Who Killed Videogames?

jjp9999 writes "Video game developer and novelist Tim Rogers exposes the underbelly of free-to-play games that use real-world currency. They're not trying to entertain you — they're trying to get you hooked. Every minute you play is being analyzed by men in suits reeling you into a cycle of addiction so they can keep you coming for more, and hopefully opening your wallet to buy premium points here and there. To do this, they intentionally give you an hour's worth of gameplay dragged out over the course of a week to keep it on your mind, dropping coins here and there for you to pick up, and playing on your own sense of work and profit to keep you coming back."

Comments

same as with everything else

[Anonymous Coward]

capitalism

Re:same as with everything else

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not capitalism its greed.

Re:same as with everything else

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

More subtle than that, arguably.

Consider this bit from TFA:
"An ex-drug-dealer (now a video game industry powerbrain) once told me that he doesn’t understand why people buy heroin. The heroin peddler isn’t even doing heroin. Like him or not, when you hear Cliff Bleszinski talk about Gears of War, he sounds — in a good way — like a weed dealer. He sounds like he endorses what he is selling. When you’re in a room with social games guys, the “I never touch the stuff” attitude is so thick you’ll need a box cutter to breathe properly."

With the traditional, boxed lump-'o-retail game, there was a certain necessary straightforwardness, possibly even honesty about the thing: You make the game and either get my $50 or not. Even if you are merely calculating, you still want to make a fun game, because you need me to buy it. If you are genuinely enthusiastic about games, you also want to make a fun game.

Once you get into the world of DLC and MMORPGs and such, you are in a sort of intermediate position: There is still the upfront purchase; but you have a constant nagging incentive to see what you can get away with in terms of sucking me in for another month's grind, or making some downloaded component semi-obligatory.

Once you get to "freemium", our interests are more or less at odds: I'm a net loss to you as long as I play for free, so you have an incentive to try every dirty trick in the book to 'monetize' me, and create a game that induces payment without ever overtly demanding it.

It's ironic, actually, that the "casual" games would be the ones where this rather ugly dynamic is strongest. The stereotype(not 100% without supporting anecdotes, but rather overplayed) is that the 'serious' gamers are the ones where the hardcore addictions are; but that is the area where the publisher's incentive to create addictive gameplay is weakest: You already have my $60, you want me to enjoy myself so I'll buy the sequel; but you gain nothing from sucking away my life. On the casual side, you start with nothing from me, and you have to scrape it out one microtransaction at a time...

Re:same as with everything else

[msobkow]

I was hooked on Mafia Wars for a few months, until I realized how much time I was wasting for nothing. So-called "social media" games are anything but. There is no social aspect to them at all -- no in-game conversation, no player messaging support, nothing. Anyone with a headset and an XBox experiences more social interaction while gaming than on Crackbook.

Once I stepped back from them, I realized you couldn't even really call them "games". There is no winning or losing, only perpetual grinding for enough points/items to accomplish a mission, after which you eternally move on to the next mission that they've added in the meantime.

There is no skill involved, no choice involved, and no thought involved. Just keep clicking long enough, and you'll get to the "next level."

I'd call them Ponzi schemes, except you were never promised anything of use or value if you choose to spend real money on them.

Re:same as with everything else

[maguxs]

same thing

Re:same as with everything else

[digitig]

Clearly the free games with microtransactions are adaptive. People didn't realise what they were asking for, but yes, they asked for it and are rewarding it.

Re:same as with everything else

[PopeRatzo]

The funny thing is that it's pretty much direct result of piracy.

That is purely bullshit.

Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.

The F2P debacle is simply the direct result of the entitlement mentality of corporations who feel that any money that is in your pocket that is not destined for their pocket is some sort of existential affront to the corporation's very existence. They HATE the idea that anybody might not be giving them money.

Last week we had an admission from an industry group that "lost profits" was not really what was driving their efforts with the MPAA and worldwide lobbying efforts to create local police states, but rather it was their loss of control. I see you're new to Slashdot, so I'll explain: "Profits" means money. "Control" means "The power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events".

The only "direct result of piracy" is groups of corporations fear that a day may come when human beings will realize that they, corporations, are not people and thus should not control everything in the world. And the terror that notion strikes into their hearts has induced them to set out on one last big all-or-nothing effort to lock down the fucking world through bribery, thuggery and dishonesty.

I guess it never occurred to them to try just making high-quality games and charging fair, reasonable prices for them. The experience of Valve's Steam, that people will gladly pay instead of pirate a game if it's $25 instead of $60 and that many people won't lay out $60 for a game after having been burned by the last time they paid $60 for a buggy console port that ended up with only 5 hours of gameplay and needed several patches just to be playable. just never made an impact on the primitive corporate brainstem.

If you listen carefully, TechLA, you can almost hear the sound of the world changing. People are starting, though slowly (and a little late) to figure out that corporations have not been performing on their side of the social contract. How funny that with all their wealth and alleged technical prowess that the corporations themselves are going to be the last to realize what's happening.

Here, let me leave you with a little something. I saw this in the Salt Lake Tribune today:

A Time poll released Thursday morning found that 54 percent of those surveyed view the Wall Street protests favorably, compared with 23 percent who think the opposite. Interestingly, only 23 percent say they donâ(TM)t have an opinion, which suggests that the protests have succeeded in reaching the mainstream.

