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Is Free Really the Future of Gaming?
TRNick writes "Is the future of gaming more or less free, perhaps funded by advertising or micropayments? A bunch of MMOs have pioneered the way, and now they are being followed by the likes of EA, Sony and id Software, each of which is offering some form of free gaming. But it's not just the big guys. TechRadar talks to a new generation of indie developers who are making names for themselves. 'I make most of my money from sponsors,' says one. 'We're all here because we love making games first and foremost,' says another. But can free games ever make enough money to fund the really ambitious, event games that get the headlines?"
While paid games aren't likely to be on their way out any time soon, more and more developers and publishers are experimenting with cheaper pricing, and the results so far seem positive.
Personally, I'm not interested in the varying methods that big game houses can extract revenue from their sweatshop produced big titles. I want to know about the future of Open Source game development, and where that'll go in the next decade. The Linux kernal and other big projects prove that large, complex projects can be accomplished under the FOSS model.
Given the right leadership and drive, I would really like to see an MMO spring up around an unlicenced universe (not one of the done-to-death and copyrighted to hell ones like Star Wars or LoTR) but one that is perhaps by an obscure author and in the public domain. This would allow content developers to develop the game's stories without needing to buy expensive licences so they can use the name "Harry Potplant" or whatever it is.
Perhaps an FPS with some new twists that the big houses are too gutless to try due to the uncertainty associated with stepping away from The Formula. Perhaps something like the original System Shock, where you truly do get cerebrally challenged. Most FPS games now have to appeal to 14 year olds with ADHD. Oh, how I miss the days when you actually had to *think* between firefights.
Where are games that break the moulds the way XCom, Syndicate, System Shock and Bioforge did? We just don't get that level of innovation in the gaming industry any more, and I think that FOSS should come to the rescue. We've put a gigantic thorn in the side of the likes of Microsoft, now let's stick it to EA and Rockstar. They're no less stifling to innovation than Microsoft so why should we let them get away unmolested?
I hate printers.
Greed is always going to overpower ambition, if not by the developers then the parent company.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
is the future of everything
What?
While free games are certainly an option, I find it very difficult to believe that you are going to have a team of 10 developers working 5 days a week, for nothing to develop a game. If you want free games, then expect them to use last year's technology, be late and not necessarily have the same amount of finesse.
Don't get me wrong, I will take a free game if I am given it, but I don't expect to get everything for free. If you do, then give up your day job, join a commune and don't cry when you don't have money to buy your next PC.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Sorry, but your not going to get anything other than the cultist want to play.
Or put it this way, you might get something on the order of the freespace community, nice and tight but in no way marketable let alone sustainable.
But a MMO? Who is going to make content? Don't say everyone, because to have a consistent world someone has to set the rules. Let alone policing it would be a nightmare. Who is going to step up and fix a bug? Where there be any guarantee of service? If so who backs it?
I can see it anywhere where the end result is not akin to a service. In other words it can be a side item to a popular series, something like a door program from bbs of days gone by, but not a mainline like EQ or such where content is presented in a cohesive and regular manner. The attention span isn't there for most developers and without the enforced system of manger/employee/etc it ain't going to get done let alone be pretty. Petty, but not pretty.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I don't see it. I still see a lot of value in games worth me spending money for a high-production value game. On the other hand, I don't think I'd be willing to put up with as much advertising as would be necessary to offset what I'm willing to pay WITHOUT ads.
That said, variable game pricing needs to happen. I should be able to buy the *new* physical copy for $60 or a digital copy for $30 (no resale) or digitally rent it for a week for $5. The game publishers don't make much on me buying used games or renting from blockbuster. I'd rather see more of my money go to the publishers/developers than to the middle-men who currently have a pretty over-priced service.
Free games from independent developers won't "replace" current games any more than YouTube "replaced" Hollywood.
My amazing prediction is that in the future, people will indeed get a lot of entertainment from free and/or indie games, but at times they'll want the high-budget spectacle that only a major studio can provide.
