Slashdot Mirror
Major Games Publishers Are Feeling The Impact Of Peaking Attention (midiaresearch.com)
Some analysis from research firm MIDiA: Earlier this month Electronic Arts (EA) reported disappointing quarterly results, now Activision has laid off nearly 800 staff, mostly in marketing and sales. As MIDiA has reported multiple times before, engagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritizing between them.
This downward trend in engagement has persisted for a while now, and the latest quarterly results from some major games publishers confirm that a revenue slowdown will ultimately follow consumer behaviour. Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought. Publishers will be quick to blame declining engagement and revenues on Fortnite. While the title indeed intensified the manifestation of the peak attention economy dynamics among gamers, the coming slowdown is part of a much bigger challenge -- how to capture attention in an increasingly attention-scarce landscape.
Top publishers are facing several headwinds at the same time. Fortnite is only one of them, and arguably one of the less harmful ones to the long-term outlook of the games industry: Fortnite's model utilises the attention economy dynamics: It's a high-grade gaming experience and it's free to play, which means there is little barrier for consumers to allocate attention to, compare to its paid counterparts. While it has undoubtedly cannibalised some revenue and engagement from other major publishers, Fortnite engagement still contributes to the bottom line of the global games industry.
More gamers engage with games videos and events than Fortnite: Not only is engagement declining across mobile, PC and console gaming, at the same time, video is winning the race against gaming in capturing attention on multipurpose devices such as PC.
This downward trend in engagement has persisted for a while now, and the latest quarterly results from some major games publishers confirm that a revenue slowdown will ultimately follow consumer behaviour. Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought. Publishers will be quick to blame declining engagement and revenues on Fortnite. While the title indeed intensified the manifestation of the peak attention economy dynamics among gamers, the coming slowdown is part of a much bigger challenge -- how to capture attention in an increasingly attention-scarce landscape.
Top publishers are facing several headwinds at the same time. Fortnite is only one of them, and arguably one of the less harmful ones to the long-term outlook of the games industry: Fortnite's model utilises the attention economy dynamics: It's a high-grade gaming experience and it's free to play, which means there is little barrier for consumers to allocate attention to, compare to its paid counterparts. While it has undoubtedly cannibalised some revenue and engagement from other major publishers, Fortnite engagement still contributes to the bottom line of the global games industry.
More gamers engage with games videos and events than Fortnite: Not only is engagement declining across mobile, PC and console gaming, at the same time, video is winning the race against gaming in capturing attention on multipurpose devices such as PC.
EA, Ubisoft, et al. are not.
So I have a choice with my leisure time, do I play the latest Medal of Snorefare 78 Rehashed edition where for £44 I can buy half a game and be expected to front up another 9 £6 transactions to get the full game...
Or I can play a game from a studio that interacts with it's community, cares about game-play, balance and re-playability, provides free content updates and fixes bugs (well, mostly)... Is it little wonder Paradox, Eleon and System Era see more of my money?
EA wen't off to chase the casual crowd with dumbed down "everyone gets a prize" and pay to win games. This had the nasty effect of alienating actual gamers who spend their money on games. Generic Sports 20XX isn't bringing in the money now they have to spend millions on advertising and people are realising that its the same game as last year.
Another problem is that they expect me to install yet another resource sucking, update popup producing crapware client to run their games. I refuse to do this, ergo EA lost me long ago, as did Ubisoft.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
... the game industry succesfully got it's way to control software and by keeping half of it on their machines. They're finding out how gaming always was - most games will be played once, finished and then forgotten. It's hard for any game to keep players for a long time, which is why people need a rest from games between sequels instead of always online service base gaming bullshit. This is especially true for mobile games that survives off a tiny minority of whales. The sooner the game industry figures out we want good content for money and stop trying to turn every game into a service the better off we'll all be. People can buy multiple single player games they can't play every multiplayer game.
