pure profit for the music company. Call me crazy, but that is just plain greedy. Of course they and the videogame industry can charge whatever they want but I'm not going to pay it. I haven't paid full price for a game or a cd for years.
Costikyan has a lot of great ideas and he means well but he is also very very pessimistic about the games industry. There isn't much that he is optimistic about, so it isn't surprising that he would see Gametap as negative.
I subscribed to Gametap for a while, and the bast majority of the games they have are arcade and consol games that are gathering dust on a shelf. Sure there are a handful of more modern PC games, such as Prince of Persia Sands of Time, but that is about it. While Gametap is making some moves to distribute games like the Ages of Myst and Sam and Max, I just don't think it is very likely that gametap is going to make a dent in the games industry. Right now, they are basically going after games that no one would buy otherwise or games that would have a much more difficult time getting made in the first place.
The real problem with Gametap is their selection. Playing consol games on a pc is only of limited entertainment value. As long as they refuse to carry "M" rated games, their selection of games is going to lack some of the games that have historically been popular.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
...for indie developers.
But really, isn't that rather like saying "If this 'dollar store' idea takes off, they'll put every retail store out of business!!"?
I'm not convinced that gametap and the indie game markets are mutually exclusive. No one's going to release new games straight to gametap when they can sell them in stores and online for far more, just like no one releases new, quality products straight to the dollar store.
Relax. Keep making new, interesting games, and we'll keep buying them. The vast majority of gamers want the latest and greatest anyway. Most of those of us who play older games do so for nostalgia, because we played those games as children. All the kids turning 13 this year, and getting their first console are still going to want 2k7, and the latest FPS.
GameTap just lets us older gamers play our favorite NES titles without blowing the dust out of the cartridge and resetting the system a few dozen times. By the way -- you wouldn't be making any money off us doing that, either -- we either already own them, or bought them on the used market. At least you get a few cents when we play the same games on GameTap.
games != fruit : Internet != truck
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It seems like a lot of Costikyan's beliefs about "what gamers want" are just examples of wishful thinking based on what's good for (small) developers. Apparently we don't want good graphics or up-to-date features; we should be just as willing to pay $20 for a game from 2002 as we are to pay the same for a game from 2006. We also don't want pricy next-gen graphics, complex multi-player options, talented voice acting, expansive gameworlds, or anything else that makes it expensive to design a modern game. Nope, we want "gameplay," that mystical quality that sold a billion copies of Tetris and Pac-Man.
I don't think the facts bear him out on this. Well, let me qualify that; gamers DO want good gameplay, but we're also most willing to pay good money for games that are on the cutting edge in terms of graphics and the rest of it. I know when *I* saw the trailers for White Knight Tale and Bioshock, I started wishing I had ludicrous amount of money to blow on an Xbox 360 or PS3.
To focus on this article in particular, of COURSE people aren't willing to pay as much for older games. Just look at all the posts here on Slashdot complaining about the prices Nintendo is charging for its classic games through the Wii online dealie; for modern gamers, $5 is too much to pay for some of the best gameplay in history when the game itself is decades out of date. Sure, $60+ is a silly amount to charge for games, but it's not extortion or anything. Gamers know they can just wait a couple months for the price to go down. The people who pay $70 for a new game are the ones who think it's WORTH $70 to have it NOW. Why would a game-maker NOT want to make it available to them? And likewise, I'm sure game-makers would charge $20 for 10-year-old games if anyone was willing to pay that much, but quite simply, they're not. It's not like publishers are intentionally ignoring this viable revenue stream from people who are lining up to pay for old games; there's simply no market for them. Saying that games aren't fruit doesn't change that.
That's right!
games == teh potatoe : Internet == information super-tubes
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Economics has shown that price discrimination works. If somebody is willing to pay $50 for Rise of Legends and I'm willing to pay $30, then the publisher should sell it to us at those prices. But they can't have different prices at the same time. By dropping the price steadily over time, the publisher should be able to earn more total money, and people who value games less can still get them at reasonable prices. So the fact that publishers lower their prices over time doesn't necessarily mean they're stupid or they think games "go bad" or whatever.
Contrary to Greg's opinion, games do sort of go bad. For instance, I was trying to play Baldur's Gate on my Powerbook G4. My Powerbook will go down that far in resolution, but then the pixels look muddy, and I have two large black stripes on the side of my screen. The other alternative is to play it in a windowed environment. The graphics are nice and crisp, but small. Then there's the emulation problem. The game runs WAY TOO FAST to be able to enjoy. So yeah, from my perspective Baldur's Gate has gone bad, and it's past its expiration date.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I look at it and say, "It's a 50MB installer. If I have a conversion rate of 1%, I've got 5 gigs of data traffic, which costs me a buck, per sale. At ten bucks, that's a big chunk of my margin."