(And by the way... If you think micropayments are the same as "free", you must think a credit card is some kind of magical money tree.)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Isn't Planeshift completely free? I've always wondered how good the game is. The screenshots look decent. The engine is GPL. There are no upgrades or micropayments. The game is just 100% free. I keep getting tempted to install it (especially since they have native Linux clients, including 64-bit clients) except I try to avoid most MMOs on principle.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
They are 2 very different things. I think advertising to support games, other than flash game websites, is just going to cause more annoyance to the player. I don't know about you, but ads in places where I can't filter them out, such as movie theaters before the feature or before games load really piss me off and, in fact, make me not want to buy that advertiser's product. I can tune out banner ads. Or, I can click on them if it is something I am interested in (rare). If many commercial games go this route, they might find themselves out in the cold when their advertisers decide they don't make enough from the money spent on game ads and pull their sponsorship, similar to the dot com advertising bust. People have to actually buy the advertiser's products to make it viable. Funding with advertising is like the lesson some industries refuse to learn from.
I'd pay $500 at the very least for a copy of Virtua Fighter 5R or a sequel to Chrono Trigger.
Starcraft, Unreal Tournament, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Super Turbo, Virtua Fighter. These games and series I've gotten thousands upon thousands of hours playing single-player or with others either locally or online. The measly $20-$60 I paid for those games has been overly worth it if you consider how many hours I got worth of entertainment out of those. I might spend $15 on a movie (NYC prices) at the theater and never see it again. My copy of Final Fantasy X was $55 new the day it came out and I've played 500 hours beating the game multiple times and writing an extended FAQ for it.
But for shorter games, or multi-player games with little variety that get very boring quickly, the cost of paying full price for them is just simply not worth it. I'll use Dead Space as an example. I was sold on the hype of the game, and paid $60 in full for a console version of the game. After the first playthrough, through extremely exciting, I new I wouldn't return to play the game probably ever again. So for one playthrough was $60 worth it? Probably not. I could have rented it and then returned it after beating it in two or three days.
But for Virtua Fighter 5? I specifically purchased an X-box 360 and multiple arcade sticks for the game, grand total let's say $1,000 between XBL gold over the years, 360 and accessories, and the game and DLC. But was it worth it? For me absolutely. I play the game for hours upon hours every week. I have people over to my house, I've even flown to other countries to play the game against international players which brings the grand total to even more (yikes).
How about Starcraft II? There are some people (including myself) who have been waiting for Starcraft II for a decade. When Starcraft: Ghost was canceled, part of my soul died. But now with SCII right around the corner, I'll be building an adequate gaming rig to play the game. Let's say that with the monitor and speakers the total cost to play SCII is $1,500. Worth it? For me, absolutely without question. After playing SC:BW and WCIII:TFT for years I am fully confident that Blizzard will deliver a long lasting and timeless RTS for the community to play for years. Also I'm sure my rig will get loads of Diablo III in it as well.
Lastly I'd rather pay for game than have it for free but chalked full of advertisements. I don't want to see any advertisements in-game in a respectable series like Virtua Fighter or Starcarft.
My point is that if you get hundreds or thousands of hours out of game it's easily worth the entrance fee of $60 if not way more than that. If you play a game for a couple of hours and then it's over...probably needs to cost less at retail. I always found it annoying that a game designed to be played in under ten hours was the same retail price as something designed to have unlimited replay value or extensive multi-player.
Generally, they pander to the lowest common denomintor. I should imagine free games would be a race to the bottom, yeehah!
Sometimes, you need a professional touch on these things. That costs money, just as many of the professional touches in Linux have cost money.
A few years ago, I played and really enjoyed the Freespace 2. I enjoyed it so much, I thought I would try some of the free contributed content from enthusiastic fans. I played the campaign that was generally rated as the best and it was good fun, but there was a huge gulf in quality from the professionally produced content. The amateur stuff was laden with fan-boy excitement - the mission descriptions were far too long and the in game dialog chattered on and on. This was particularly tedious when you had to replay missions and listen to it over and over again. Also, the voice acting was incredibly hammy and it was so obvious that it had been recorded in geeks bedrooms.
These guys were doing their best, but they are not writers or actors. Maybe other projects are better at recruiting these kinds of people to work for free, but I suspect the overenthusiastic geek effect is probably quite difficult to mitigate.
Definitely no. But Greed and Ambition have nothing to do with it.
As a customer, I want a game that just works. Not a game with five dozen incompatible interfaces, two half broken configuration interfaces, inscrutable documentation written by an engineer who never took a writing class in his entire six years in college, untalented artwork, and random crashes justified by the credo "if you don't like it, dig through 100,000 lines of poorly commented code to fix it yourself".
For the non open-source "free" games, I want a game I can play, not one that's a one screen flash-animation that's really just an add for whatever is the latest kid-fluff being pushed on Nickelodeon.
