What will the gamers do?
As I have spent the last couple of years yelling loudly that the game industry (despite record years) is actually in dire trouble in a business sense (not just creatively), I have repeatedly run into one comment from core gamers. You see, I keep saying that the rising landscape has a lot more lower-budget, asynchronous, low time investment, web-based games. And the response is usually,
“But the landscape you are describing doesn’t sound like games I would like.”
And that is absolutely right. I don’t know what happens to the core gamer in that scenario. Maybe sometimes, they are made very happy by a title like Rock Band, which frankly isn’t designed for them, but which epitomizes many of the characteristics I have been talking about (including the microtransaction business model — 2.5 million songs sold!).
iQ212 has a great post about how the 300m user mass market is making games for Your Hypothetical Mom.
Your Mom has a household annual income of $48,201 and lives in the state where she was born. She listens to CDs by Carrie Underwood, or Daughtry, or some other American Idol. She watches four hours of TV a day, and her favorite shows are Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, CSI, Grey’s Anatomy, Wheel of Fortune and Oprah. Mom drives a white or silver Japanese car, but almost half of her friends own big American trucks or SUVs. She saw most of the Spider-Man, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean movies in the theater. Odds are she is Christian, owns a Bible, and prays almost once a day. She reads Nora Roberts, James Patterson, Mitch Albom, and anything Oprah suggests. Mommy talks on her Motorola cell phone about 25 minutes a day, but has never downloaded a game to it. (By the way, did you know her ringtone is “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas?) Her favorite restaurants are Outback, Red Lobster and Ruby Tuesday. Your mom shops at Walmart, Sears and Costco. She websurfs 30 minutes a day on her dial up connection (though she uses broadband at work and will upgrade to broadband at home next month) and visits Yahoo, Ebay and Pogo. She has no idea what a WoW Guild, XBLA, Free BSD, BlueRay, or Podcast is. Oh yeah, she wants you to call her more.
Yah, that’s not us, now is it? I’ve used some pretty provocative language in the past to describe this problem, including the catchy phrase “numbers talk, niches walk,” which got some folks mad. But is hard to argue with the numbers.
The thing about niches is that businesses try to monetize them more. Basic math: if you are making a title for a passionate minority who loves their hobby, you charge them more to cover the costs of operating in a smaller market. And, well, because you can.
This often manifests in things like ongoing premium service fees, or tiered service plans, or some form of premium upsell. Look at TV, for example. Sure, you have an antenna signal. No, wait, you have basic cable. But if you’re serious about TV watching, you upgrade to one of the nicer packages. If you’re really really serious about it, you want stuff like HD signals. Or pay-per-view. If you’re a phone nut, you start getting not just a better phone, but stuff like all-you-can-eat data plans, and buying things like ringtones, apps, etc. Or maybe you live in Beaumont, Texas, where Time Warner is testing this sort of plan for your high-speed Internet.
This is really common across all sorts of industries. The reason is that while everyone may want a given service or product, they often want it to different degrees, and they often have very different price thresholds for what they want. Me, I’m willing to buy the full-on Rock Band set and even some downloaded songs, or a DDR mat, or whatever, but I am not going to buy a $250 dance mat from Red Octane (though if they send me one, I’ll gladly try it out 😀 ).
This is a huge part of why I have been saying that microtransactions are the rising business model. Unlike the single flat fee, they allow users and businesses to arrive at the price point they feel comfortable with for the service they get.
But if the offerings from the businesses shift direction overall, then what? Like, there’s not much on Facebook for the core gamer. If stuff like Facebook becomes the dominant model, then what does the core gamer do? Under circumstances like that, you’d expect prices to rise for core games.
In some ways, that’s exactly what is happening, using microtransactions and premiums as the way to do it. Is the fancy metal tin on a collector’s edition actually worth an extra $30? Not to most people — it’s for the niche. The same goes for selling you dashboard themes and gamer pictures on XBLA. You’re paying real money for an icon or a desktop background — and nobody else can even see the latter.
The question of what sort of offerings need to be in the overall portfolio is a tricky one, when you look at it this way. For some, chasing after the mass market is very hard, because their expertise is simply not in that area. They have lots of experience at making core gamer titles, and are entirely geared towards high-budget titles.
For others, it’s sort of a bird in the hand, and the question is whether they double down on it or whether they service their traditional audience. Consider the dilemma Nintendo faces, where they are actually facing a fair amount of anger from core gamer loyalists wondering if they are being abandoned.
This has hit home in the MMO world recently as everyone watches the painful process that the Star Trek Online title has gone through. Consider Robert “Apache” Howarth’s reaction to the reports that the game was going to refocus to aim for a more casual audience, when he covered the news over at Voodoo Extreme.
Set phasers to suck.
Whoa. One could say quite easily that World of Warcraft is “EverQuest done more casual.” Suckage is not a mandatory consequence in the least. And one of the darling titles of the last year among core gamers was Puzzle Quest.
Core gamers are almost certainly going to have to adapt to a world in which a lot of developer attention is going towards a much broader array of titles than in the past. The bookstore is changing from having mostly genre stuff and pulps, to having nonfiction aisles, music aisles, coffeetable books, and so on.
The fat fantasy, sci-fi, and military novels are going to end up relegated to a section of the store, where once they owned all the shelf space. We’re already seeing burgeoning growth in areas like non-fiction (Like with Wolfquest, perhaps), self-help (hello Brain Age 2), personal essays (such as Passage), and so on. And the growth here will, to some extent, distract developers from making stuff aimed at the core gamers.
Who will also have to get used to being dinged repeatedly for their love of their hobby, buying ever nicer editions of stuff they already have (yes, I mean you, Absolute Sandman).
Overall, I think this is a good thing for the core gamer, not a bad thing. But it’s definitely an adjustment.
The flip side that is equally interesting, of course, is that the mainstream will get tugged in the direction of the niche. As the world has become more science-fictional, we have seen the memes of SF appear in everyday life. Stuff from James Bond and Lord of the Rings is now common currency. The boundary lines between niche and mass market are very thin these days, and will likely get thinner. So even the casual stuff is going to have a heavy tinge of the stuff that we the geeks love.
Given the nature of games, I’d expect to see a continuation of the trend to complexify the casual, because that’s what games do: grow more complex as people master the basics. The high-end casual market isn’t very casual anymore (some match-3 games are not only expensive to make, but downright esoteric in their rules).
In other words — gamers may not want to become like Your Mom. But Your Mom is gradually becoming more of a gamer.
What will the gamers do? Complain, then play on, probably. 🙂
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What will the gamers do?As I have spent the last couple of years yelling loudly that the game industry despite record years is actually in dire trouble in a business sense not just creatively, I have repeatedly run into one comment from core gamers. You see, I keep saying t
Interesting,
I had actually just gotten to the part of your book where you talk about Niches and mass market.
I’ve decided that Niche games remain classic to some people (Blade Runner), while mass market media is quickly forgotten (Spiderman 3). Classic games are like classic movies, and are/were all Niche games.
Hey raph – have you seen malcolm’s talk at TED about spaghetti sauce!
http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/09/malcolm_gladwel.html
Hopefully there will still be a strong effort to make games that are considered for the more core demo in the future.
Understandably, right now there is the realization that designers can make games for a more casual audience, and reach more people in this way. Many of the core gamer games are much more involved than the used to be, and rake up much time and effort, and only seem to come out with 12 to 15 hours of game time; which a core gamer is going to blaze through and then want to move on to the next title.
Perhaps that is why there is an overall rise in the MMO market right now across the board. Casual and hardcore gamers alike are moving over there, and continue to play their normal games. Some focus mostly on the MMO of their choice and use other games as a break, some use the MMO as a consistent break from their other games.
Hopefully there is some more creativity involved in future development for the core model gamer as well; many are complaining about how unoriginal many games are, and with the growth of facebook games and a fall back to board game roots beginning to heat up again, perhaps we can appease casual and hardcore gamers alike, and still boom.
Yeah, we’re talking about a utopia, haha.
So as the mainstream of games become CSI and Law and Order on CBS and NBC, the unfortunate core gamers get stuck with The Wire and Dexter on HBO and Showtime? Dark days for gamers, indeed.
I haven’t… will check it out.
It’s dark days if you factor in the fact that you have to pay for HBO or Showtime… higher costs. And the fact that The Wire and Dexter aren’t anywhere near as high-budget as the hit TV shows for the broader audience. There ARE tradeoffs.