A buck a sale for the download sounds suspicious. Lets take a closer look.
First, I assume they're hosted in a data center some where and have purchased the cheapest commercial bandwidth available (Cogent: $10/mbps). They could be hosted with MCI ($350/mbps) but I doubt it.
Now, that $10/mbps is based on the "95th percentile measurement." That works just like taking a median except you take it at 95% instead of 50%. We can't assume that their cost would be the cost of transmitting files at a fixed rate continuously 24 hours a day but we can get a rough estimate by assuming they transmit at a flat rate 12 hours a day. That'll be accurate plus or minus 50% and in a few moments you'll see why plus or minus 50% is damn near nothing.
So, they have to send 5 gigabytes to make a sale. That's suspicious too but I'll come back to that. 5 gigabytes = 40 gigabits plus about 10% overhead is 44 gbits. Divide by 30 days in a month, 12 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour, 60 seconds per minute. 0.033 mbps. Times $10 per mbps is 33 cents. Add 50% for our error estimate and you're talking half a buck.
5 gigabytes is suspicious too. With this supposed 50 mb installer, you're saying they have to let 100 folks download the game to make 1 sale.
First, why would download the installer to someone who hadn't paid you? Okay, maybe you want to give them some demo levels to get them hooked. Fair enough.
Second, do you seriously think that 99 people are going to wait through a 50 meg download for an obsolete game and then walk away for every 1 person that actually buys it? Bull! The folks who don't intend to buy it will get the cracked version off bittorrent. The conversion rate on the web site will be 10% or better and the price of bandwidth keeps dropping. Now you're talking around 5 cents per sale and falling.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Mr. Costikyan's comments are almost entirely based on an "inherent value" theory of games, which is an interesting philosophical idea but has neither predictive value nor practical value in the real world, where only "a thing is worth what somebody else will pay for it" actually works.
If you can't put a five-year-old game on the shelf and sell copies of it for $50, then, proof by concrete demonstration, the game isn't worth $50. If retailers can only move older games with deep discounts, then, proof by concrete demonstration, the value of the games has dropped over time.
You can complain that people should be more willing to try old games. That makes some sense to me, but I benefit greatly from that attitude since I no longer mind being a few years behind the curve if it means saving big bucks. But the value of those older games is still less than it used to be.
Pretty much happens to movies, TV, computer programs of all other kinds, and to some extent music (where what typically happens is that once the value of a CD drops far enough it simply disappears, rather than dropping in price, but it's the same effect).
The article was idiotic and easily explained by the fact that this guy sells old games for money. Hey if that was my livelihood I'd probably say you should play $1000 for Yars Revenge.
An old video game doesn't spoil like a piece of fruit but it becomes obsolete by better and better games. The entire article is based on a meaningless analogy. Just because a video game doesn't go rotten like fruit doesn't mean that therefore the price should always stay the same.
Video game prices, like all prices, depend on the law of supply and demand. The greatest demand exists right before launch time. A finite number of people are willing to pay full price for any game. The biggest games are hugely hyped and we know a lot about them through press releases and leaks during their years or decades (DNF) of development.
When launch occurs, those who can't wait for the price to go down buy the game almost immediately. However, they are not going to buy the game more than once. Now, keep in mind that this initial sale will usually cover the entire cost of developing and marketing the game, along with hopefully some profit. At this point, the only fixed unit cost for a developer is the cost of the CD or DVD and the case and manual etc. So any copies sold after this point will have a higher per unit margin. The developer then has a choice, should he continue to stick a $50 price tag on a game, sell zero copies of it, and make absolutely nothing? Or, should he sharply drop the price and make a big profit on each unit? Obviously the developer is going to drop the price.
Consider now the market for fruit. Some people will only buy fresh fruit and wouldn't even consider the "manager's special" past-due fruit discount. The manager charges a higher price for his best fruit because people will pay it. Other people are always looking for a bargain and don't care if the fruit has a few bruises. The manager makes money from both these people. He probably pays for his entire bushel of apples after the first few have been sold to the fresh fruit lovers. The next few apples provide him his profit margin. Any remaining apples, he has a choice. He can throw them away and get nothing or he can see if someone will take them off his hands for a fraction of the original cost. In this rough sense, video games and fruit have more in common as economic commodities than the Manifesto allows.