Also: The most populist positions espoused by Occupy Wall Street â" that the gap between rich and poor has grown too large; that taxes should be raised on the rich; that executives responsible for the meltdown should be prosecuted â" all have strong support.

Meanwhile, the poll found that 27 percent of respondents have a favorable view of the tea party. My handy calculator tells me that this is half the number of those who view Occupy Wall Street favorably.

In a little over a week, an anti-corporate movement went from complete obscurity, known only to a very few online activists, to a popular, global movement that even a significant number of self-described Republicans are getting behind.

The only corporations that are going to win in this new climate are the ones that get a clue. And it may be time for corporate apologists to take note, too, my very high-UID friend. You might want to pass the message up the line. There might be a gold star in it for you.

Re:same as with everything else

[DarkTempes]

A direct result of piracy is definitely a stretch. At best piracy is a contributor to more established studios getting into the social/web game market (and social/web games have their own versions of 'piracy': almost all features that one can pay for can eventually be gotten with scripting).

Free-to-play web games have been around since the creation of the internet (and like most other websites they are usually funded by advertisements).
Then as they got tied in with social platforms they got exposure to larger audiences and became 'social games'.
Nothing new, nothing to scream, "OH MY GOD, PIRACY PUSHED THIS TO HAPPEN".

As they got more popular business people found better ways to monetize them (microtransactions) though even that is not new nor is it a direct result of piracy.
It's been common in asian games for ages (and while piracy is a problem in the asian market I would suggest that piracy rates, microtransactions, lower costs are more of a result of poverty).

Re:same as with everything else

[turbidostato]

"Poker is also just a game based on pure luck"

Yes. Unless we forget the fact it is not, that is.

"it's completely random which cards come out."

Yes, but it is not completly random what the contenders will bet against their respective odds.

"If hit and play until end of the hand, it's completely random which cards come out"

If you promise me that you will stick to that behaviour you can play poker with me whenever you want.

"You can't win the game with skill"

That's right. Except that's wrong, I mean. The fact that on 500 to 1000 gamers tournaments there's a bunch of names that consistenly repeat should make you to consider that there must be something out of randomness that make this to happen.

It certainly might be that all those games are fooled but unless you have proof that's the case you must accept that it might be that the more skilled are *not* at odds with the less skilled ones. Once and if you can accept that, then we can go on what could be that makes the more skilled to win more often.

"the house always wins. You cannot control it."

That's an absolutly different thing because "the house always wins" doesn't mean that "the house always wins *all*".

Re:same as with everything else

[RCL]

Bullshit, that has nothing to do with greed.

People play less these days (lack of time - damn, we get older!), and those who play the most (teenagers) usually pirate, so they want it free. F2P is the natural answer. You don't have to pay up front, so you may invite all of your friends. You pay either with time or money, so if you can't play 10 hours a week, you can pay and get the same result. You don't pay for something you don't need, so it's even more fair than 'classic' games.

Sure, players' behavior is analyzed to make the game more attractive for them, but hey - that's natural. People want to influence the game, they provide a lot of feedback (mostly asking for new stuff or complaining), so game developers consider all the input - both explicit and implicit - when making decisions.

Where's greed here?

Re:same as with everything else

[hakahaka]

Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.

I pirate many single player games because I can. Multiplayer games, however, I have to buy because otherwise I can't play on the real servers or at all. But as single player games are easily available without paying, I don't feel the need to pay 50 euros for them. Skyrim will be single player so... and I need to buy Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 at the same time anyway, because I mostly enjoy them online. If it wasn't possible to pirate Skyrim, I would buy it, because I really want to play it.

Re:same as with everything else

[Gadget_Guy]

People play less these days (lack of time - damn, we get older!), and those who play the most (teenagers) usually pirate, so they want it free.

The only problem with that theory is that it does not match the evidence. The games industry keeps making more and more money every year. A lot of that increase is due to games costing way more than they used to, but it shows that there are still a lot of people paying for games.

Re:same as with everything else

[bigstrat2003]

Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.

You overstate your case. If you don't know even one gamer who would buy a game that they pirate (if piracy weren't an option), you either know very few gamers or have an exceptional circle of acquaintances. I don't hold with the attitude that (insert copyright Nazi group here) espouses that every pirated copy is a lost sale. That's bullshit. But it's equally bullshit to claim that no pirated copies represent a lost sale.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. If we try to argue the opposite extreme as the (insert copyright Nazi group), then we're frankly no better than they are.

Re:same as with everything else

[bigstrat2003]

There has never been a bit of evidence that game publishers have lost profits due to piracy.

I'm not saying that no pirated game represents a lost sale...

If they lost a sale (that is, if someone would have bought the game if not for being able to pirate it, which you seem to agree does happen with a non-zero frequency), they lost profits. You don't need to lose millions upon millions of dollars to lose profits.

Re:same as with everything else

[PopeRatzo]

I pirate many single player games because I can.

Isn't that interesting? I reply to one industry astroturfer with a very high UID and like magic someone immediately registers with Slashdot only to post one comment which supports the astroturfer's assertion.

I'll say one thing, TechLA, you're a hard worker. But too obvious. You must be new at this. I know times are hard but there must have been a more ethical job out there, like drug dealer.