I think the current core of gamers is so large that the “niche” in this case probably won’t have the downsides of say what automobile companies have. In the case of automobiles you pay money for the product and for the fact that the company is addressing the niche need because niche in this case also means very low volume.
Hopefully, in the case of games the niche for current gamers will be so large that the extra “niche tax” will be sufficiently low enough as to not make a difference.
I have a feeling that the as the technology and knowledge for creating games becomes pervasive that the barriers to entry will become low enough to offset the increasing cost of games through other options like open-source. That may be 5-10 years away, but I doubt that substantial cost increases to “core gamers” are going to happen before then anyway.
You’re business analysis is perspicacious: translate, dead on. You may or may not have been there for the early web when a really bad browser (Mozilla cum Netscape) caught fire. The disgruntled among the pioneers who had developed systems that were far superior was very real.
And almost totally irrelevant to what would follow. The market recycles simpler designs as soon as the needs make it profitatble. Consider that a Tata Nano is almost precisely an Izetta from 55 years ago. My Dad had one. They were great.
http://www.worldcarfans.com/5050328.001
Tier one markets collapse into tier two and even tier three markets as they commodify. Lots of forces cause that and you can even model it using low-energy orbital transfer systems (vs a Hohman transfer). It is hard on the company economics because legacy businesses have set their costs and salaries in the tier one times. They become ripe for buy-outs. Talent whines but they adapt unless they want to take up another trade. Core gamers begin to be perceived like big ticket items: too expensive a business to be in.
On the other hand, as the market commodifies, the quality comes back after one or two cycles depending on the costs of resources. So cheap gets better and better gets cheaper. As much as it frosts the early adopters, it is a good thing overall.
Raph, Thanks for the link and iQ212 mention. Nice to know that someone reads my rants! Do you think they will port Panzergruppe Tactics 4: Eastern Front to the Wii? 😉
I’m with you about 99% of the way here Raph, but this bothers me:
It’s dark days if you factor in the fact that you have to pay for HBO or Showtime… higher costs. And the fact that The Wire and Dexter aren’t anywhere near as high-budget as the hit TV shows for the broader audience. There ARE tradeoffs.
How is it a trade-off that the Wire’s budget is lower than CSI (for instance) from the audience point of view? CSI could pay their stars $50 mil/episode and cater the shoots with caviar and peacock tongue, but that doesn’t give us as viewers anything extra. It still sucks.
Perhaps in theory the Wire could be better with a larger budget, but I don’t think that claim is any more or less likely to be true than saying it’d be better if the producers were forced to get even more creative by a smaller budget.
–matt
Raph wrote:
With regard to music aisles at bookstores, that offering could be attributed to the decreasing space for music at major retailers. Digital distribution, as well as microtransactions, in the music industry is greatly affecting music sales at retail. The games industry will probably be more affected at retail in the future when games can be more easily digitally distributed.
While Kristen undoubtedly has a better grasp on economics than I do, I don’t think the “core gamer” market will have to adapt or adjust. They represent a demand and there will be, and are, businesses out there to meet that demand.
I don’t see the “new landscape” in terms of doom-and-gloom for the “core gamer” market. What’s happening is really typical to any sort of product life cycle: a niche becomes a mass market and that mass market eventually becomes a niche again. There are just more products and services in the marketplace and a lot more businesses ready to take the places that were once occupied by the majors. Life goes on, basically.
Hmmm. The landscape you’re describing still doesn’t like games I would like. Shrug. If there are no online games I want to play I guess I won’t play online games. I managed to have fun before mmorpgs came along, I’ll still find ways to have fun if they go by the wayside.
You can lead a core gamer to the mass market but you can’t make him[her] play 😉
Kind of a combo response to both Matt and Morgan:
It matters because the businesses (content developers) are nt operating in a vacuum. They have to assess which markets to target, and how much to spend. It matters for The Wire that they may have less budget to work with, because they do have to hit a connoisseur market — that is the market they are targeting. It also matters that if they try to hit a bar, and cannot justify it with sufficient advertiser dollars, then they may not be as profitable as if they were doing something else — there’s an opportunity cost issue there.
Even if there is a core market demand, it doesn’t mean that the economics of it for a given content developer will make sense, versus oher possible market opportunities.
I’d just like to say that I don’t think the Wire could possibly be any better than it already is.
Raph wrote:
…but that’s what I’m saying. I’m also saying that when you talk about how a certain category of consumer will either have to adapt to new products or exit the market completely, you’re sort of approaching the issue from a “businesses are operating in a vacuum” perspective.
Although companies are creating new markets and focusing on those markets, that doesn’t mean there will no longer be a place for that particular category of consumer. There will be more more entrepreneurs, more new products and services, and simply more effort to create supply to meet existing demand. For example, consumers still buy The Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Mamas & The Papas.
I don’t think everyone will be centering their attention on only the next generation of entertainment because the fact of the matter is that businesspeople tend to go where there’s green to be had. If the “core gamer” doesn’t want to “get with the program” than clearly there will be opportunists who step up to service their needs.
Not all businesses seek to be innovative. There are lucrative, sensible opportunities in resale, refurbished goods, and middleman services. You don’t have to “challenge conventions” to be successful. That’s just one way… and it’s a lot more fun. ;p
Right…so we’re in agreement there. All I am saying is that the cost of servicing the core gamer is pretty high, so that process you describe may result in less choices for core gamers.
Raph wrote:
Yeah, that’s probably true, but I think what some people forget is that less quantity doesn’t always mean less quality. There might be less choices, at least less preferred choices, for that category of consumer; however, who’s to say that big value can’t come in a small package?
I think we can see the value of this from the business side. For the producer, it’s “just-in-time” servicing, which is more efficient. For the consumer, pay-as-you-go seems more in tune with an unfettered capitalist vibe; you can have whatever you want right now if you can pay for it. So the business case for mictrotransactions seems strong.
My problem is the gameplay side: microtransactions are intrusive. They break the magic circle.
Having a monthly subscription fee deducted nearly invisibly on my credit card leaves me free to immerse myself completely in a gameworld (or at least as completely as the game’s obsession with rules-based play allows). The grimy commercial details are out of sight, and so out of mind.
Not so with microtransactions; they interrupt the kind of exercise of imagination I enjoy by forcing me repeatedly to make decisions about real-world money. That pops me right out of the play experience. So why should I pay anything at all to play such games, since they’re guaranteed to shred the immersiveness I prize as entertainment?
Maybe there’s a gameplay-driven way to contextualize spending little bits of real money inside a game world that it’ll feel like a fun way to spend play money, thus not breaking immersiveness too much. (But imagine the field day the anti-game people would have with that… “Bob here lost $20,000 in one month in World of Barcraft without even realizing it!”)
More likely, I’m simply not representative enough of the big field of gamers (including Mom tomorrow) to justify setting aside the business advantages of microtransactions to preserve gameplay advantages. Maybe the edge of the magic circle is somehow sharper to me than to most other people. Or maybe there are gameplay advantages to microtransactions to which my own interests are blinding me. If so, then my concerns about gameplay probably aren’t strong enough to warrant second thoughts about moving to microtransactions.
Just a thought.
Funny; this is almost exactly what Eric Heimburg, former systems designer for Star Trek Online, said in his “Advice for Cryptic’s Star Trek Team” blog entry.
It hasn’t gone over well with the fans.
I wish there were a single site that gamers could go to that showed them — with great clarity — just how hard it is to create a conventional MMORPG of any depth….
–Bart
[…] I go on I want to contrast another two sources, one is hard to cite though. One is a recent “scare” by Raph Koster (and I think I have figured him out, he sure knows how to create buzz by […]
Bart Stewart wrote:
The actual problem, Bart, is that you (along with many others) have conceived of a single notion of microtransactions that imagining anything involving microtransactions beyond that notion is, well, unimaginable.
Plus, I love the pro-immersion argument because that argument is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Ever been to a casino? Ever watched all those zombies at the slots? They’re plenty immersed in the games they’re playing, regardless of what sitting at one stool, pulling a lever, for hours upon hours does to their health. At best, the pro-immersion argument is idealistic, even noble. People love to write about and poetically criticize the “unfettered capitalist vibe.” In practice though, the argument is irrelevant because nobody blinks an eye—figuratively and literally speaking. But again, that’s just one version of microtransactions.