That means service based games are a winner take all market because free time is limited when many multiplayer games are released in the same period vying for player attention. The level of idiocy coming out of management selecting for short term profits instead of fixing the AAA game industries ability to make said games is the issue.
Responding to criticism with "Don't like it, don't buy it" definitely lessens the attention directed towards your game, even if customers have some in reserve.
I think that screen is showing the main TV show in the middle and the rest is just ads, not other shows. It was kind of a joke that the future of TV was going to be like the web, which was full of pop-ads at the time.
#DeleteFacebook
in the UK it's 999 but I'm assuming you're murican and couldn't place it on a map so you are forgiven.
After Doom, I was already tired of the first person shoot em up. However because it was so popular, nearly all the games have been like that afterwords. Then World of Warcraft was a big hit, so all the game companies moved over to online games. Game makers gotten serious about their stories, so all the games started to have these big huge complex stories.
With the companies following these fads, we had a lot of good games genres die out.
1. Single player Adventure Games, these were once games with state of the art graphics and sound, it made progressing to the next screen and area a real joy, you weren't playing against people, or having to keep your twitch reflex on maximum all the time. You get into a place, you then can take your time explore the area find as many hints as your can. The 2016 new Kings Quest while not getting big reviews, I found was a decent attempt of a modern version of the adventure game, however could had been much better with more budget and planning. (There was a trend in it, to make some puzzles, actual puzzles, and not organic part of the game environment)
2. Platform Games. Sometimes we don't need to use all the buttons on our controller. No story to figure out, no moral ambiguities, you are the hero, everyone else is the bad guy.
3. Strategy Games. No rush, take your time, come up with a plan.
4. Building Simulators, no plot just keep of building and simulating
Sure they are Indy games like this, and on the mobile market they have more options. But most of the big name games are nearly all the same. It isn't that we have lost our ability to pay attention to a game, but the fact after playing a few of these types of games, there isn't much we want to pay attention too.
Fortnite, is one of those quick to play games with a combination of many genres. You Win, then you Win, if not then you play again.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Perhaps the problem is market fatigue due to post sale monetization. Today, buying a game that isn't intentionally hobbled to allow for micro transactions is rare. Metal Gear Survive came out with a requirement to pay for a game save slot - the permission to save your progress. You have the likes of Madden and FIFA coming out where it's no longer a game of skill or strategy as building your team is making your best of random unlocks unless you pay for them. You have Call of Duty putting shame icons next to players who don't have the season pass, preventing people from playing all the maps without kicking them from matchmaking. Deus Ex Human Revolution had you pay to unlock and level your various skills in the game at 1.99 a piece, or else to unlock your entire tech tree it would take ~3800 hours to unlock them... For a single player, story driven game. And yes, this literally has made me ignore a number of titles I previously looked forward to.
Thirty four characters live here.
I'm Canadian, so you're assuming wrong. I also know different countries use different emergency numbers. I was expecting/hoping someone to reply the exact same thing as me but with a different number than 911 and 999.
And by the way, the emergency number in the UK is not 999. It's 0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3.
#DeleteFacebook
I haven't looked forward to a game release in years. It's pretty simple...
-I don't game on my phone. ...So basically, 98% of new AAA games aren't written for me. And that's fine. I'm voting with my wallet; I've got green pastures of games in my Steam. Not everything has to be incredibly story driven or be some GPU workout, either. I have fun playing PinballFX and Sol Exodus, Game Dev Tycoon and Trine. I'm one of those people who still enjoys playing Unreal Tournament in all of its iterations - it's got the same concept as Destiny 2 ("Go to the place and shoot the lads"), but with far fewer annoyances, free DLC, and free multiplayer. And, of course, no matter how many times I play the Mass Effect trilogy (and even Andromeda), I come across a new thing somewhere.
-I don't want a game without a single player campaign (y'know, an actual campaign, not a 90-minute tutorial).
-I don't want a game with lootboxes.
