In the New Age of Game Development, Gamers Have More Power Than Ever

Velcroman1 writes: "In the olden times before high-speed Internet, the game you purchased on day one was what you were still playing months later. Now we live in an era of day-one patches, hotfixes, balance updates, and more. Diablo III, for example, is unrecognizable today compared to the state it was in when it launched back in 2012. Nowadays, savvy gamers go in expecting their experience to change over time — to improve over time. Today, 'Early Access' is both an acknowledgment of the dangers of early adoption (no one likes to be a guinea pig, after all) and an opportunity for enthusiastic consumers to have a say in how the product they've purchased will take shape. In this article, Adam Rosenberg talks with Michael McMain, CEO and founder of Xaviant, and creative director on the indie studio's first project — Lichdom: Battlemage, which embraces the concept like never before."

Comments

Bullshit

[O('_')O_Bush]

We lost the ability to mod a lot of games because of stupid DRM controls and lock-down.

We had power when we could come up with something like Desert Combat mod, or there were tens of thousands of downloadable mods to turn the base game into really incredible things. There are some games like that still, like Minecraft, but for the most part, that is no longer true.

Re:Bullshit

[Mashiki]

Well steam is DRM, but you can and are able to mod many of the games there without a problem. The problem though isn't so much the DRM in cases, it's the publishers/parent company throwing a hissy fit.

Re:Bullshit

[Mashiki]

It's that modding modern games is simply more difficult, because the games are more complex. Sure, a company can spend the time and effort to produce good mod tools, but that's not necessarily a good business decision.

Really? Odd that modding in skyrim isn't really all that more difficult, or even complex. Or Dragon Age: Origins, how about xcom? New Vegas/FO3? Dark Souls, or NWN/2? The witcher games? Come on, it's not a franchise selling issue it's a laziness issue. And would have CoH2 sold better if it had modding support? Well...yes. Generally games that have open support for modding, have a longer shelf-life, and make more money in the long run especially games that milk the DLC train. A more recent example would be Saints Row 3/4 right? There's no steam workshop support, but there are tools, mods and no shortage of goodies. With developers answering questions on items, much like with the REDkit, and back before Bioware was bought by EA, you could find the developers doing the same. Notice that one? No mod support for their games since EA came along...

Re:Bullshit

[artor3]

If a tool is for internal use only, it can have a messy UI. It can involve half a dozen different programs that must be used in a particular order. It can have crap documentation, relying on the developers' tribal knowledge. If you were to just "zip them up and putting them on an ftp", your community would turn on you in a heartbeat, declare that you don't care about supporting your game, and that this justifies pirating it. They'll spam every review site they can find with the worst scores that the site will accept. They'll spam your message boards with abuse, and drive away other customers.

I've seen gamer communities fly into a rage over much less. If you're going to publish mod tools, you need to actually do it right.

Working Games

[wisnoskij]

Ya, and far more of those games that we never patched did not need patches because they got enough QA to produce a stable playable product before launch.