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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.
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.
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?
The Sims is the best selling PC game of all time, and there isn't much there in the way of content or gameplay. The users create it for themselves. Same with The Sims 2, and Spore. Then there is Second Life. So that market can work.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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!
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".
Second Life only generates a profit (and a slim one) because their users can't do math.
(Not a troll--I've done some programming work for people in SL, and it's a neat concept. But they're only making money on the margins, and they're poor margins.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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.
That market IS people who want to make content. It also isn't constant.
Now add fighting monsters and quest rewards into the mix and it fails becasue it will only take 1 person to screw it up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
If I customize Firefox, the Linux kernel, or Gnome to make it easier for me to do things, it does not affect the experience of anyone who is using the official client without customizations. If I do the same thing for an MMO - and change it to give myself an unfair advantage, such as the ability to see through wall, rather than just to make it work better with my video card - then it will affect the experience of other players. And given that we have seen this kind of behavior in closed-source MMOs, you can bet it's going to happen in an open source one. But it will happen faster.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
You think there's a war now over IP (Imaginary Property) and its ease of copying and dissimination, wait until we have microscopic robots that can coordinate to manufacture anything you have a design for (I'm thinking Star Trek replicators).
When that happens, the only thing with monetary value will be land. You think we're going through social upheaval, we ain't seen nothin'. Your grandchildren are in for a hell of a ride!
Free Martian Whores!
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.
"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"
Mostly because getting rights is a PITA. Think of each product as an actor, and the parent corporation as their overzealous agent.
Say you're a game developer with a brilliant vision, and you think it would be realistic to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of some vending machines. Now you might think "Hey, Coca-Cola would love that! I'll contact them and see if they'll pay me to put their logo in as I see fit!"
Not exactly. Some guy at Coca-Cola's marketing department contacts you back and says "All right, but we have to approve of every placement. Show us where you plan on using the logo.
And you talk to your modelers and level designers and figure out everywhere in the game you'd put a Coca-Cola logo.
And you talk to Coca-Cola again. They look at the nice pictures you made, then point to a picture of a wrecked Coke machine in a bombed-out building and say "This just won't do. See how the machine is all broken and scratched? The lights aren't even on. Replace it with a new machine in working order."
And they point to another picture and say "Here you've got a Coke machine in the enemy headquarters. We don't want that. Make all the good guys visibly drink Coca-Cola products, and make all the bad guys visibly drink some generic product."
And then they tell you "Hey, we've been thinking. Gameplay is 'where it's at'. We'll pay you a tidy sum if you make the player drink Coca-Cola products to restore his health. And have the player hunt for Power-Ade bottles for an extra 'Boost'! It could add a whole new mechanic to your game!"
And you go back and forth with Coca-Cola until you finally say "This is going nowhere! I don't want to turn my game into a Coca-Cola commercial! Can you just give me permission to put the logo in my game according to my artistic vision? I don't care about the money any more!"
And they reply "Sorry, unless you intend to portray our brand in a positive light we won't give you any rights to it."
And you're back at square one, albeit a bit wiser. The next day, you ask the art lead "Hey, can you come up with a nice generic soft drink company logo?"
Hollywood has been banging against this problem for decades. Companies won't pay for just any instance of their product on screen, or relinquish their rights merely for the sake of "Realism". If you want their logo, you have to play by their rules. That's why ninety-nine out of a hundred items seen on film are still "genericized", and the few that are branded are usually quite conspicuous.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Rule number 1 of online games: never trust the client.
Pretty common knowledge by now, honestly.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
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.