I’ll give you another version: subscriptions. Yes, subscriptions are a form of microtransaction. You pay a fixed fee every month (or whatever terms you agreed upon) for access to a service. The only difference between subscriptions and the popular notion of microtransactions is that subscriptions are automated. Unfortunately, subscriptions are on their way out. Most people don’t want everything that a service offers. Most people don’t want to develop their character to Level 80, spending thousands of hours in a game world, just so they can play the almighty End Game with their friends or guildmates or whoever. Most just want bits and bytes here and there for the brief time they’ve allotted themselves to playing games in their busy lives.
That’s where microtransactions as personalization comes into play. If I wanted to resolve the pro-immersion argument, I’d probably look to balancing the overwhelming demand for transparency and the desire for privacy, or what might be called freedom from so-called “real-world elements.”
Microtransactions don’t have to take place in-game; that would just make microtransactions more convenient. Microtransactions don’t have to be upfront and in-your-face; they can be just as invisible as a recurring subscription fee. Unlike a single, fixed and recurring subscription fee, microtransactions empower consumers with the freedom to personalize their entertainment experiences, enabling consumers to get what they want whenever they want. I could probably go on to write an article on microtransaction myths, and probably will as part of a new venture I’m working on, but I think you get my point.
If not, my point is simple: use your imagination. If you were responsible for making microtransactions “work” in accordance with your criteria for acceptable implementation, and you could not simply say “no microtransactions,” what would you do? In this day and age where everyone is held up high as a content creator, I should be seeing more and more people trying to solve problems instead of merely excusing themselves from the effort with simple “just don’t do it” and “it’s not my job” quips.
I am the Mom. I have a lot to say about this. In fact, I could go on for hours about how I feel that the gaming industry is ignoring me and my family. For one thing, my husband and I, both in our mid 30’s, have a hell of a time trying to find an E or Teen rated multiplayer quest game to play with our 7 year old girl (we’ve played every playstation 2 game there is that remotely fits that description). For another thing, I have no real games of interest for me. Sims was too un-end-user friendly, and generally stupid/boring. The rest have too much fighting, which is again, boring.
Don’t give me that crap that there ‘isn’t a market’ for me and my family. I’m not the only mom out here who grew up in the arcades and see nothing wrong with a little family game play. And don’t tell me to buy the Wii – we don’t want tennis. We want more shrek, teen titans, spongebob, etc. 4 player adventure games where we work as a team against bad guys and not against each other. And throw in a few games for just me, ya head-in-the-sand-prejudiced-blind-stupid-arrogant fucks.
(sorry, that last bit wasn’t very ‘mom’ of me. I’m seriously pissed off, though)
I just read Moroagh’s reply post to this… where there’s the mistaken assumption that *I* am worried about the moms taking over. As I said in the opening to the article, I’m commenting on something I get a lot from core gamers. Me personally, I’m not particularly worried.
Morgan, I think you may be reacting a little too strongly to how I actually feel on this subject. I expressed a concern that I haven’t seen discussed much (the gameplay impact of a microtransaction-based revenue model); I tried to explain the reasons for my concern; I even acknowledged that my understanding could be limited. I used some relatively strong adjectives but I didn’t froth or rave to the point of needing a smackdown. Even so, I take your objections seriously. I won’t be making any “it’s not my job” quips.
(Sorry for the wall of text, though. Taking your objections seriously means addressing them.)
First (and least), I’m actually a happy and committed capitalist. I’ll take Hayek and Mises over Marx and Keynes any day. And you probably don’t want to know who I’ll be voting for in November. 🙂 But that doesn’t render me incapable of seeing the pathologies that can emerge from barely-restrained free-market capitalism in a semi-anonymous setting… for which I think a good argument could be made that this is precisely what we have in most MMORPGs. Pay-as-you-go may indeed be a better fit for that kind of fast economy. In fact, I don’t really disagree with you that it probably is a very good fit for the casual gamer. The question I don’t hear asked much is whether the typical very free-market game economy needs to become even more so at the expense of other game effects I believe are also valuable, namely, immersiveness. So I asked. Maybe the question isn’t worth asking. But I’d hate to just assume that.
More importantly, I hope you won’t mind too much if, after careful consideration, I disagree with your assertion that the common subscription model is a special case of microtransactions. Firstly, there’s nothing “micro-” about a monthly bill. Secondly, monthly subscriptions that get debited almost invisibly to the gamer (and definitely invisibly to the character) are functionally different from paying a small fee of real-world money for numerous individual items from inside a gameworld (especially an RPG gameworld). To equate these two kinds of payment activities is to balloon the concept of “microtransactions” so far that it no longer means what even the people who like it think it means.
Next, do “most people” (most Americans? Westerners?) really reject flat-rate revenue collection models in favor of a more frequent per-usage collection system? I’m old enough to remember when BBS systems charged by the hour of usage… and I remember that this per-usage model got dropped like a glowing ingot of death by service users as soon as online service providers started offering flat-rate agreements. Yes, we could argue that these aren’t perfectly analogous situations (perhaps because of pricing), and of course they’re not perfectly equivalent. But they’re close enough to suggest to me that per-usage revenue collection is unlikely to be anywhere near as popular among service users as you appear to believe will happen.
Finally, as I already admitted, it’s possible that I really am suffering from a lack of imagination on this subject. I honestly don’t see any truly good way to encourage microtransactions that don’t run afoul of my current view that they can’t help but intrude into the fiction of the gameworld. Still, I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that there are obvious solutions to this problem (if it really is a problem, as seems to me to be the case).
So to answer your “how would you do it if you had to” challenge, the best I can come up with is segregating microtransactions to the vicinity of the character login screen. That’s low on convenience. It badly lowers the likelihood of players actually making a micropurchase as an “I need it now!” impulse buy. (Presumably I’d have to try to make the available items really, really desirable somehow.) So I wouldn’t call it a great solution. But at least this approach has the virtue of moving decision-making about real-world stuff out of the gameworld proper which, if not one of your goals, is one of mine.
I won’t go the childish route of now demanding that you in turn show me how you’d implement a subscription system that was satisfactory to you. Instead, I sincerely hope you will write an article on what you believe are myths about microtransactions. I’d like to read it. Dismissing as merely “ridiculous” concerns about in-game immersiveness versus the business value of the microtransaction model is not persuasive, but I’m open to fact- and logic-based arguments, and I’m capable of admitting error and (like Keynes) changing my mind given good reasons for doing so.
In particular, I’d enjoy seeing some ideas for how microtransactions — real microtransactions as commonly understood, not monthly subscriptions — could be implemented that intrude only minimally on a gameworld’s fiction. If such solutions really are obvious, I have no problem bonking myself on the head and publicly declaring, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”
But I don’t think I should be expected to go there based just on someone’s exasperated say-so. (I can appreciate an “I’ve already said this a million times and don’t feel like saying it all again,” though. God knows I’ve said that one myself more than once….)
We’re not going to be taken seriously until there are games for everyone.
Raph, thanks for your clarification. I wrote a postscript to my post to try clarify the scope of what I wanted to get at and a brief reaction to the main drive of your blog entry above. I think we both in some sense misunderstand because my article really wasn’t meant as a response to this one, certainly not exclusively.
Your article along with other sources does however give nice context to what I am trying to get at. Certainly I think that the stuff that we tend to pay attention to or consider important are rather different, but that’s fine.
This does not need to be true. The bulk of the items sold in Asian “free-to-play” MMOs are purely decorative – they have no game function at all. They increase immersion by increasing personalization.
Game balance is a key issue in this games. Virtual items have to be designed so that they do not unduly unbalance the game. I actually think this can be more immersive than level-based games. The relative power of a Level 70 character to a Level 1 character is highly “unrealistic” (is a General that much more powerful than a Private?), segregating (new players literally can’t play with more “senior” players, even if they are friends), and sloppy (careful game design and balance is dodged by simply dividing the game world into numerous level-based sub-worlds).
I think what we’re seeing is that the game industry itself has moved, over the past 20 years, from itself being a niche, into being a mainstream industry. When that happens, you get all kinds of opportunities for different models.
When I was in college (mid 80’s), we “core gamers” would wait and wait and wait for one or two new titles a month to come out for the PC, and play them no matter how bad they were. We’d play ’em to death. And play ’em again. Because we loved “to game.” We were the computer geeks and D&D nerds etc.