Re:same as with everything else

[TechLA]

A lot of that increase is due to games costing way more than they used to

Wait, what? No they don't. Games have always costed the same amount. In fact, we now have lots of games that are actually cheaper than what most new games were before, thanks to indie games and internet distribution. And yes, even back then there were a few games that cost above the average, for example I remember Sierra's Pro Pilot flight simulator costing more than the average game.

Re:same as with everything else

[PopeRatzo]

If they lost a sale (that is, if someone would have bought the game if not for being able to pirate it, which you seem to agree does happen with a non-zero frequency), they lost profits.

Not if they gained other sales due to the interest generated by those who pirated the game and who otherwise might not have bought it.

The argument here is whether piracy has cost the corporations profits, not whether one lost sale represents lost profits. Is the aggregate effect of piracy lost profits? There has been no evidence to suggest this.

Re:same as with everything else

[PopeRatzo]

I have to admit i pirated oblivion, which in turn made me glad i did not spend 60 bucks on the dumbed down.

Did you finish the game? You seem to suggest you did not.

So, would you call it "lost profits" if a download prevented someone from being fooled into paying $60 for a game that they never would have if they knew how bad it was? It's perfectly reasonable for someone to expect to try something before they buy it. Now I don't mean you should be able to eat a hamburger before you decide to pay for it, but you should at least be able to get a look at it to see if meat is rancid.

What was the last time you saw someone offer a money-back guarantee on a video game? When you have a business model that is dependent on selling an inferior product but relying on them not realizing it until you have their money, you deserve to lose profits.

I don't really believe purchasing products is supposed to be like buying a lottery ticket. If a corporation loses profits because people get wise to the fact that they are selling empty boxes, then I believe that's a good thing for people, if not for the corporation who was selling empty boxes.

Re:same as with everything else

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, you're right. It can't be entirely attributed to inflation because games are CHEAPER now when you account for inflation.

Re:same as with everything else

[EdgeCreeper]

The funny thing is that it's pretty much direct result of piracy.

No, it isn't.

Much closer to the truth is that this is a result of creating a software product for "non-traditional" gamers. These people find it appealing because they cannot lose in any meaningful way in the game. They are solely designed to addict and suck as much money from certain vulnerable individuals. I cannot see any way that users of these games benefit at all from them.

Please note that the article is only about "social" games, such as those on Facebook, and the iPad or iPhone or whatever. It also says that the figures bandied about are that 95% of the population who touch a "social" game spend nothing. Here is what it says about those that do spend the money:

Do players buy energy? What sorts of players buy energy? The short answer is: actual idiots. The long answer is: people who don’t understand why they have so much real-world money.

So, unscrupulous individuals have found a way to sucker feeble-minded people with stupid half-formed pseudo-games. They are worse than casinos. Do not touch these things. Anybody playing them needs to be hit with a cluebat, hard.

Please read the TFA, even if it is a somewhat epic in length, it is some of the best writing I have encountered.

Re:same as with everything else

[Babbster]

If you look at console games, you'll note that the price point is now roughly between 60 and 70 dollars, whereas it was 50 a generation or two ago.

No, you won't note that. You'll note that the price point is now roughly between 50 and 60 dollars, assuming you're talking US dollars. You'll also note that $50 was the standard price for console games for much longer than "a generation or two" - more like over 20 years. Heck, I remember Super Nintendo games up to $75 at retail and N64 games sometimes debuted at even higher prices! Playstation prices bucked the trend (and in fact set a new trend) by being cheaper because pressing CDs cost publishers next to nothing (just as DVD and even Blu-ray duplication is extremely cheap compared to cartridges). In short, adjusting for inflation, retail console game prices have gone down over the years. This is thanks, again, to the disc formats replacing cartridges and the economies of scale. Even with significantly higher game development costs, more games sold means profits can be realized at lower retail prices. I think the reason people think that game prices are higher today is that the average age of gamers has risen steadily over the years which means that more people playing games today bought them with their own money. I was buying games with my own money before the Genesis and Super Nintendo hit the scene, so I've had to know game prices for over 20 years.

Re:same as with everything else

[KDR_11k]

F2P is an attempt to sidestep the normal market dynamics. On the PC most F2P games are C-grade clones of popular AAA games that try to compete by not charging anything up front. On the mobile phones the F2P games exist to avoid the price pressure as most mobile gamers have learned that anything can be had for a dollar or free if you wait for a sale, F2P extracts more money from such people.

Me, I prefer paid equivalents since they don't give the dev any incentive to add needless "pay a buck to skip this" grinds that hurt the fun badly if you don't pay up. That usually means they strive to make the game more fun and cut grinds like that out.

The worst I've played was one of those F2P FPSes on Steam (War Inc I believe), weapons could only reasonably be earned as rentals (for a week on level up and a few days for ingame currency IIRC), to get things permanently you'd practically have to pay real money. Meanwhile games like a Call of Duty MW2 which I got for 30€ up front at launch (compared to some ingame item bundles that cost as much in War Inc) let me keep all the items I unlock once and are much better in every respect. Mind you, I'm not big on CoDMW2 but it was clearly much better than War Inc.

