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Dollar Apps Killing Traditional Gaming?
donniebaseball23 writes "There can be no denying that the rise of smartphones and tablets has had a major impact on the gaming business. The prevalence of free and 99-cent apps has changed consumers' perception of value. Mike Capps, president of Gears of War developer Epic Games, said, 'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents. As I said, it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'"
Oblig. Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-02-12/
Your $60 game should be incomparable to a $1 game, in terms of both gameplay and technology. If it's not, you are Doing It Wrong.
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
Most of these get deleted after 5 minutes (and in the case of the first item, within 30 seconds). Games like Street Fighter IV are completely unplayable on a touchscreen. I don't think Epic really has anything to worry about.
Summation 2
An interesting game. It sounds like the only way to lose is not to play.
Many will lose simply because the number of popular game apps will be a tiny fraction of the number developed and marketed. The losers will include quite a few who invest time/effort/money in developing a game that gets bought by essentially nobody.
Right now, these mini-games have novelty value, but that might wear off, and the potential rewards for success will shrink if the punters don't play.
Of course, I'm not really in the "gamer" demographic. The last game I bought for a PC was Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, maybe 20 years ago, for about $40. Since then I've bought precisely three PlayStation games for the kids, costing a total of about $150. The number of app-style games I've purchased for our smartphones is exactly zero, and unlikely to change.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Isn't this the same as asking whether short scruffy videos on You Tube are going to usurp Blockbuster films? I think the only threat would be if smart phone games could be developed so that the game arena was the real world and the phone was some mission interface. That would be neat - best it isn't a FPS though...
What's happening now, on iOS and other platforms, is you give away the FPS but charge for the bullets.
It's pretty insulting when you think about it, but then I'd say that about half of all consumer products are pretty insulting to the consumer, if the consumer took the time and had the resources to think about it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Really. Most of what you game dev studios/industry was producing, was CRAP. $60 was the perception of the 'price point' that the marketing types came up with - "hey, what is the maximum people in america will pay for a game ?" turned out, that perception was wrong.
you were rehashing the same crap over and over and pushing it to masses with marketing. just like movies. trailers, marketing hype, ads, showing only the best few parts you added to the game, whereas the rest was rehash of the previous version or other games. taking no risks to please shareholders. a few cents per share more for every shareholder, more important than satisfaction of your customer.
that was why there was rampant piracy.
thank mobile apps. this '$60 blockbuster' bullshit will end.
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Our perception of value is distorted anyway. Example- It takes about 100 days to raise a chicken to the point where it's slaughtered, plucked, driven to your supermarket and refrigerated. It'll cost 5 GBP. At that price, 5p/day per chicken, someone manages to feed the chicken, clean after it, vaccinate it, transport it, keep it cold and apparently still make a profit on it. But don't expect to be getting premium stuff at that price.
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That was the first thing I thought of, too.
Make sure it's as good as Half-Life 2.
You are welcome on my lawn.
How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it?
Perhaps it isn't worth $60.
If a $1 game provides me with about 1 week of entertainment, a $60 game should provide me with 60 weeks of entertainment.
There aren't many games that can do that, and there are even less that give me the convidence to pay for those 60 weeks up front.
I fear TFA calculates "worth" as "the amount of money we had to spend to make it". There used to be a day when games could be fun without gigabytes of graphics and sound. That day has never really gone, it's just been obscured by an increasing focus by developers on adding stuff that isn't part of the actual game.
If I bake a cake and package it in a golden, diamond encrusted box designed by some guy that changed his first and last name into a single, unpronouncable word, the cake hasn't increased in value at all. Sure, it looks much nicer with all the shiny bits, but it can't compensate for the fact that I can't bake a decent cake.
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One game I have been desperately looking for on both Android and IOS, and failing to find a suitable version of, is Baldurs Gate - put that on the mobile scene and I would be more than willing to pay more than a few bucks for it. But it doesn't exist, and nothing is rising to replace it, so I dont spend my money.
There was a report here a few months back or so that linked to a game company's discovery that quite a few people only played a $60 game for a few hours and many never completed it before moving on to the next game. These are the folks that are being lost. Instead of spending $60 on a game they don't complete, they spend a buck or a few bucks on a game for their phone. It lets them play a little when waiting or idle without having to go to their computer, power it up and go back in.