As a customer, I want my GTA, Oblivion, Project Gotham, and a dozen other high quality games that could only be developed by paying real programmers, artists, and writers real money to work on them. So I am perfectly willing to shell out real money to pay for them to do so.
In fact, given the price of a couple of movie tickets and a family night out, I figure video games are still the best dollar per hour entertainment value out there.
id Software... offering some form of free gaming.
Wolfenstien 3-D? Doom? Duke Nukem (2D side scroller, Apogee and Id were once the same bunch of guys)
Surely you guys remember "shareware?" Free is what made Id the powerhouse it eventually became.
Free Martian Whores!
I spend 3 years designing and building a house from scratch, which I subsequently sell on. Some local obnoxious engineer photocopies my drawings and blueprints and uses them to create 10 houses exactly the same across the road, which he sells at a much lower price. When I try to stop him using the drawings he phones the cops, bitches and moans about his "rights" and repeats the line "IT ISN'T THEFT" at the top of his voice, and mails copies to everyone he knows. He claims that because I didn't give the owners of the house the raw bricks and mortar to do what they wanted with, I was restricting the way in which the property could be used, and therefore he made my drawings available to anyone that wanted to see them out of spite. Is the future of architecture to be carried out for no financial reward? Unlikely.
How many of you play muds anymore? Time to build the castle in the swamp again I guess.
While a lot of things free can be exceptional, free games will never be the best. A lot of the times the 'monthly prescriptions' you pay to play an MMO is never really the money-maker for the company; it's all of the essentials either needed to play the game or the 'gift shop' items you can purchase from the game or even the conventions you hold and use the game as advertisement to get more people to show up. Really, games are just another form of active-marketing; get the customers involved and hooked into a business and make them become loyal. I also find it rather interesting that pay-to-play games are highly addictive because most of us who are not hard-core gamers are thinking "Well, I am paying for the game, I might as well make my money go to good use and play the game".
"developers and publishers are experimenting with cheaper pricing, and the results so far seem positive" People prefer to pay less for games. In other news a one legged man lost an ass kicking contest. More details at eight.
If you want to talk "Free" games, check out Trackmania Nations.
Nadeo worked with ESWC, nVidia and other groups to release a free version of their series. Trackmania the series, Nations the free version. It's done wonders for their uptake.
It's also a fantastic series.
Some players actively avoid free games, particularly for MMOs.
I know players who want to make sure that everyone around them has at least something invested in the game world. They want some barrier to keep out dabblers, people whose commitment to the game is below a certain point, overly casual players. For big, shared worlds, when there's a lot you can't do solo, when you're forced to team up with people, there's something to the idea of ensuring that the people you're teaming up with take things at least little seriously.
And thus, the population of people who consider "free" to be a signal to stay far, far away from an online multiplayer game.
Honestly, I think this is one of the reasons some people honestly prefer the XBox Live network gaming model to the PS3 one.
Wow proves that people are willing to pay as long as the product is what they wanted. Like the folks above, I've played SC and WC3 in different spans of 6-7 years each. I keep bragging about the price/entertainment-value I got: $70 (with expansions back then) for 6 years. Even with just average of 10 minutes a day, it comes down to about 20 cents per hour (excluding utilities).
You could house the hardware in a large single unit box and provide a slot to put coins in! You would let someone play until they have had a set number of characters expire- if they want to continue playing they can put more money into the slot to get more 'lives'
Should I patent this idea?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Indie developers pursue this because its hard to get people to spend $50 or even $25 for a game they haven't read a review of, from someone or some company they never heard of before. Low prices (or free with another revenue stream) allow the game to go viral.
To me the last gaming revolution occurred 12 years ago in the form of shareware games. You see the evolution of that today on the iPhone app store with $5 (expensive games) that have free or $0.99 "Lite" counter parts. I expect various similar approaches my take off across all gaming platforms.
I am shocked that Google doesn't have a special type of adsense ad for in game use for casual games on the web or mobile platforms (read iPhone or Android).
Think Deeply.
rocket scientists... all of them... it only took them from the inception of gaming to realize their prices are assinine...
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/20/steams-left-4-dead-sale-increased-purchase-infection-by-3000/ 50% off 3000% increase in sales...
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/03/ut3-steam-sale-extended-due-to-2000-play-increase.ars 40% off 2000% percent increase in sales
I work for (I guess I should say DID work for as I'm on my two week notice...job laid off half of us last week) a small game company that makes free to play games for the PC. We have a loyal following but not NEARLY enough to entice advertisers in this economy into spending money for ads in our games. We don't use the most recent engines. But we use a very stable and powerful one for what we do. And lemme just say that free gaming, while possible will never have the quality of a large budget console or pc game. Just not enough money to pay enough programmers/artists/testers...etc.