Who are the “core gamers” now? Well, it’s still me and my 30-45 year old compadres. But it also now includes college kids who grew up with the PS2 and a whole world of PC games. Sid Meier’s original Civilization came out in 1991, eh? Kids born that year are now in college.
So I find talk of “core gamers” vs. “moms” a bit… odd. My wife is a “mom” (though her reading and TV habits are vastly different than the “core mom” mentioned above). She plays online “casual” games, but does so for more hours than I play hardcore RTS and RPG games. What makes her games “casual” whereas mine are “hard core?” Is it that they’re lower budget? Have fewer rules? Can be played in shorter increments?
It’s pretty simple to me. As the equipment to play games has become more ubiquitous (PCs) and inexpensive (PCs and consoles), more people have taken the opportunity to play them, because the barriers to entry are lower. As more people began to play games, it became clear that there were more markets than just geek games (RTS, RPG, simulation) and sports games.
We now have the case where my three favorite games recently for myself are “Super Mario Galaxy” for the Wii, “The Witcher,” for the PC and “Desktop Tower Defense.” I play Mario w/ my son for 1/2 to 2 hours at a time. I play Witcher on my own for a couple hours now and then. I play DTD when I need a fix.
Games aren’t any one thing anymore, or even any ten things. They are as “out there” as books and game titles will reflect a growing base of players who are exposed to a variety of games on various platforms. I think it’s a GREAT thing for old-school, hard-core gamers like me, because a bigger pie will generally mean more people in the industry with more resources, and that will lead to better games.
My son plays Mario and Chuzzles. Is he a “core” gamer or a “casual” gamer? He’s just a gamer.
At PurpleCar… “…For another thing, I have no real games of interest for me.” What kind of game are *you* looking for?
Purple car said:
I’m not sure this deserves a response, however there are plenty of designers here who, with Raph, are trying their best to look at this industry from different angles. We don’t deserve that, particularly not here in a place where conventional wisdom is challenged and alternative perspectives are accepted. If you are in a demographic who’s gaming needs are currently unfulfilled, it sounds like a business opportunity. So get on with it then and stop whining. Perhaps you will succeed in having success in a market that we, apparently, don’t understand or don’t respect.
Bart Stewart wrote:
I’m more or less reacting to general resentment of a narrow idea of microtransactions, and not necessarily to you.
A subscription is the exchange of commitment for access to a service. (Compare conscription.) The typical subscription term is 12 months. A subscription fee is often charged monthly, for the term to which you agreed to commit, with billing automated for convenience. Automation is not an integral characteristic of subscription. The fee could be charged with your knowledge and consent. In fact, most governments charge transparent subscription fees. We just call their fees “taxes.”
A microtransaction is also the exchange of commitment for access to a service. Microtransactions usually occur instantly, like subscription fees, except more often with your knowledge and consent. Over time, microtransactions add up, as pieces of a whole, to comprise a larger total non-economic exchange of commitment for access to a service. If payment of that total non-economic exchange was made upfront, then what would be received would not be a service; instead, what would be received would be either a good or a result.
Microtransactions are often (mis-)characterized as being too small of exchanges to be “affordably processed by credit card or other electronic transaction processing mechanisms.” This characterization relies on an arbitrary optimal minimum set by the operators of credit card and electronic transaction processing mechanisms. I say arbitrary because this minimum could change in time with either technological innovation or policy; thus, in my opinion, this attribution is not integral to microtransactions.
What does not change is that microtransactions are parts of a whole, where the whole is the goal of the commercial activity. Microtransactions exist, regardless of form, to provide consumers a means to opt out of a long-term commitment (e.g., a subscription) or to benefit from a service without a long-term commitment (e.g., a subscription.)
As an addendum, virtual items are not property; they are data that serve as keycards (access) that open doors within the game world (service). These doors represent opportunities for entertainment, social interaction, etc. When your character acquires a virtual item, your account gains access or expanded access to the service, not property.
Also, as I wrote before, microtransactions are not required to be intrusive. They are “intrusive” because the law requires transparency; however, if fixed fees were agreed upon prior to engaging the service, then the billing process could take place just as invisibly as automated subscription fees. (Note: I’m not a lawyer, so for the most part, I’m assuming that this is and would be the case.)
So would you say this “niche tax” is the reason that this generation’s consoles (including the Wii, but especially the PS3) cost more than last generation’s? And that many games now cost $60 instead of $50? I suppose you could say that even though the niche is growing, the cost of pleasing the niche is rising even faster. Would it be safe to say that the next generation’s core gamer consoles and games will cost even more?
About microtransactions, my only real concern is that they will be added on top of the typical costs and not actually save the player any money. Isn’t this how it’s typically done on XBox Live, where you will have microtransactions on top of the game’s $60 price? I even remember reading about some game that would charge you a microtransaction fee to unlock cheat codes! I am not happy paying for something that used to be free. It’s the same thing with advertising in games (and even in movie theaters). In my experience, it never actually lowers the price for the consumer.
Yes it does. But there is an ever more important part of what she writes that deserves a response! Rather than telling her to “stop whining” you could actually ask what she’d like! Something that Andy has managed. Andy and Purple very much reflect a rather real problem, namely that some game devs, even if they consider themselves as those looking at things from a different angle, they actually don’t. You never actually look at things from the gamer’s angle. For that you’d need to be curious about their needs.
Every time I hear “stop whining” from a game dev I want to get a penny. I’d be having a great income and on top of having an actually gross sum of how many game devs failed at the most basic thing: Listening.
Rather than this post about how supposed “core gamer crowd” will complain, why isn’t there a discussion that many gamers have been complaining for a very long time that designers design games away from their gaming needs? And why isn’t there a discussion that all too often the only response they get is a variation of “stop whining” or “you deserved to fail” or “you are just lazy” or “this never was meant for you” and changes only coming reluctantly and often initiated by others.
Not asking the question or caring about gamers’ needs but telling to STFU may well justify a nice hyphen chain like “head-in-the-sand-prejudiced-blind-stupid-arrogant f*cks”. I think she got that not all that wrong at all. At least I can completely sympathize with the underlying frustration.
Also she has been poorly stereotyped to begin with, which justifies some solid anger in my book.
Basically your response has exactly justified her point.
The day game devs start asking a lot of questions rather than making grand statements about how things supposedly are or will or should be and how massively open-minded they are, will be a rather very happy day for gamers because suddenly game devs want to learn from and understand their gamers rather than suppose things (and stop being prejudiced-multi-hyphenated f*cks thanks to the change).
And it’s so easy too: Just ask loads of questions.
Like the simple question: Purple, what kind of games would tickle your fancy?
Oddly enough only another gamer on here has managed to ask that basic but all-important question. So only the gamer but not the devs managed to even care, understands and respects Purple’s needs.
Another intriguing question would be: Why do my opinions make people angry? And be sincere and not opinionated about discovering an answer…
But the answer may be as simple as “I didn’t understand, I didn’t manage to ask the right questions, and I didn’t manage to care”. The insight is simple: “I care and I can ask some good questions!” or you can stay multi-hyphenated.
Can someone post the link to Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk again? Folks still fail to listen to it or just fail at listening, period. Purple just said she doesn’t want traditional Italian style sauce even though you said she should be or feel otherwise.
I second Andy’s question and would be really curious what Purple enjoys in a game.
Zomboe wrote:
I don’t know how the idea that businesses should help consumers save money came about, but helping consumers save money is not the goal of any for-profit venture. Decreasing prices by either decreasing costs or value only becomes important when affordability is a point of interest to the market for which the venture is concerned. The ultimate goal of a for-profit venture is to help consumers spend more money, particularly on that venture’s offerings, over and over.
With microtransactions, the idea is to empower consumers with customization, enabling them to derive more value from their purchase decisions, and thereby increase their overall satisfaction, which can lead to increased brand preference and loyalty. Consumers of luxury goods and services are not motivated by cost savings. When cost savings becomes an issue for those consumers, the actual value derived from their purchase decisions needs to be evaluated and corrected.
The idea that designers don’t listen is as pernicious and flawed as designers not listening. This is a conversation, but there are people shouting past each other insisting that the other doesn’t listen, and I’ve never seen a conversation go well that way.
To start with, there is the obvious. Plenty of designers are asking questions, all over the place, all the time. We hang out on forums. We have comment threads on the blog. We post asking “what sort of game are you looking for?” Even a casual search would turn that up.