Re:same as with everything else

[blahplusplus]

" I was buying games with my own money before the Genesis and Super Nintendo hit the scene, so I've had to know game prices for over 20 years."

While the game prices haven't changed much the size of the market has changed offsetting the need to increase prices because of market expansion. I really hate how people say "games are cheaper because of inflation" but then fail to mention stagnant wages and the erosion of buying power from said inflation.

It's too simplistic an explanation that doesn't take into account multitude of variables.

Re:same as with everything else

[Zontar The Mindless]

Since when is making money off a product greed?

The objections being raised are not to profit in or per se. What is being objected to is

1. Profit *to the exclusion of all other considerations*.

2. *Ever-increasing* profit in proportion to actual producer costs.

Re:same as with everything else

[maxwell demon]

Capitalism is greed. Eliminate greed and it becomes communism.

No, capitalism is the belief that if everyone is greedy, then it turns out best for everyone. That's not the same as greed. Is is used to justify greed, and it certainly advances greed, but it is not greed. You can be greedy without being capitalist (although if you are greedy, it's probably a good idea to at least pretend that you believe in capitalism; well, unless you happen to be in a communist country, of course :-)).

Re:same as with everything else

[Dr_Barnowl]

Many of those games were roughly equivalent to indie games these days, in terms of the amount of manpower required to produce them.

So ... what has the march of time brought us?

Firstly, inflation. The price of a loaf of bread in 1980 was £0.33, in 1990 £0.50 ; now it's more like £1, so prices have roughly doubled for the essentials of living.

An A-list title in the mid 80s would have been something like Elite ; I remember paying £15 for it (on cassette tape). The package was a robust cardboard box, with the cassette, a manual, a novella, a reference card, etc. I remember getting other games in just the standard plastic cassette box for less.

Elite was originally the product of just two programmers ; although it spawned a large number of conversions and a few unsuccessful sequels.

Right now, I can see Elder Scrolls : Skyrim listed for £29.99 . This is similarly, an A-list title of it's age. The quantity of man effort to produce it has no doubt been enormous. There is no doubt that you are getting a product that contains far, far more content than Elite, which used procedural generation for the bulk of it's content. Being silly ; you are getting around 300,000 times as much game (considering data volumes) - although it's probably more fair to rate it in terms of the hours of gameplay you get before being bored.

So, an A-list PC title seems to be priced about the same as it was in 1985, accounting for inflation, even though it probably cost several orders of magnitude more to produce.

Part of this is accountable in terms of duplication costs - it's cheaper to duplicate optical disks in a standard box than it ever was to duplicate floppy disks and cassettes. Part of it is the expansion of the market ; back then, a computer was a niche item - I had to walk to the next town to buy that copy of Elite. These things really go a long way to compensate for the fact that making games is MUCH more expensive than it used to be. You could knock out a feature-parity copy of Elite pretty quickly these days - modern programming tools would make it a cinch to achieve what you used to have to do manually in assembler or even raw 6502 machine code, and the plentiful resources a modern computer has means you wouldn't have to resort to dirty little tricks like changing screen modes in the middle of a raster frame so you could have a display that was monochrome, but high res at the top, and colour but low res at the bottom.

Even indie developers have to produce a product that is visually and aurally much more polished than anything from the 80s or 90s if they want to succeed. When you look at something beautifully simple like Osmos, you do wonder how they manage to sell that for a price that is, inflation included, around a quarter what you used to pay for a game in the 80s, given the level of artistry involved.

I agree with your observation that with the advent of CD-ROM, publishers went a little mad, and desperately sought ways to get "value for money" out of all that storage space they weren't using - they went from having perhaps 10MB to play with (if your game shipped on 15 floppies, not uncommon), to having 700MB. Hence the "Full Motion Video" crapfests of that period.

Re:same as with everything else

[Tom]

Once you get into the world of DLC and MMORPGs

Not necessarily. There are a couple MMOs out there that are genuinely fun and if they are built on the principle of addiction, it is very well hidden. Guild Wars is still one of my favorites for that very reason. They already had your money (it had no subscription, you paid once and then could play), so their goal was to make you want more (expansion packs), but I never got the feeling that the game was a "trailer" for the expansion packs. Maybe because they did things so differently from everyone else in the industry - for example, no expansion pack raised the level cap.

I'm sure there are more exotics like this. I'd like to hear about them.

Re:same as with everything else

[makomk]

I'm actually quite cautious about buying from Steam these days; too much obnoxious DRM. Even Valve are getting in on the act with Portal 2, which has some new buggy DRM that glitches out randomly on genuine purchasers, requires me to disable my antivirus software to even run the game, and is designed to make the game uncompletable if it thinks you've pirated it. (I think I may have tripped this on my genuine, purchased copy; it's hard to tell.)

Re:same as with everything else

[FooAtWFU]

You're both wrong.

Capitalism is the idea that whoever builds the means of production gets to have its output. If you own capital, you get to benefit from it. This means that people have an incentive to invest in capital, and build things which will make money for them. This results in a society with more capital to do useful things for it (factories, homes, restaurant espresso machines, satellites, server farms). It also means that people take better care of the capital.