"In fact, given the price of a couple of movie tickets and a family night out, I figure video games are still the best dollar per hour entertainment value out there."
World of Goo
Mirror's Edge
Fallout 3
F.E.A.R. 2
GTA IV
Crysis/Crysis: Warhead.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
What will happen is it will become like cable tv. Where you pay through the nose for the game and STILL have to view advertisement after advertisement.
It started when I reformatted my drive and started using Linux exclusively and gave up TV about 10 years ago. Up until then, I used to buy games and had game consoles around. I last remember playing Metal Gear Solid like a man obsessed and getting a sound beating or two playing Starcraft online.
On Linux, there were plenty of games - GNU Chess, Same Gnome and so forth. There was no buying any games for Linux at that time, so I learned to like these games a lot. I imagine people must have had a similar experience with Microsoft's Solitaire.
When I got married, my wife needed a Windows machine to access work applications, so we had a Windows machine and I could purchase games again if I were inclined. But, it just didn't occur to me to buy games anymore. I found free games to be more interesting in some respects because they didn't have money for graphics, so they focused more on other things. This isn't knocking professionally created games. In my experience they're great, I just wasn't looking for them at this point.
I tried playing games that won The Interactive Fiction Competition because I remember playing Zork back when I was young. I couldn't get into text adventures anymore, but I think it is worth exploring.
I had played Civilization before too. So, I tried freeciv, which led to other free turn-based games like Battle for Wesnoth and even returning to older games like Nethack.
I then went on to try independent games that you had to pay a small amount for, like those made by Positech.
I also tried Second Life and similar and found them to be glorified IRC chat rooms.
I'm getting into this history because I think it raises an interesting question. Why would anyone buy Halo III when they have never played the the first one? Particularly, if someone can buy the earlier editions for a fraction of their original cost now, and they would likely enjoy them as much as most people did the first time they played them, why not start there?
You may not be as extreme an example as I am, but I bet there are older games, free games or low-priced independent games that you have never played and would like. So, why are you buying the newest WOW expansion set (and paying the subscription fees) or HALO 3 - as soon as it comes out? Is it that you are so involved in these games? I can understand that because the one game I have purchased was Sid Meyer's Pirates - again, partially because I had played it before and liked it a lot. But, I don't want to assume that is true of everyone.
What about a new game? It's one thing to get the new Grand Theft Auto. It's another to get a totally new game. How do you decide to go with something just released - rather than buy something older that you haven't played before? Is it about having the newest and greatest in graphical features? What's the appeal?
Maybe you are such a hard core gamer that you've played most new games. But given the amount of time they require - is this really so? Maybe it is playing with friends, a la Quake. Maybe it's checking the review on Gamespot or Slashdot. Since I don't play them, I don't know. So was wondering if someone can offer a clue.
I guess part of my question is that I am looking at new things to try. I know there are a lot of good games out there that I haven't played. So, why would I be interested in these new models of game production or even new games? What do you suggest? What games do you think everyone should know? Is there a great game out there that you think most gamers have missed?
For example, I remember reading about one game in Slashdot where you are a pencil or something and you role around and things stick to you - something from Japan. I've also heard someone that taught fo
[Free] is the future of everything
Including sex.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You are willing to shell out serious bucks to play the latest and greatest games in the best settings possible - so yeah you're willing to pop $500 for a really good game, above and beyond the standard $60 release. Heck, game companies should consider that there is indeed a market for narrow-release, high-dollar games (just like any other luxury goods category).
I'm not a hardcore gamer. I'm not gonna drop even $60 on a game. Content with good games of the past, I'm happily working thru a $5 used copy of Max Payne, and have a $3 copy of Oni in queue. Not exactly free, but close enough considering the relatively high satisfaction I get from each. My PSP + Daxter were free by using a Sony credit card enough. Not the latest, not the greatest, but [shrug] they're just games.