Beyond that, there’s the work itself. Every game a designer puts out there IS a question. “Do you like this?” “How about this?” “Or this?” Do you think designers do not learn from, or listen to the answers? The “grand pronouncements” you decry are our best summary of the answers we have gotten.
The answers are often not very useful, by the way. We speak different languages. Purple Car probably cannot tell us the precise amount of garlic or mushroom or what breed of tomato she wants in the spaghetti sauce. She knows she wants something sweeter, with more bite, and a smoky undertone. Well, a smoky undertone until she tastes one with a high overnote of oregano and decides she likes that instead.
Grant games the same complexity as spaghetti sauce — often people cannot tell you why they like what they like, and why they dislike what they like, no matter how much we ask.
None of that detracts one whit from Purple’s anger. She is poorly stereotyped? That was data from the census – an average, not a stereotype. Nobody is average, everyone is right to complain that stuff is aimed at the average and not at them. It does not render averages less useful, but her anger is still justified.
As an aside — sometimes a chef just wants to invent a new kind of spaghetti sauce, and he does not care what people want. Yelling at him over that may be counterproductive, at least until you get to try the sauce. Sometimes someone wants to talk to one group (say, core gamers that they have seen upset), and another group overhears and says “why aren’t you talking to me instead?” In conversations, this is usually considered rude. This is why people get angry at your posts.
Isn’t that the main argument in favor of Laissez-Faire Capitalism? That it leads to innovation and low prices due to competion?
I’d point to Kart rider or Neopets as an example of how micropayments can be a benefit for the end user. In the US, micropayments do seem to function normally as an “added revenue stream” instead. So you do see people paying full price for the game and then pay again for extras.
Even the core gamers who pay a monthly fee already pay more on occasion… willingly (RMT mostly, though other services to support their social circle as well like web hosting for various tools).
This discussion is interesting mostly in that it implies that categorization matters as much today as it did previously, and that one category (Moms/Kids, or “casual”) will replace another (18-34 guys, or “core/enthusiast”).
What is being missed is the fact that there’s plenty of room for both, not because of the huge amount of money out there, but because they’re entirely different markets fed by entirely different companies with entirely different needs.
Everything is up for grabs. Traditional barriers are shifting. People are already making money talking to different markets. A lot of what is ignored by enthusiast-focused developers and gamers is due almost entirely to the revenue involved and how it is collected (pay = revenue). Less actual money is made for other types of models (microtrans, embedded advertising, etc), but they hit a lot more actual eyeballs (people) so are at least compelling for very different reasons.
Then there’s the cultural revolution that’s been underway for some time, at least in the U.S, the shedding of Industrial Revolution one-size-fits-all in favor of more personalization/customization. It’s not just about your songs ofr your iPod, but your portable device of choice at all, and from there the entire business that delivered it to you and makes money from it. The nichification of America is well underway.
Games are just part of it.
People like to talk about “anytime, anywhere” gaming as some new thing. Not really.
Raph said:
PurpleCar said:
I think she’s perfectly capable if telling you, because she did! I don’t think it’s all that important to worry about nuance, because the needs are rather specific.
People are not so bad at identifying their needs, specifically if they are chronically underserved.
To go back to your original post I actually think that its main trust and outlook is extremely casual-friendly and I really enjoy and support that.
I also think that some attitudes around some “core” gamers should change, but it’ll remain to be seen how that develops.
I think the main source of possible misunderstanding is the specific ordering of quoting the “average” mom and then following it by “That’s not us now is it?” and after that the prose wanders. It’s really easy to read this as you aligning yourself with “core” players and differentiating the core and yourself from that “average” picture of the Mom.
It certainly got me and I can only second guess that it got Purple as well.
But reading the whole post there certainly is a strong sense that your sympathies are with rising casual gaming and asking core gamers to adjust.
I do find Purple’s post particularly interesting in the light of your bookshelf analogy. Basically Purple says in a sense: “I go in the book store now and there is hardly any selection for me. What are you on about worrying about the folks who currently have most of the store catering to their needs. Aren’t you a book writer, why don’t you address the shortage?”
This may seem like an unwarrented “but what about me” post. But another way of looking at it is this: The real concern is how the bookstore will specifically be stocked, how big the bookstore will be and what kinds of audiences it will serve.
Purple is expressing the need to rethink the bookstore offerings, and the struggle to get these books in against a dominant “core” culture and the feeling that many game devs share and are part of that dominant culture (and are actually not interested in her gaming needs).
I think that is very legit also as a topic and I see the anger more as the frustration about the current book store stocking and the lack of visible signs that it’ll improve (I haven’t heard many cooperative-heavy MMORPG announcements recently, WAR, Conan, etc all emphasize gore and/or PVP, so I can sympathize with Purple actually pointing to the fact that the book store isn’t actually changing in specific ways). If Startrek Online actually turns out to be 7-year old friendly (unlikely) it might be an example of an appropriate game. I very rarely see game dev discussion that start with “what would a family with veteran gamer parents and pre-teen children enjoy as a computer game to play together” discussed heavily.
Some of the solutions are rather dull, like yet another disney movie themed jump&run.
I do see heavy discussion how to keep the core happy in a changing gaming landscape and I do see heavy discussion about the “casual games”. Even the discussion about “casual games” is funny because it has certain assumptions. For example take the Simpsons and make a full fledged MMO ala WoW out of it, with reduced gore (E or worst Teen rating), and accessible gameplay so that a 6-year old can meaningfully participate in a PVE type collaborative gameplay. This is not what we usually mean by “casual games” which are typically fairly low budget, small team developments (exceptions to the stereotype granted). Some games are geared towards the casual (Sims comes to mind) but is fairly high budget, but does completely diverge from a typical collaborative gaming idea that would be MMO PVE. Purple actually very legitimately points at the fact that there are many niches that are underserved and poorly understood and hers in particular. I can’t help but agree that running into a game store I will find many many war simulation games but few interesting collaborative games. Even sports games often only allow people to play on opposing teams. If a family looks for a game to play together you are kind of challenged running into a gaming store, even if you browse for “casual games”. Or they may be forced to play Wii, but not specifically enjoy the Wii paradigm, like Purple evidently doesn’t.
And while that may not be the main topic of your initial post, it is, I think very interesting and very worthwhile. And the fact that it’s underserved and poorly understood, warrants some frustration.
It’s also very worthwhile because the main wave of current casual gaming isn’t actually appearing to adressing Purple’s (or I mentioned Wolfhead’s on my blog) concerns and these are very good ones. Yet some of it is very predictable, because basically we are talking about the ever growing demographics of former core players coming of age and hence forming new outlooks as they enter new stages in their lives.
This demographics, rather than resisting the change that you call and predict for current “core” players, have already embrace it and completed it (thanks to changed RL circumstances) but find limited support in the gaming landscape for the change they have already made. The crowd to look forward to addressing that changed need are the game devs of course.
Some good debate happening around this issue! It’s been a while since I’ve chimed in here, but I thought I’d return to make a few points:
Your Mom is actually one of my main motivators for being interested in game design. One of my goals is to work towards a game that My Mum will be interested in playing. As a mid-20’s designer, I find my mid-50’s parents to be a wonderful playtesting resource. They have far fewer preconceptions about games, and tend to be less forgiving of a waste of time. If your parents are intelligent and up for new experiences, no matter what their age, try out a few games on them, even just getting them to watch and comment.
Regarding Bart Stewart’s point of micro-transactions being intrusive and breaking the magic circle, others have covered this better than I could, however I would like to present my personal observations. My partner plays Albatross 18, a micro-transaction funded game. She typically purchases ‘astros’ in bulk, and spends them as she needs. The rule here is that it is all highly implementation dependant. If you make completing visible micro-transactions a requirement of continuing to enjoy the game, you are placing barriers in front of the gamer, which causes distress. Whereas, if you were to make visible micro-transactions able to extend and enhance your existing enjoyment rights, players will tend to actively pay for them. Players select the easiest path to enjoyment (returns on investment in terms of time), as a rule. It seems to me that a lot of the theory discussion about micro-transactions happen without considering how to design in the user experience, something I will return to later.
Micro-transaction implementations vary so much that lumping them into a single category is not always fair. Consider the cases of direct payment for an item (visible micro-transaction), Payment via a ‘currency’ (less visible) and payment that simply automatically happens through your credit card account (invisible). The last design is perhaps unethical, but fits well with modern culture, it feels. If a ‘currency’ is involved, the manner by which this is paid for and its cost change the nature of the system further. If the currency happened to be a right to farm golds, and you set up an automatic regular purchase of this currency, you effectively have a subscription model.
