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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.
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.