Capitalism harnesses the inevitable human vice of Greed, and (when combined with free-market competition in an efficient market) can make this greed more productive to society at large, but reckless wonton greed is not a value it intrinsically promotes. It's not really a value system; it's merely an ownership system. (Notice also that only markets with low transaction costs and low barriers to entry are really efficient. This is important. Notice what a mess we see when neither is the case: health care, cell phone providers...)

Usually, competition with other greedy capitalists is enough to keep a capitalist in line, and not exploiting and abusing his fellow man too much. When this is no longer the case, it's entirely reasonable to pass moral judgement (or attempt to restrain) these people who are taking their reckless, wonton greed and exploiting their fellow man. Capitalism is not an excuse... but it's not the illness, either.

Re:same as with everything else

[Luckyo]

Usually competition in capitalism is bought out or killed off. Capitalism's end game is always in fascism (or as those who dislike nazi links from WW2 to that name call it, "corporatism") where large capital-based industrial monopolies take over the government through buying out those in power.

It happened many times over the course of history.

Re:same as with everything else

[PopeRatzo]

the vast majority of revenue came from the XBox 360

You know that revenue does not equal profit, right?

While the games industry has expanded a lot in the past 15 years, almost all the growth has been in console games (Microsoft cracks down on piracy, PS3 was impossible to pirate until recently) and online games (can't pirate).

The fact that gaming has expanded into consoles does not mean that computer gaming has not also grown. There is a myth of "market share". The point is that the big game companies are making money. Steam is making money and they don't sell to consoles.

Further, there is the whole issue of game/hardware tie-ins. You know that 90 second commercial that you see whenever you start a game? That translates into profit for the game companies. Thing is, we don't know how much of a game company's profits even come from the sales of a game. There's merchandising, there's movie tie-ins, there's all sorts of corporate fuckery that is designed to separate suckers, I mean consumers from their money that doesn't have anything to do with actually playing a game.

If computer gaming is so horrible because of piracy, then why are there still companies having these huge computer game roll outs? Geez, it's not even Halloween and we've got blockbuster games coming out. Do you think that these companies are rolling out these big games in spite of the fact that piracy has destroyed PC gaming?

Go look at any of the big online computer hardware stores like Newegg, Tiger Direct and others. Notice how much of their website is strictly targeted to computer gamers. Do you think this is in spite of the fact that piracy has destroyed computer gaming?

Just because there may be some other business sector that is even more profitable does not mean that the less profitable sector is not making money had over fist. Have you seen some of the budgets for AAA games nowadays? Do you think that's in spite of the fact that piracy has destroyed computer games?

Do you believe that EA or Warner or Ubisoft or some other is still releasing huge-budget games for PC because they're just so dedicated to PCs as a platform for gaming? No, it's because it makes them rich.

I also know pirates who say things like "why are you paying for something you can get online for free?"

You know, I've noticed a certain trope that you see in advocacy journalism where the author uses as an example some anecdote that can not be checked and may not be true. David Brooks loves to do this. He'll say "I was in a cab today and the cabdriver told me he thinks Barack Obama needs to cut taxes on the oil companies." Of course, this unnamed "cabdriver" cannot be found to see if the story is true, so all we have is this story, of a "regular person" who just happens to agree 100% with David Brooks and David Brooks writes an entire column presenting this unnamed regular person as an indication of just how right unassailable is his position.

It's almost always bullshit, and it's similar to the guy last night, commenting on this same story, who registered a brand new Slashdot account just so he could say "I pirate games, and the GP is absolutely correct".

Come on.

My own opinion is sometimes people would pay for software if piracy was unavailable and sometimes people wouldn't pay for it.

But the only data we have is your opinion. And forget about whether or not there are people pirating a game. We still haven't even come close to indicating that their piracy has cost the game industry one thin dime. How do we know that the buzz surrounding a scene release doesn't boost the company's profits?

From the time it was released to March, 2011, Apple sold 108 million iPhones. During that time, a lot of people bought other phones, Blackberries, Android pho

Re:same as with everything else

[PopeRatzo]

I just scrolled back, to see what you replied to and what you were talking about, and no where is someone with a high UID and the quote you put.

Actually, there was. The person to whom I was originally replying is named TechLA (2482532). The person person to whom I was replying beneath that, his sockpuppet, had registered about 5 minutes after I posted my reply to TechLA. His username is "hakahaka (2485890)"

Did someone with a high UID post that, or did PopeRatzo make it up?

You do understand that it's a lot easier to check whether I'm making it up or not than having to use Google, right? All you have to do is click my comment and then the little link at the bottom that says "Parent". It will take you to the previous comment to whom I was replying.

Now, you sleazy cocksucker, don't you ever impugn my honesty again. You may call me off-the-wall, a troll or simply wrong, but you may not call me dishonest, especially when it's so dead easy to check my statements.

"Google", indeed.

Re:same as with everything else

[Luckyo]

Do you prefer more recent history, such as South-Korea and Japan, early industrialization (US late 1890s with its trusts), or even European dark ages when large economic interests bought aristocracy (debt) ending up controlling them, or even the infamous destruction of Knights Templar (which was the first well documented large-scale political attempt to kill a large corporation wielding too much political power).

You can take your pick.