Now, turning to Raph’s post on the changing future of the industry, it is useful to note that typically break down the current games market into five categories (ignoring MMOs, for they complicate matters and are really on a separate axis):
Blockbuster games – extremely high budget productions, often marketed for their lavish production values. Comparable to blockbuster films, we have now entered the 70’s in game design terms (Jaws, regarded as the first blockbuster by many, was released in 1975).
Franchise games – Although these can often have blockbuster value, franchise games typically have guaranteed success through their name alone. Yearly sports games are often within this category, as are those games that use film titles. SimCity Societies is a good example of the use of a game franchise being used for this effect.
Arthouse games – Katamari, Okami, The Sims, and some strategy games are what I would call Arthouse games. Although production values may be high, it is the gameplay that drives development, more than attempting to showcase other production values. They often explore novel game designs and topologies, and their success is not always predictable. These are generally rare, much like their cinematic counterparts. However, film publishers know to directly fund these, for it gives them a good name, and hence are better able to attract talent.
Serious games – The documentaries of the gaming world, this also includes simulations and other games that drive sales based on the accuracy of their systems (an appropriate lumping, since you can get books on converting FSX skills into a real pilot’s licence). My personal speciality over the last year.
Casual games – A poor category for the lumping together of shorter, less detailed games that focus on providing a ‘hit’ of fun. Although some studios are investing a lot of money into casual games now, they are still seen as having very low production values, as appealing to a different type of player to other games, being very short in length, and very easy to drop and pick up again. There is no film analogy for these!
With the above, we have effectively divided up the games market to neatly fit into the categories used by the motion picture industry. Films exist that fall a little outside of these groupings, but once you correct for their typical audience, they can then be categorised by this scheme within the group of similar films.
Now, hopefully, you will have noticed two problems with the above. Firstly, that casual games really don’t relate to films at all. And secondly, that films are only one form of alternative entertainment. We seem to be producing all games to be marketed and sold as if they were films, one-off hits available only from special outlets. In many respects, games are being viewed as a genre, or an entirely separate and inseparable technology, not simply a medium.
We have become locked into this view of being a genre, of meaning seven hours of gameplay priced at £40. Yet casual games are trying to show us that there is more than just that to gaming. In terms of comparable media, they are really more like magazines than films.
In terms of the film analogy, most games still aspire for blockbuster production costs. Sets are built as needed, torn down again after filming has finished. Custom props are produced rather than sourced. Scripts may be worked on for years.
I’ve been playing through season 1 of TellTale Games’ Sam & Max episodic series, and I am full of praise for the design process I have seen so far. Objects, locations, characters and sound samples are heavily reused (although annoyingly redistributed each time).
Movies that are not aiming to be ‘blockbusters’ (and especially made-for-tv and straight-to-DVD) tend to use exterior locations with few changes, may source an existing house to be used for filming, and often make do with spray-painting props or gluing things together in interesting ways to make a ‘bomb’. As you move from film to television, this gets pronounced even further. Sets are even sold on and shared between productions, and set dressers end up with large collections of devices to re-use. TV shows have typically no more than a three week rolling production cycle (a writing team, a filming and acting team, and post production team if needed, all working in parallel), and costs have to be kept down.
Magazine production is somewhat different again, with some articles having a regular format that is easy to produce new content for, others being written by freelancers, and some parts even the result of the readers themselves (print 2.0? :P). Photographs often come from archives, or are purchased as needed. They are a lot of work, but no more so than other forms of information.
Of course, magazines are technically a change of medium from visual film. Visual non-interactive recordings is really medium that collects together movie films, DVD films, and television shows. But it is worth still considering magazines, as they are still part of the entertainment industry.
I’ll let others extend this detailing to books, or to radio, or for even websites.
The big point here is that films still exist, despite the other forms of visual non-interactive recording. And even with their competition from other mediums, we still have blockbuster films each and every year, and audiences have not seemed to decrease. Production quality of television shows has markedly increased even in just the last decade, yet movies are thriving. Similarly, games will adapt, change, cost less and be more casual, but we will still have blockbusters. The easy money for blockbuster games might dry up, and the industry’s sales methods may change, but the supply of blockbuster and other film-like games certainly will not.
And the good news is, those blockbuster games will be better than ever, I’d bet. As promised, I wish to touch on User Experience, something I have been involved with research in heavily over the last month. I’ve found that most serious game projects tend to take for granted the nature of their user experience (or rather, assume a user interface, and by doing this dictate a user experience). Very little consider the design of their interface worthy of consideration in publications about their project. Gamasutra thankfully has quite a few features on UE design, but few seem to have been taken to heart by many developers. In this respect, the games industry is certainly not “in the 70’s”. Although we have figured out set pieces, only a few developers manage to pull off effects like pacing (I actually swore when I realised that Valve did this in HL2: episode 2, I was that impressed!), like considering unique methods of interaction, like making any real use of their physics engine (and I’m not even sure I fully count Valve’s see-saws as this, either). Very much, the focus is often still on the technology, and not the human factors that should be at the heart of the design. That’s why micro-transactions often suck – they are simply slapped on without consideration.
The move towards Your Mom games is a wonderful one, in my opinion, for the effects it will have on game design. Your Mom is less impressed by particle effects, and more impressed by the experience of playing the game. The experience of playing the game can only be designed by considering first and foremost the most important part of that experience – the user. We are beginning to see moves towards this (Portal, for example, has had some major changes done to it from it’s initial design stage because of what they found the user actually needed), but the move to make more Your Mom games will require that all such developers put her first. And let’s face it, you probably like some of the things your mom is interested in (Ok, so perhaps it was just me who had a mum who listed “Conan” and “Aliens” as her favourite films, but you probably appreciate what she likes, at least). Your mom games are also smaller and quicker to produce than classic games, meaning it becomes actually possible to experiment with design concepts, providing us with valuable data on real players. Those same production skills and values will naturally then find their way back into your blockbuster games, with their new skills at being able to direct the user experience resulting in the most compelling product yet.
That’s precisely the concern I was trying to express. Thank you for putting it as succinctly as I should have, Michelle. 🙂
Most of the pro developer discussions I’ve seen on this subject have focused on the biz aspects of microtransactions (however implemented). But I can’t recall seeing much commentary at all on what a microtransation model does to the play experience of the actual gamer, in particular the gamers accustomed to a more “pay and forget” model. I’d enjoy seeing more serious discussion by experienced game developers from the gameplay-effect perspective. I’d like to have a better understanding of why some developers feel that Western gamers are likely to happily embrace the possible changes to “their” gameplay driven by more frequent decision-making about payment choices.
(I put “their” gameplay in quotes to point out that I personally am not stuck on any particular model, but I think many gamers are. If anything, I’m most frequently on the “try never to be blinded to what might be by what currently is” side of any development discussion! Just wanted to mention it, since I can see how I might have come across as dogmatically defending the subscription model. That’s not the case; I just haven’t yet seen good support for the claim that microtransactions may offer more satisfying gameplay than a subscription model. The possibility that it might be better for casual gameplay — and thus bring in more people who don’t currently game online — is the most persuasive argument I’ve seen so far. But I’d like to see that possibility given a good critical airing to see if it holds up.)
As someone currently in academia, I’d like to also suggest that we don’t just want serious discussion by experienced game developers, but we also need trawling of academic research for related studies. Off the top of my head, I know that a lot of studies have been done into the psychology of payment, so perhaps one of those directly relates to this topic.
If I wasn’t busy with other things right now, I’d look into it. Remind me in a few weeks, perhaps 😉
The lack of detailed involvement and communication between trivial game developers and academia is something that has become a personal irritation in my research, as there are some lovely examples in trivial games (as in the opposite of ‘serious’, no negative cogitations intended) of user interface and interaction design, but I cannot use them in bulk due to their lack of documentation in trusted journals, and I see all kinds of academic research that the game development community would strongly benefit from.