I was a pretty heavy gamer back when Doom, Command and Conquer, Red Alert and StarCraft were popular. As multi-player became more popular, I found I didn't have the time to invest in trying to beat some twitchy 15 year old who had nothing better to do all day. I still get the newer games like StarCraft II and even play them, but I haven't finished it yet. I'll get the other two when they come out as well and may finish it they, or not.
I also have several "games" on my iPad and iPhone ranging from Angry Birds (it's really a puzzle solving game), Popper, and Pocket God to Small World, Rage, and Red Alert with several others in between. They're fine when I'm sitting here at work at lunch or in the car with my wife going somewhere.
The game companies have less of my money because I'm not interested in sports or super realistic multi-player gaming (battlefield 2 or crysis for instance). I like the games like Castle Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake, Command and Conquer, Red Alert (the original one more than the newer ones), Carmageddon, and StarCraft. Heck, I'd be excited to get many of the games I played back then simply updated to work on the current tech.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
And, strangely, the rate of piracy is often correlated to the number of digits on the price.
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Developers just aren't in general focusing on providing a challenging single player experience that one needs to keep playing to master. I mean, look at a game like Super Meat Boy. Single player, but there's no way you'll explore everything it has to offer even in 20 hours. Maybe more. I continually spend a great deal of money to import Cave shooters from Japan. These games can easily be beaten in 30 minutes on free play. The appeal, is that to actually get good enough to 1CC them and get a good score, take months and months of practice. What's killing the single player games market in my eyes is the focus of single player on storytelling. Instead of being about getting good enough at the game to conquer all the challenges it has to offer, developers are treating the single player mode as merely a way to tell their story, and so design the campaigns to be easy to beat (so their story can be told). It's been a very long time since a major release has actually been challenging to finish the single player portion of. The appeal of multiplayer is obviously that you can get better and better since you're playing actual humans. You used to have to get better and better to beat the single player portion of many games, but this is no longer the case, and in many cases 100%ing can be accomplished even by beginners. That's why it's dying.
It's not that expensive although the cost is rising quickly. There's a significant number of rock star programmers out there who want to write for their phone and are willing to take a pay cut to do so. Try hiring for a console game right now. That's become even more expensive because so many developers no longer want to write for consoles or work on a multi-million dollar title. The stress involved in doing so can be substantial.
But for every person like you, there are lots like me who only want to play Angry Birds for a few minutes a couple of times a week. Honestly, I've spent more on phone games in the past year than I have on PC or console (PS3 and Wii) titles and frankly I've been disappointed with purchases on all the platforms. The difference is that when I buy a crappy phone game, I'm only out a few dollars. When I buy a crappy PS3 game (like I did twice last year - GT5 and ModNation Racers), I'm out $60 each time.
Epic complained about piracy then used game sales and now $1.00 apps. Basically their problem is everything except their lack of innovation and complete reliance on making the same game in a prettier package every year and charging a high price.
My feelings are the exact opposite. I prefer the single player experience, whether it be on the PC or Consoles. I am looking forward to games like The Witcher 2, Elder Scrolls Skyrim, and other single player games. I have zero interest in multiplayer; when I get home from a hard day's work after dealing with difficult people the last thing I want to do is to have more social interaction. The games I play are usually 40 hours or more in length, that's pretty cheap entertainment and well worth the $60 price tag.
I find very little of the $1 games that can hold my interest for very long at all, where many PC and Console games I have played for hours on end.
It still boggles my mind that so many game developers pay so much attention to "story." It is like the producer of an opera worrying himself over whether his cast looks athletic enough.
Now, I'm sure there may be some people who refuse to buy an opera ticket because the performers aren't good-looking, just as I'm sure there may be some game players who fret over whether their new game will have a good "plot," but it is madness for the producers of either form of entertainment to be concerned about these confused consumers, just as it would be wrong for lipstick manufacturers to spend time and money making their product stick on a pig.
Sounds reasonable. Although you can understand why the established players are concerned.