I myself only purchase fresh fruits and vegetables. I buy games I really like for the full $50 cost. And I always take a peek at the bargain bin to see if there is anything worth picking up for a low cost. And, anything under $5 I buy on a whim nearly every time. The best bargain I ever got was Tony Hawk 3 for the PS2 for $2.99, I played that more than some $50 games. Of course plenty of people paid full price for that but I wouldn't have. So they made a few cents off me they wouldn't have. I think the Manifesto author is way off base and is engaging in wishful thinking if he believes people should or would pay full price for older games. As for GameTap, it's the same issue. The game companies see a way to make a little money from a product that isn't currently bringing in revenue. Of course they will pursue that revenue stream. Will it kill the game industry? Of course not, there will always be a certain demand to have the very best games right away at full retail price. The front runners subsidize low priced games for everyone. It's always been this way, I bought MY copy of Yars' Revenge for 99 cents at a Zayre's closeout sale. Would I have paid the full $50 for it in 1982? Of COURSE not. But better to sell it for 99 cents than for nothing. What the Manifesto author's dream will lead to is more landfills full of crushed video ganes, it's in no way beneficial to the video game industry.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Anyone claiming that piracy hurts their business is assuming that if piracy were impossible, a significant number of would-be pirates would buy the product instead.
So, Mr. Costikyan's assertion that Gametap hurts developers is assuming that you could actually sell the original Doom and Tomb Raider for $20.
Sorry, but for my $20, I'd much rather have a more recent game, like, say, Final Fantasy X. Or maybe an indie game -- Lugaru sells for $20. Or an episode of a state-of-the-art episodic game. What's more, people are willing to pay these prices for these games, and thus, Gametap won't be able to buy the rights to Lugaru or Half-Life 2 just yet.
Game developers and publishers are not stupid. If a game isn't selling because it's too old, it's far better to put it on Gametap -- or better, release the source. Id has realized that all of their games up to and including Quake 3 Arena are far too old to sell either the game or the engine. It is better for the industry as a whole to release source which benefits everyone than to hold tight to the few dollars you might still make, benefiting no one. It's certainly better for the consumer -- getting Doom to run on a modern computer in its original DOS form is not easy. Since we have the source, Doom will last as long as it has a cult following to keep updating the source.
I don't believe copyright should last anywhere near as long as it does. I don't believe you should be able to make a living off of royalties from a game or a song you wrote 20 years ago. Here's a hint: By the time a game ends up on GameTap, the developers should be working on a brand new game. Otherwise, they should be subjected to the same rule that applies to any other job -- no work means no pay.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Nope, I'd far rather play a great game with decent graphics rather than some "game designer"'s wannabe movie. And I can't imagine that 80% of the gaming market is made up of people who would rather watch a game than play one. Eventually, the graphics will all be photo-realistic, and then there won't be any market for games with no gameplay.
You know, that is so true when you ignore TellTale Games and Cyan Worlds. After all, they are making the Sam and Max episodic games and Uru Live respectively, both of which will be available through GameTap instead of brick-and-mortar stores. Yes, TellTale plans to eventually sell the games through its Web site and then as a CD or DVD-based compilation, but all of the episodes of Sam and Max will enjoy a period of exclusivity on GameTap first and foremost.
Most men are not thought unwise until they speak.
I predict less ESRB and more TIGRS.
Gametap's evilness doesn't matter to me (and not just 'cause it isn't available outside the US yet). For the most part, if there's an older game, like a Sierra classic, that I would enjoy, I already own it. Yes, the originals, not some hastly-downloaded greyware. I treasure my favorites. (:
So for the most part, Gametap doesn't have much to offer me, and it would ordinarily slip under my radar.
Except that I'm big on Myst, and thus super-excited about Myst Online: Uru Live, which Gametap is resurrecting and making available via the Gametap network. Super-fun time.
Turner is smart. They're not just playing reruns on this station; they're going for some premium exclusive content here: Uru Live, Sam & Max, and I hear rumblings about a few other things in the works.
And this is going to kill the game industry how?
Soylens viridis homines es
When discussing digital downloads I would have thought supply was essentially unlimited?
This being the case, applying the classical economic theories of scarcity to the games themselves seems wrong.
I have some time I want to spend being entertained and I will choose a game from the many on offer based on some combination of how entertaining it looks and how much it costs. I don't have time to play every game or money to buy every game. Depending on my choices either my time or my budget may be the limiting factor for my purchases. Games should (from the seller's perspective) therefore be priced to maximise revenue across the market as a whole given that each player has differing financial resources and differing amounts of free time.
So the key question is: how much less entertaining are older games? Greg Costikyan asserts that the answer is "not much less entertaining". In reality, of course, it varies from game to game. Had I not played Final Fantasy VII I would still happily pay full price for it today. Had I not played Quake I wouldn't want to pay as much as a dollar to play it today. (Your mileage may vary in both cases.)