(but that’s all going off on a tangent)
Moroagh said,
Really? I thought I invited her to roll up her sleeves and help fill the void. In retrospect I’m regretting my choice of words, however if she is felling frustrated that her needs are not being met, then swearing at all of us seems like an odd approach. Designers fill niches based on where we see opportunity and we are often in the niches we serve. If we are getting it wrong then it may to take designers from her demographic to fill her needs. The games industry doesn’t listen to players per se. It can’t listen to feedback in a forum because it’s not homogeneous. The industry is filled with companies and individuals with vastly different approaches and opinions. Some of these are good listeners, some rely on focus groups, some rely on the vision and entrepreneurship of their designers. It’s impossible for any one of us to respond to your critism because none of us can claim to represent the entire games industry – certainly not me. For this same reason, PurpleCar’s comments, besides being rude, are difficult to respond too. I’m making games for a niche I understand and believe in. Am I suppose to feel bad that I’m not making games for her demographic? Who here is in a position to take responsibility for the fact that she can’t find the types of games she wants? At the end of the day, if there is a true market need it will eventually be filled, likely by someone who has the same needs as Purplecar and had the guts to take the plunge.
I think there is accessability and pricing policy in the mix as well. Okay, Mom won’t play the blood and gore FPS core gamer games, but maybe Dad would. But these games won’t work on his office computers and it’s still too early that he considers a console for their living room. He may not even consider playing games as an activity. Not because of dislike. There are folks out there who won’t go into the theaters, not because they don’t like to, but because they haven’t this sort of activity in their »book of activities«.
Yes, you did and I grant you that I think you were very well intended.
But: Say you go to a restaurant and inform the cook that certain choices of dishes are lacking from the menu. Now the cook turns around and tells you: Stop whining and cook those yourself, you’ll make a buck or two!
Do you understand what the problem is there?
Not at all, but rather than trying to read what is behind her anger statement (the only thing you cared to quote) you could have cared to read what she wrote and requested and you could have asked more questions.
You basically didn’t which basically means you don’t care.
Don’t get me wrong: You have the perfect right to not care. Like a cook has the perfect right to not add a dish to his selection. But that’s different from being dismissive by telling his client they should cook stuff they need themselves and stop whining.
If the client thinks of the cook in multi-hyphenated terms afterwards, I for one, am not the least surprised, because actually the cook was rude too, though possibly well-meaning.
I’m just surprised how much effort there is to justify how hard it is to listen to people and how many market potentials there are but how little effort there is to actually do something – from game devs like yourself.
I do learn this though: Some game devs basically make games for themselves. Sid Meier was already so smart to express that devs should make games for gamers.
No, but you could feel bad for telling a non-cook, a potential client, to go cook themselves. And you could feel bad for telling them to “stop whining” rather than “I understand your concern”.
Your whole post could have been as simple as:
“While this is an angry outburst, I see the need. Someone really should pick this up and develop games for that niche. It’s not my interest but it’s a worthwhile direction.”
That’s a completely different response because you suddenly don’t tell people off.
In the end the problem with your response was exactly that you felt insulted by her rant more than reading her needs. She complained that her needs weren’t respected, and indeed your response exactly displayed that.
But you have the right to not wanting to serve her needs and not understanding that you can still care and display that care.
If the hypothetical cook said: “Yeah I see your point. I can’t really accommodate that need but these dishes should be served somewhere” the client feels much better (the cook does’t have his head in the sand), because the “whining” was justified (and the cook has sympathy for her complaint, rather than being dismissive).
The really smart cook even realizes behind the rant the gift: There is earning potential here and the client was so graceful to inform me of it.
You can take the gift or not. That’s totally free. But regardless, the client did something good and helpful by addressing the cook, even if they don’t find the best words or the best mood for it.
And a professional cook understands a simple service-economy principle: The client is king. Which is as simple as saying that the client’s needs are important and the client’s shortcomings are to be overlooked gracefully.
Again, I want a penny for a dev to use that “whining” word… it really is a bad sign, because it displays disregard for the gamer’s concern.
Some people go to film school and – go out and make Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or the Godfather.
Some people go to film school and – go out and make commercials and spots for salesmen conventions.
Some people learn to write and they write – Stranger in a Strangland or The Hunt for Red October or The Princess Bride.
Some People learn to write and they write for the Tabloids or US magazine
The first discover that it takes a long time and they rarely ever ever get rich ( there is a lot of swings and misses for a Success )
The second discovers that there is a constant demand for the work and its quicker and easier and they always have a pay check and that a lot more housewives read US than do hardback novels.
This is just what is being discussed as the “big shift” in gaming. The same old truth in just a newer medium.
Here’s hoping by shifting to the quick pop marketplace this medium can be different and take some of the craft and creativity with it. History says NO in the vast vast majority of cases. Maybe gaming can be the first to bring quality to the wider audience.
…remeber the hopes for TV as a tool for mankind 🙂
The thing is, I don’t think it is so much of a shift, but rather an expansion.
Recent years have seen more university “game design” courses come into being, vast numbers of self-help books and websites exist, and the industry is slowly gaining a degree of wide credibility. Labour to make the games looks to be easily available.
Your Mom and even Your Dad are getting into games, and marketing companies now are seeing games as the useful tool they are. Businesses are slowly experimenting with serious games, and this sector (once it gets it head out of technology and into actually dealing with the users) is really set to boom. There is also the fact that most games we see do not even begin to cover the emerging middle eastern and indian markets! As such, the market for games will also grow.
The part were it becomes to get less optimistic is with respect to financing. We shall ignore issues of general economics, for those are far outside our scope here. With the gaming market maturing and becoming increasingly able to produce polished products, VC for experimental concepts may well dry up. Serious games are also expected to have their funding tightened, as many of the technology based projects fail to show results. VCs and publishers are likely to want to see evidence of designs generally appealing at a wider demographic than a lot of current titles aim for, also. On the bright side, however, the potential market will be bigger (and hence a concept that hits the market well will have more money), and business and marketeers may directly fund projects.
The question you need to ask yourself is “did the emergence and increasing adoption of alternative media and easier access to forms of that media (tv versus film) result in a decrease in craft and creativity?”
In my opinion, the opposite has actually occurred. We have become better skilled at crafting each moment of video footage to have meaning. Although the average length these quality productions may have decreased, their satisfaction value has increased. We generally accept this reduction in length, as the perceived cost has also decreased (until you see the price of a series on DVD, but that’s another huge rant :P).
Of course, not all modern video non-interactive recordings are better than their older counterparts. But the director’s skill at crafting pace, at drawing the viewer’s attention, at misdirection, at designing set pieces generally seems to have increased. Although one can’t do flashy car chases in a sedate suburban soap opera, one can focus on how to write scripts well, frame shots, and so on. Action series with high budgets provide ample opportunities to hone action scenes, whilst those with low budgets (more important for this example) force experimentation with pacing, setting and script writing.
Indeed, if anything is wrong with the current film industry, it is that far too much money is often being thrown around. This was very much the case in the 90’s, were raw explosion was often seen as a suitable replacement for dialogue (remind you of anything?)
I guess I’m not clear on the question here. Is the implication that gamers will go away and game developers need to shift their target, or is it that there is a much bigger target (market) out there just waiting to be plucked?
Your right, I really don’t. I don’t make the rules here, however I always assumed that players come to this type of forum to hear about the craft, learn about the process and get involved with the issues at another level. Do I expect to be doing customer service here? No. If I’m responding to email from my players, the reponses have to be carefully crafted. There are sessions on communicating with players at GDC – Raph did one a few years back. But I’m not in my kitchen here. I’m at the local bar talking to other cooks and conesours of food interested in cooking. Would you really want designers here to be in customer service mode?
Also right, but why here in neutral territory? I think there are places where equal standards of civility apply to both players and designers. This is one of them.
Lemme venture a guess that the anger there was directed at #18, rather than any designer, for insinuating that since the chefs are all looking at cooking a certain dish they will no longer be able to make that dish a small minority of people like. Which was an absurd point to make, of course, but that’s how people who think they need not eat becaue they are priests in WoW operate.
Well, it irritated me anyway, as I could probably write many pages about how the sub model is an unfair immersion breaking restriction on a game designer. But you could sum it up by letting people borrow microcredits and only disallowing a log on if the bank was 0 or less. If that’s really the issue, which it isn’t.
I consider these somewhat related.
Businesses sometimes define opportunities and then hire designers to design around that. Advergaming is one example on occasion, as is much of casual online/download games. Even these categories fall into niches though, they’re just different niches, with different people and talked to different ways. There’s no casual online/download game magazine for example, but rather advertising driven through the other interest-based magazines for that core consumer.
