Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
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"
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...
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.
Monstar L
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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:
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
paintball
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 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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.