Re:same as with everything else

[Luckyo]

Why is it suspect? I show that natural flow of capitalism, when uninterrupted by revolutionary level of resistance always leads to the same end. In US, anti-trust legislation of 1920s was absolutely revolutionary in its own right, being the first true attempt to limit power of corporations though non-discriminatory (on personal level) legal means rather then direct application of force (example: pogroms) and extended by legislation that came after great depression.

It's worth noting that repealing parts of said legislation package has led to severe banking crisis and significant growth of corporate power in US. It's certainly not where South-Korea and Japan are today in terms of fascist influences, but it's most definitely on the same road, heading in the same direction. The main limiter is the culture, which supports West individualism over East-Asian style collectivism, severely limiting the speed at which capitalism can reach end game unresisted.

I haven't read the article, but hear me out here..

[intellitech]

This summary quite literally illustrates exactly what is driving away gamers, and which nothing to do with the games but instead the various companies behind it and their various little pay-as-you-go niches (map packs, songs, excessive subscriptions, etc.). It's all about the various companies involved in the development and marketing of a game, who nearly always turn out to be greedy little pigs. Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and their Double XP Promotion. This really pisses off real gamers (the ones who play a lot and get better through time and practice), and especially pisses off those who had to work hard for their last prestige. One mere example, but, regardless, they really need to knock it off.

Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her

[oakgrove]

One of the main reasons I stopped playing games is I couldn't stomach the level of intellectual insults I was enduring anymore. And I moved to Linux. That too.

I keed. I keed!

Silly.

[kamapuaa]

Video games have been about making money since the beginning. Arcade games used to last approximately 26 seconds a play, and you put in a quarter every game. If you want I guess you could couch it in really loaded terms: "business men in suits crawl out of the gutter and analyze player behavior to get more and more quarters into their greedy hands."

And are there actually businessmen in suits looking over the computer-generated databases on player behavior? If there are, is this a bad thing? This whole article is bullshit with some kind of weird nonsensical anti-establishment bias. Perhaps you'd be better off occupying Wall Street.

Re:Silly.

[Osgeld]

I was watching a old computer chronicles from 88? anyway there was a game designer talking about arcade games

"Its almost like inventing a drug, and finding that balance between letting people play forever and not frustrating them so they keep dropping the quarters in, is the key, just give them a big enough dose that they cant stop"

Well...yeah.

[chemicaldave]

They're not trying to entertain you — they're trying to get you hooked.

From my perspective as a consumer, what's the difference? It's all the same to me as long as I'm satisfied.

Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her

[Dunbal]

You don't have to buy their games. Fortunately the games market - at least for PC's and smart phones - is fairly easy to get into. Yeah ok if you want to talk retail distribution then it's harder if you're not doing it online - getting your game into brick and mortar stores around the world is next to impossible unless you sign with a major publisher. But even the major publishers are moving to online distribution, so the independent has no excuse. The market is coming to expect to be able to download games and apps now. And many, many independent games have achieved surprising success.

Therefore there will always be some game genres that don't follow the mainstream trend - if everyone is monetizing, at some point they are not going to be getting new customers because everyone will be busy playing the non-monetized games. Apart from the occasional idiot who never learns, you can only take people for a ride so often. Eventually people are going to get a feel for these cash-sucking parasites, just like people get a feel for telemarketers or infomercials and instantly switch off, and this "industry" will extinguish itself. I think good games are never going to die because human creativity is never going to die.

Re:They have to make money somehow..

[bmo]

No, they don't have to make money. Profit is not a right.

--
BMO

More nostalgia goggles

[antifoidulus]

How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?

Shareware games->designed to get you hooked on the first few levels so you buy the game

Those little SNES consoles they set up at stores back in the day->designed to get you hooked on the game so you guy it.

hell even a lot of arcade games were intentionally designed to be really easy for the first stage or two so you would get hooked and feel compelled to pump more quarters in. This guy has some serious nostalgia goggles, the model has, and always will be to get gamers to spend money on the game by tempting them with a little taste of what is in store if they do spend money on the game. Free to play has just added another method for achieving the same objective.

Re:More nostalgia goggles

[sakari]

How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?

It is fundementally different, because of the design objectives. They are designing the game to hook the player in by putting monetary gain as the primary motivation of design, not playability or making the game fun for the players. Monetary gain is the objective of this game.

This creates very different kind of games than those that were originally designed for just the love of making videogames!

Re:More nostalgia goggles

[Pumpkin Tuna]

Programmer needs quarters . . . badly.

Re:More nostalgia goggles

[grumbel]

How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?

Ever played FarmVille? No? Give it a try. Within the first few minutes you will learn that that games works quite different from anything you played in the past. Among other things:

* based on realtime, forcing you to revisit the game to not spoil your crop
* regular calls to spam your friends, for in-game reward
* regular calls to exchange your real world money for in-game currency
* randomized in-game reward whenever you start the game
* essentially free of challenge, all the game requires is clicking on stuff to get rewards

None of those elements have been present in that form in traditional games.

Certain elements of course overlap a bit, Civ has some of those addicting elements, Diablo had them, etc. But the way they are directly exploited and analyzed in free to play games is quite a different thing then what you had in the past.

Arcade games where of course somewhat similar in trying to exploit the player, but they where limited by needing an expensive arcade machine that could only serve one or two players. Online games not only no longer have that limitation, they also allow regular changes to the games to optimize them for maximum revenue.