-I don't want a game with microtransactions.
-I don't want a game with an always-online requirement.
I realize that saying "they don't make 'em like they used to" wreaks of nostalgia, but I preordered Andromeda, and on the sole basis that it was one of the last EA games that didn't wreak of microtransactions and lootboxes, I'd do it again if only to encourage that sort of model. Activision has the same problem - Starcraft isn't always my cup of tea, but when I'm in the mood, I'm happy with what it is, to the chagrin of Activision who would far rather I be a fan of CoD: BO4. I got that game for free and I still didn't find it to be fun at all, even though the first Black Ops game was one of my favorites of the series.
EA shifted their business model toward short term profits, and while it worked for a while, it's obvious to everybody with a brain stem that microtransactions and second-half-of-the-game DLC simply isn't going to garner loyalty in the long term. It's just that the chickens are finally coming home to roost, and while it's possible that they'll figure out what the rest of us already know, I wouldn't wager a counterfeit wooden nickel on it.
Fortnite is not the problem, and neither is a dwindling interest in video games.
It's a dwindling interest in paying again and again and again for getting the same video games.
Does EA even have a line of games anymore that doesn't have the current year in the title? Or does any major studio still offer games where you actually get to buy the whole game for 60 bucks instead of buying a husk that you can then fill with zero-day DLC and "season passes"? Only to eventually find out that you shelled out about 200 bucks for game you already had, just that back then you actually did get the whole game for those 60 bucks (aka what today passes as a "sequel")? But it has a new gimmick and worse, dumbed-down mechanics because crippling games so they run on consoles was not enough, today's gaming market is cell phones so enjoy playing games with mouse and keyboard on your 30" screen that were designed for stamp-sized touch screens.
EA, it's not that people don't want to play games anymore. You just don't produce the games anymore that we want to play.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My two kids (10 & 5) spend more time watching people play video games than playing games themselves! :(
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
EA and Blizzard are publishing mostly shitty games.
This. They're both trying to blame Fortnite for their problems, but they simply don't make great games any more. Perhaps giant corporate conglomerates never can.
AAA games focus on presentation, not gameplay, as that's the easiest way to get first-week sales. But when gameplay is bad game after game, not to mention code quality and server quality, people start to notice. I sure as heck won't buy e.g. the next Diablo without seeing reviews (by post-launch reviewers - everyone who gets pre-launch copies is captive these days).
Meanwhile Indy games with crappy graphics keep me entertained for endless hours. Much as I'd like to see those games look better, I don't want a better-looking game that's not fun to play!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Also that it doesn’t cost you more money to actually finish the game which requires a paid DLC.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The whole gaming industry needs to go through massive a overhaul. The whole model has been straight fucked by mobile and micropayments. Burn it all down, send most every new company out of business, leaving the quality operators like Nintendo and Sega behind.
It's a problem with corporate governance. Growth is usually favored over sustained dividends. The problem was created by the favorable tax treatment of capital gains over dividends - investors of course want their profits in a lower-tax way. But it has created a disease that has killed business after business, as corporate leadership seems unable to say "we've won: we've saturated the market and this business can't double again because we already have more than half the possible customers; here's a fat dividend which we can sustain indefinitely".
Transitioning from growth to dividends is the freaking point, it's how profits are supposed to flow to shareholders. But the culture of corporate governance is broken now, and cultural fixes are hard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not about IP, "plot and gameplay" take talent; microtransactions, always-on connectivity to collect user data, loot boxes, etc don't. The fact they seem to have ditched mostly marketing and sales people may be a sign they are starting to catch on to this, but generally large companies have stable management placement programs, to such an extent that they don't place people in positions of leadership who can see the issues faced any better than they guys before them - so I don't have a lot of faith that they will actually start improving. More expecting that the next great games will come from smaller shops EA and Activation are more like the 400lb raging mental midgets in the room than great creators of things.