I feel compelled to write this because I recently played the diabolical port of Bullet Storm on PC. I have absolutely no sympathy for Epic, nor for any other studio that shovels millions of dollars into a 10 hour title and can't even be bothered to support 4:3 aspect ratios. I remember when Epic actually released games with any sort of longevity - Like Unreal Tournament. Now they, like many other 'AAA' developers ship bloated, 'HD' (nonetheless held back by aging console hardware), soulless games that focus more on treating the player like, frankly, a fucking idiot without any free will than a thinking, feeling human being. Unsurprisingly, $60 IS too much to charge for a title and hopefully consumers will vote with their wallets. Perhaps soon we'll get back to having games with well thought out and engaging stories, instead of gratuitous crotch shots and a script that seems to revolve almost exclusively around killing dicks (no matter how funny that occasionally is). In recent years I've had more fun playing 'low-key' titles like Pixel Junk Shooter, Scott Pilgrim and Amnesia than any major title shipped by a big developer.
if the consumer took the time and had the resources to think
We'd be living in a much better world.
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'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents. As I said, it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'
I've got a Droid, but I'm not a big mobile gamer. I'm used to spending $50 on a video game for my PC, or Nintendo, or whatever.
And what's killing you [in the traditional games business] is that your games are not really worth it.
Used to be that I'd buy a game for $50 and get 20+ hours of gameplay - not counting multiplayer. And I'm not talking about an RPG either... RPG's would be a good 60+ hours of gameplay.
I remember playing the first Unreal, or Quake, or Marathon, or Half-Life - and they all took me over a week of late nights to finish.
And then you'd have multiple hours of multiplayer on top of that... Usually with some terrific mods bolted on... And then some mods for the single player... Often the modding community would double or even triple the gameplay you got from your original purchase...
Now you shell out $60 for a game and get 5-10 hours of gameplay, plus the multiplayer. Then they'll start releasing more single player content, and multiplayer map packs, and skins, and whatever else as DLC. And the game will be designed around consoles, so there'll be very limited support for modding.
$50 for 20-80 hours of gameplay... Compared to $60 for 5-20 hours of gameplay...
Is it any wonder you're having a hard time selling your games?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I have written a iOS game called MatchuM. Its a Mah Jong solitaire game without all the "oriental baggage" you get in those games. It is on the app store but hardly anyone knows its there. It doesn't matter how good your game is, once it has fallen off the "new releases" screen in iTunes then what do you do? How do you let people know its there? The "freeappaday" people want £2.5K to advertise it, but thats probably more then I have spent on hardware in the last 20 years, so thats a no go.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/matchum/id379622306
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There's no math error. Your conjecture is way off. Apps made by a very, very, very slim minority of developers make a profit.
+0 Meh
Were are the usual voices that argue piracy is okay because games want to be free. And they argue that piracy does not hinder game development. But now that games are cheaper it looks like it may be killing the big-tim gaming market. Defend thyself hypocrites!
On another note, it may be that we simply have more small games with more people earning more money in total. it may be an expansion in gaming. But it may come at a loss of the concentration of capital that enabled the "big time" games of high polish. i.e rabbits farting versus CGI masterworks.
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Plus, whenever you try to get rid of it you end up with a garage full of other cars.
If by a controller upgrade you mean buying controllers 2, 3, and 4 for a game console or gaming/home theater PC, this expense can ideally be amortized over multiple games for the platform. In fact, it's even easier because HTPCs and Xbox 360 consoles can use the same controllers. If by a controller upgrade you mean instruments for a music game such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or DDR, those costs are certainly not hidden because the game is often sold bundled with an instrument.
As for PC video cards, look for games that share an engine with a game ported to Mac OS X. These will run usefully on a 3-year-old video card because they also have to run usefully on the integrated NVIDIA GPU in a Mac mini, MacBook, or iMac.
As for Xbox Live Gold, play the PC version instead if you can. When it comes to multiplayer, the big advantage of a console is that more games support local multiplayer on Xbox 360 than on PC because publishers think there aren't enough HTPC owners to make a market. Besides, even for 360 exclusives, Xbox Live Gold is still one price no matter how many games you play (apart from MMOs).