Re:More nostalgia goggles

[syousef]

* based on realtime, forcing you to revisit the game to not spoil your crop = PAIN IN THE ARSE - If I can't automate that, not interested!
* regular calls to spam your friends, for in-game reward = HELL NO. I want to keep my friends
* regular calls to exchange your real world money for in-game currency = FUCK OFF, I don't buy virtual crap. If you sell me the game that is a real world item. If you start trying to sell me in game items I walk away
* randomized in-game reward whenever you start the game = WOOOHOOO write a script to start the game daily ;-)
* essentially free of challenge, all the game requires is clicking on stuff to get rewards = Same as any video game I've played. Just gotta click the right stuff.

No wonder I've never been interested in farmville.

Re:More nostalgia goggles

[MindPrison]

+1 one from me 2!

The quote is from Gauntlet (Wizard needs food...badly), obviously there aren't many real old-skool Slashdotters here anymore...sadly :/

Re:More nostalgia goggles

[grumbel]

But what I can't comprehend is how people are pissed off that we're trying to make the games fun.

People are not pissed of at others making games that are meant to be fun, people are pissed of at developer who make games with the sole goal of maximizing profit. A lot of features that get implemented into free games are there to do the exact opposite of fun, they are there to maximize the player annoyance and willingness to pay to skip or speed up that step in the fast. Essentially these games are exploits of human psychology and they work damn well when you look at the amount of money Zynga is making. Jonathan Blow has held a few good talks on the subject, look them up if you still have a problem understanding what people are complaining about.

Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her

[sonicmerlin]

I was actually about to comment on how surprising it is that it took this long for the games industry to mutate to this model. Games have always been ripe for psychological manipulation of the customer, but for the most part until recently game developers had focused solely on the "pure" goal of providing a great experience. Eventually this led to publishers milking franchises to maximize profits, but usually those sequels (like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout) were actually quite good. Now we have "achievements" and "trophies" and other bizarre and meaningless "rewards" mostly unrelated to the actual game experience.

FUD in light of industry history

[otaku244]

I think what is lost in this conversation is that the game industry HAS been here before. Does anyone remember arcade games? Play Time Crisis and try to tell me with a straight face that that series was a well made, complex strategy shooter that you could play for more than 5 minutes on less than $1 of coins. I agree to an extent that the pay-as-you-go model is getting pretty pervasive and it should be implemented in more moderation. Just don't try to sell me that this will take over the WHOLE industry. It might fill the niche market of mobile apps, but I don't see this being the model of choice for console and PC markets. They are different audiences. And, even if you're right, the likely result is that history will repeat itself like it did with arcades and the model will collapse in some measurable amount of time.

Re:They have to make money somehow..

[Cruorin]

Neither are games.

Re:This is different?

[Dunbal]

The difference, according TFA, being that these games intentionally provide variable stimulus (the most powerful type of stimulus according to behavioral psychologists) and diminishing returns in order to maximize profits. A regular game which you paid up front is designed to entertain you. Whether or not you actually finish the game depends on the perceived difficulty of the game, the appeal of the game view (world, story, graphics, physics system, etc) presented to you and your own desire and willingness to keep playing. Whether you actually finish the game or not makes no difference to the creator, he has been paid up front.

What these guys are doing is intentionally manipulating your emotions by constantly dangling candy in front of you, but just out of reach. Every time they see you starting to lose interest, they might move the candy a little closer, every time they see you are really interested they move it a little further. Therefore you are being intentionally manipulated not to achieve satisfaction with the game but rather to achieve you sending them a credit card authorization. Satisfaction will come later, we promise.

Re:They have to make money somehow..

[cyber-vandal]

They have to make money in order to keep the business going dumbass.

Re:This is different?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Every time they see you starting to lose interest, they might move the candy a little closer, every time they see you are really interested they move it a little further."

Sounds like /. Every time I log out for a few days, and then log back in, I get mod points; else, not.

This reminds me vaguely of Graham Watkins' Virus

[brokeninside]

Except instead of a computer virus that is trying to optimize users so that they supply a steady input of data, it's businessmen trying to optimize users so that they supply a stead input of cash. In both cases, through trial and error the would-be optimizers eventually discover the secrets to getting users to play over and over and over until they're absolutely drained.

Gosh, when I put it like that it also sounds like the golden age of video games. Pong, Space Invaders, Q*Bert, Pac-Man, etc. were just big excuses to get users to put in quarter after quarter.

Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her

[phantomfive]

Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and their Double XP Promotion [pcgamer.com]. This really pisses off real gamers (the ones who play a lot and get better through time and practice), and especially pisses off those who had to work hard for their last prestige.

Sure, but you'll still buy it, mate?

Terrible writing

[solferino]

He wasn't kidding about being 'The Worst Journalist In The World'.

Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her

[zAPPzAPP]

I am not sure I can agree with you.
You talk about MW but you clearly think of something else than Mech Warrior. I can not support that.

Ah, the $0.25 micropayment

[msobkow]

I shudder to think how much money I actually fed those old machines, a quarter at a time.