Free is not the future of gaming. Continuation of supply-and-demand is the future of gaming. Those wanting the best/latest will pay dearly for it. Those wanting to spend little can buy used or legacy copies. Those wanting to grab eyeballs for advertising will pay accordingly to support "free" games. Those wanting to get otherwise unlikely players hooked will use the "shareware" model. Those who compulsively write such software may go OSS if they can't get hired to do so. Supply-and-demand will find a way.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
coding is the least part of a game. creating all the graphics, animations, sounds, textures, models and what not are what makes a world. And you need consistent quality for a cohesive vision of a world, and that usually takes someone working for money, most artists don't want to work for free and take direction from someone they don't know. Where as getting people to write code for free is much easier. The "creative" side is about 80% of the effort for a AAA title.
From the first time I saw the ability to spray-paint "graffiti" on walls in Team Fortress Classic, I wondered when we would see in-game advertising in the virtual world the game created.
When I played later games of Half Life and saw soda and vending machines in the virtual world, I wondered why those virtual vending machines did not have real-life logos on them, and why money did not change hands to make it happen.
How many millions upon millions of people are in virtual gaming worlds every day? Why not have virtual product placement or advertisement in these games? I don't think it would have to detract from the gaming experience at all. In fact, it could add to the realism.
I should patent this idea and be rich. :)
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"Ad revenue sponsored gaming has real potential. In the same way TV advertising works - so could in game. It just has to be VERY carefully done so as not to alienate the players. "
Those who suggest ads, really mean, "Someone else foots the bill". Problem is, what do you do when everyone wants everyone else to "foot the bill"?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I started playing MapleStory last year but my son has been playing for several.
"MapleStory is a free-of-charge, 2D, side-scrolling massively multiplayer online role-playing game".
It's free to play but there are shops everywhere to buy stuff for the game to make it more interesting. It's great for casual gamers and serious alike. I don't get much down time to game so it's nice to have a MMORG that I can play for a couple of hours and maybe not pick up again for weeks or longer.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I'm debating if I should post this since it's been an idea of mine for a LONG while now. Sadly, reality is that I do not know people in the market, nor do I have the startup funds (nor time) to try and GET the funds / make the contacts from scratch. The whole point of this is for a FOR PROFIT / Partial OSS company ... and even if I personally don't do it, if someone else can ... I'll still win (better game = I... the player ... wins). That being said, if any major game devs, or people out there read this, feel free to contact me for more ideas, or to get me on board to help run this... I have lots more ideas than what is just written here ...
Now ... The point...
It sickens me that companies don't want to take chances on games that might lose a little money, or make only a measly few million (this is when everyone will say wtf is wrong with a few million). This is the same problem with Hollywood and why tv shows like Firefly were canceled for only having a few million views (few million!!)
The idea then... is to make a company encourages GOOD GAME DEVELOPMENT. I know... horrible idea right? Why make a game that can make 20-50 million in the first year ... then never make money again .. when you can make a game that will make 100+ million over 5 years .. potentially make tons on money on toys like game figurines, maybe make a movie out of it and profit even more? I guess greed = quick money ... not smart investments.
Here is how I see this. All game engines / code created under the name of the company are 100% owned by said overall company. If the game engine is developed from scratch under the name of the overall company ... then only say ... 5-10% of all profits go to the company, and the game devs/company makes most of the money. (wow ... could this mean that a gaming company with more money can hire better / more devs to make games faster / better in the future?! BRILLIANT!!). On the other hand, if you simply use a PRE-DEVELOPED game engine (all engines the overall company owns can be used for any project), with no payment upfront, depending on the age / newness factor, anywhere between 30-70% of the profits go to the overall company.
BUT, no worries, as there is an in between! If you make a significant alteration / addition to an existing engine (how long has the unreal engines been used?!), then the overall company makes less profit, and the gaming company makes more profit. Example, take a REALLY new awesome engine .... One that the company might charge 70% of profit for ... have a predefined set of goals established for the engine from the gaming company for what they want to do (additional modules... potential clean up of lots of known issues from the first game that was using the engine... etc). If they do / add/ make the changes ... then that 70% can be brought down to 40-60% ... they didn't do all the work, but they made the product better. This would encourage using the engines and fixing / cleaning them.
Final money thought ... Caps could be put on to profit for the OVERALL COMPANY (NOT the game company). Example ... overall company would take 70% of all profits ... up to 50 or 100 million dollars. Games like WoW would have hit that limit ... and then suddenly would be making a TON more money. This is actually motivation for the game companies to make a better game, because if they make a long lasting game ... eventually they'll get over that hump and make 100% profit!