Re:League of Legends

[Omestes]

LOL has a serious problem though... You are not allowed to learn how to play. I logged on, played five games, then deleted it thanks to being called all manner of stupid names, and being verbally assaulted for not memorizing all the silly terms ("leash blue!", wtf?) before hand. It seemed fun, but the community verges too much on "hardcore" (read: 13 year old boys) for my tastes. I miss silly online shooters, like UT2k3. TF2 is close, but I got sick of Valve updating the whole 30Gb package every three days just to include a stupid hat.

This has nothing to do with piracy.

[raehl]

It's not like these "social" games would go away if someone invented effective, unobtrusive copy protection tomorrow.

As a former Facebook game addict, I can tell you that the "social" games speak to the completion/builder/collector in many people. What's really the difference between building a model replica ship and building a model farm? Or collecting something as meaningless as beanie babies vs. collecting something as meaningless as digital tokens? Or needing to finish, well, any task, and needing to master all your character's jobs?

The social games offer a very powerful thing: Constant progress. No matter what you do, you will progress, but you will never win. There are lots and lots of people who want constant progress. There's also people who feel compelled to complete things (I was one of them).

The other problem with blaming this on piracy is that you can absolutely pirate these games! Most of where the publisher gets their money is getting you to pay to remove obstacles to your progress, like timers or "X friends must "help" you" stuff where X is more people than you want to annoy. So you can "pirate" by simply making fake accounts or finding a group of people who are die-hard players like you are but who you don't actually know to add as fake friends, effectively "robbing" the publisher of their revenue. So just like traditional games, you can, with some effort, get the stuff for free, but many people will still pay for it for the convenience. Actually, were piracy the issue, MMORPGs are the solution, as it's pretty much impossible to pirate a monthly subscription.

The problem with the social games though, like any drug dealer, is these game publishers have gotten too greedy. They have cut the product too many times so it is no longer any good. I USED to mostly have fun playing, but then the bean counters got too much control over the game development and it became impossible to progress without either annoying the piss out of my friends (or finding a pile of fake friends) or paying cash. And if you're trying to play for "free", you wouldn't be able to get most things unless you're devoting lots of time to the effort (complete task now, 8-hour timer starts. Are you going to be near a computer in 8 hours? Well, if not, you can accelerate the timer for only XX tokens!

Anyway, they've made it not fun. People don't pay for not fun. I suspect Zynga will ultimately go the way of Groupon.

Easy differentiator

[sjames]

There seems to be a confusion about the games. TFA is talking about the games that have been distilled down to discard all elements of skill or even luck. All that's left is the Skinner conditioning, mechanical grinding and an offer to skip the grind in exchange for real world cash.

People were hooked on SPACE INVADERS

[rbanzai]

If you expose a product to at least 100 million people you're going to collect some of those who have addictive personalities. If you think it requires modern marketing analysis to create an addictive game, replacing "real" content with material designed to addict then you must have missed out on the late 1970s/early 1980s when kids were glued to arcade games. Space Invaders, Pac-Man et al were drawing children intro scrounging for every last quarter just for one more play. This happened worldwide, with none of the benefit of the cold, computer-aided fine-tuning that we're told is luring people in.

Can they make a video game more addictive? Possibly, but the idea that only specialized work on a title is what makes people addicted to it is not accurate.

Re:Capitalism == Greed

[Phrogman]

The core of Capitalism is the making of profit above all else. It has no morals, no restraints, and no humanity. The reason companies try to avoid major industrial accidents like Bhopal has nothing to do with not causing harm or death, it has to do with avoiding profit loss. If something improves profits it must be done, to not do it would be to fail those who own the capital. The reason for maximizing profits, is and can only be Greed.

Re:League of Legends

[KahabutDieDrake]

That is less true than it used to be. Now there is a decent training mode, and a practice mode, so you can learn without pissing off the (admittedly) rather noxious community. I won't lie to you, the community is noxious. Something about DOTA games, not sure what.

That being said, LOL gets my vote. They make a fun game, that is actually free to play, where you can't ever buy an advantage. Oh... you can buy an awful lot, and they definitely set the pricing in such a way as to maximize profits. However, you can play for free, and unlock every piece of game content for free. You can NOT unlock skins (they are sometimes very cool), nor certain other perks. Perks which have no ingame effect what so ever. You must use cash for these things. However, you can be a long time League of Legends player and never spend any cash, and compete with anyone else, which isn't unique, but it's close.

Spiral knights is a perfect example of the opposite. It's a fun game, but it requires a rather healthy amount of cash to advance in the game. Pay to win, as it were.

Re:Capitalism == Greed

[martyros]

The core of Capitalism is the making of profit above all else.

The core of economics is people doing valuable for things for other people -- "creating value", to use a PHB word. I've had a bit of exposure to the business world, and discovered that there are basically two kinds of businessmen: People who want to get your money by giving you something valuable (i.e, worth the money), and people who just want to make money whatever way they can, preferably with the minimal effort (i.e., generally giving you nothing really valuable, or by causing damage in the production so that the net effect on society is negative). The first kind of businessman actually makes the world a better place; the second generally makes it a worse place.

Our system generally rewards the first kind, and we do have some systems in place to limit the effect of the second kind. But we need to be always on guard against the second kind, and continually trying to put in laws which restrict the second kind while allowing the first kind to thrive.

For the win by Cory Doctorow

[Buzz_Litebeer]

If you ever want to read an interesting book on this subject, For The Win by Cory Doctorow.