BTW, the overall company would NOT set the price on the game ... the overall company would make recommendations.. but if the game company wanted to set the price at half of what the overall c
There hasn't been a PC Mechwarrior game released in almost 8 years yet people keep playing Mechwarrior4 because of our community support at MekTek.net and other community leagues and forums dedicated to the game and series. We have become so overwhelmed with supporting the Mechwarrior community that we started building our own versions of the classic PC series (AT1:BT using the Blitz3d engine, NP using OGRE, and our MekPaks for MW4). We did produce 3 fan built expansions for MW4 through some rather creative reverse engineering.
On average our webserver costs $2000 USD depending where the economy is at, and we also have a development server which costs $1500 USD. We only ask our community to support our webserver and they always do through donations.
Do I think the community would support a Mechwarrior MMO based on a model that we proved works? SURE! With a little bit of marketing and getting the word out there we could certainly build a self-sustainable Mechwarrior MMO.
Do I think the future of gaming is dependent on this model? No. I think the future of gaming needs bigwigs to realize that the old school hackers will persist in their communities and locking out PC Game modders is a bad thing in a MMO because it is a subscription based service. Rather, I almost prefer that an MMO subscription is only required to access official game servers and download new content from the primary developer (yes the primary developer needs to provide new content).
Just my 2cents,
MekTek.net Founder
-VAM
I'm not opposed to paying for a game, but I just went to the website, and it says it is a free game, except pretty much the only links on that website are to put money in my wallet to pay for the free game. There are no descriptions, no screenshots, no guide, etc.
If I was going to try an MMO, I'd like one with a little depth of gameplay, one that I can enjoy by myself as much as in a group, and one that I can also run in Linux. Ideally, Star Wars: The Old Republic will run in Wine or have a Linux client, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I choose to play games to get away from the TV Advertisements, the Web Advertisements, the Billboard Advertisements, the Radio Advertisements, the Phone (cell phone) Advertisements, and the Clothing Advertisements. The last thing I want to see is more Ad sponsored games.
Can't people just enjoy life without the marketers of this world shoving their advertisements in our faces at every turn?
If you make a good game, it should sell itself. And people who refuse to pay for anything thinking the world owes them are to me a major cause to all the advertisement. If everyone paid alittle, then most companies probably wouldn't feel the need to see external funds from Advertisers.
Viscious circle.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Ut2k4 for example, a lot of the fan made maps and texture packs that kick the crap out of the ones developed by epic, in every way. I'd say it's not so much a gulf between professional and not, but whether that particular type of game attracts enough of the more creative types then not.
When you see "professional vs amateur", also remember that the "professional" one is very filtered, for one that turned out well, there were probably at least 100 crappy versions thrown out. With amateur, things tend to be released whether good or bad, so you get a less filtered view.
I use steam. I buy games.
I hate, hate, hate micropayments. I try to avoid them at all costs.
Even on my 360, I try to avoid micropayments.
People don't have a problem buying games. They have a problem buying games that cost $50 and up.
Steam knows that sale prices increase sales. It's now a proven trend.
100 sales at $50 isn't as good as 300 sales at $20.
They're using their grammar skills there.
For those who already downloaded a game for free, you can already make gifts (or micro-gifts) here: http://say.youlikeit.org/
A lot of this has been talked about on this topic: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/09/0517240 There is no such thing as a "free" game. The revenue must come from somewhere, ads, one time purchase fees, or subscription fees. Otherwise the game IS the ad. For example the game the US military uses to recruit new soldiers.
Hasn't Id open source their stuff since the 90's? I would say that predates the MMO.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It is for
I'm directing this at programmers and OSS developers and asking seriously not rhetorically.
Why don't we have the equivalent in the gaming world, that the OS world has with Linux?
Why isn't there a killer Open Source game engine that outperforms Cryengine and Unreal III engine, is more sophisticated and stable? Where a 'distribution' of the engine is complete game with GPL Game engine + Creative Commons content???
Explain. I'm perplexed.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Easily one of the most popular games of the last decade, created by a pair of bored college students in their free time.
I have some friends that have put together a online game that uses remote controlled tanks.
They cannot use ads as they only have a few tanks. Sponsors... maybe but again stuck with low volume. So they are trying pay per play.
have a look at it http://www.rctiger.com/
great idea... not sure if it is going to work though!!
Good thing these commercial games don't have bugs like ones that don't allow you to get 100% in the game, game locking bugs, fake imposed level caps, clipping and camera issues. That's why games never need to be patched, which is especially true of console games since you don't have to target a thousand unpredictable configurations! [/sarcasm]
Twinstiq, game news