Why doesn’t the current industry service these people? They do, actually. It’s just that if someone comes from the core/enthusiast side of the industry, they’re going to start searching for their games from that area first. There’s just not a lot of direct links between core MMOs like Raph has worked on and you’re most recent Seek & Find game 🙂
Maybe Metaplace will bridge that gap.
Purple was not making customer service request, she was pointing at a lack of design effort/market coverage. You say this is a forum to discuss game dev/game market, her point was a game dev/market relevant point!
And if you think overlooking someones rhethorical slips and upsets is a bad idea in a neutral environment, so be it. You have the right to feel offended and not look beyond it.
I don’t find this insistence in any way helpful but alas.
Yep, basically your contribution to this discussion is your insistance that you feel treated rudely and keep arguing this point. My attempt is to try steer the discussion towards what value actually is to be found in Purple’s contribution and explain her anger is totally drowned in this insistance.
I still hold that game devs would greatly benefit if they managed to look beyond surfacing anger of their customers and their own hurt feelings and understand what their potential customer-base is telling them, but I don’t see that simple point reverberating with you at all, so I’ll stop trying.
So I’m conceeding. I failed to manage to get the discussion away from your hurt feelings and towards more constructive aspects that game devs could actually learn from.
At a certain point you need to just cut your losses. Civility can often not be imposed through the comments of another random interneter.
I for one would like to get back to the topic itself. There’s plenty of places to visit for one’s daily drama drink 🙂
Word. I’m really curious about family gaming now actually. Gotta do some research.
Lets not forget the “long tail”.
Where there’s a demand, there will be a supply. The real issue here is keeping up with “state of the art”, I think.
Raph, I don’t recall on your chart about the long tail, if it shows any kind of wave moving over long periods of time from the tail end up. I suspect that any models wouldn’t have a long enough history to verify any such thing. But in this age of technology and the speed which things are moving, I think maybe some day it will. On this subject at least. I see internet entertainment as something on hyper-drive compared to other traditional industries, time/change/movement wise.
I understand this completely. But conversely, the ultimate goal for consumers is to spend as little as possible to get as much as possible. As a consumer myself, you can see why I’d argue in favor of saving money. I am not seeing any added value when microtransactions are charged for what used to be free. Are such schemes the exception or the rule?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but affordability is definitely a point of interest to me. It’s the primary reason I don’t own a PS3 or Xbox360, or buy many games at launch.
My post was addressing what Raph said above:
My problem is that my price point is likely to be under current pricing, not over. Instead of paying $60 + more for more stuff, I’d rather pay $30 and cut out the stuff I don’t want. Rik’s comment about microtransactions used as an added revenue stream is exactly my concern. Prices tend to go up. I’d love to be wrong, though.
[…] […]
Just to add to the controversy, this post has been reprinted on Gamasutra now… 🙂
[…] […]
Everybody? Nobody? Some of us more than others of us. But I’m reminded of something that was pointed out to me before. Woody Allen makes movies that Woody Allen wants to see, and Steven Spielberg makes the kind of movies he would want to see. So in some ways the answer to the question has to be, I don’t know where this game visionary is right now, but I suspect they are listening to Carrie Underwood, or Daughtry, or some other American Idol.
Geez, Raph. You really do like to scare people. Is there actually evidence that the number of games that are aimed for the core market has diminished while the casual game market has grown in recent history?
Looking at the shelves I see no evidence but that’s not hard numbers.
In fact looking at my circle of friends I might even argue that games like WoW have grown the core market (by turning more casual gamers even non-gamers into core gamers).
So yeah, I wonder what the core will do when they are getting scared to pieces by dire sounding predictions to their market segment by one of the most verbal theorists of the industry. “Complain?”
Stuff like:
Yep, that’s just a big scare without evidence for now. “But what if the sky is falling? Will you panic? Omgz, what will you do?”
I wish someone posted historical scares for the movie industry when TV established itself, or scares for serious fiction market when the pulp market grew… Best scares that don’t even mention market data, so it’s even less tractable.
Not scared yet? Maybe this will help:
Whee, that could work! And we don’t even have good evidence for that except that maybe industry wants to leverage RMT or any other business model to garner extra income (under any circumstances?), something that every gamer (casual or core) could well be scared about or simply punish the idea by not paying and seeking out business models they find tolerable.
Maybe those that ought to be scared are companies that take risky business models that go against the expressed desires of their customers because they will lose them to competition with more sensible models?
It may well be that the overall store is growing and the core game products are growing too, just all that core gamers ever will need to learn to tolerate that other game types exist as well (and even that is very questionable as casual games have existed for a very long time, basically since we have computer games.) and possibly grow faster.
Growth in core market games may well control its price demand as there is increased competition. So is it so inevitable that core gamers ought to be scared about rising prices? I don’t see good evidence, except that some game devs keep on talking about ways to get more money out of the gamers pockets seeing the rise in interest and the discovery of new models and new audiences.
But all this is set up controversially with lots of lacking evidence, so we can have long discussions about hypotheticals without any way to actually pin down something.
But certainly grats on the gamasutra article, good exposure… I wish it was on a topic that’s less out there to try to cause unwarranted controversy, or at least some solid data would be preferable, but that’s me… But heck controversy wins the media game for sure so well done 😉
For now it has great scare value and great potential to pit core vs casual even more. Nothing like hating those (casuals) that supposedly destroy your (core) market. Well done there too.
If you look at all fields of engineering, design and media creation, you see exactly what you describe. People almost always make a product that they or someone important to them wishes to use.
With less creative items, formal design processes have been developed to try and reduce the importance of the team’s own preferences. ISO 13407:1999 specifies a guide to how to ensure your design is user-centred, for example.
In creative fields, this is much harder to do, especially as there are often conflicting pressures (such as being told that your TV show can only appeal to one audience demographic, as that is what the advertisers want).
The big problem I have found is that these production biases are self-reinforcing. People typically hire similar people, and so the creative desires of the team do not significantly grow in scope.
This was an interesting tidbit for me. This standard has been around for a goodly chunk of MMO history and the setting seems appropriate, have any developer studios adopted it or, as Michelle suggested, is the setting too ‘creative’ for it to be useful?
[…] (0) Deutsches Team bei “The 48 Hour Film Project” erfolgreich Senden anh�ren What will the gamers do? eingereicht von eriktechn vor einer Stunde und 59 […]
Gee Raph, way to stir up even more trouble. 😉
As much as I hate to admit it, micro-transactions are going to be a business model and already are in some instances, but I don’t think it will improve anything until game developers start focusing on quality.
For instance, let’s look at the MMO market right now. More and more of these games are coming out unfinished and bug ridden than ever before. It’s even gotten to the point where single player/console games are becoming this way, due to the abilities of consoles now being able connect to the internet and to be patched. How can the industry expect the paying public to pay even more money at his point when the product quality gets worse?
Until the industry can start providing a lot more quality in the games released, I don’t believe large scale micro-transactions will work. Remember, those DDR, GH, Rock Band games are already, for the most part, offering a full complete and fun game for the money and then adding micro-transactions for extended game play.
Uh, this is the exact same text. They asked if they could reprint it, I said yes.
There is plenty of evidence of a shift, in terms of industry investment — I didn’t actually say that the amount had diminished. In fact, I think it is more accurate to say that extremely core is growing slowly, moderately core is growing healthily, and non-core is growing insanely fast. The issue wasn’t growth — it was relative amounts of investment.
* The most core of markets is the PC market and it has suffered massive decline. Lots of stats on that.
* The games are now designed for much shorter time investments, much to the dismay of core gamers in in several genres, who want their money’s worth and are upset over RPGs that used to be 50 hours being 8 instead. This is because of developers tuning their offering to chase more typical gamers, for whom 45 hours of that 50 hour game will never be seen.
* Several genres that are more core have simply disappeared altogether as the demands of the core market and the costs of providing the game versus the possible return on investment simply did not match.
Plus, of course, there’s plenty of trends to be teased out of examining publisher portfolios over the course of a few years.
You seem to have concluded that this post is all scare tactics and a hypothetical straw man. Yes, there are hard numbers. I’ve posted them on this blog for several years running. Ironically, this post wasn’t trying to use scare tactics at all (unlike others I have done!). Of course there are plenty of hypotheticals in the article — it is based on the extrapolation and market predictions I have been making. But those are based on hard numbers.
As I said originally, I get asked “but what about games for US?” constantly. What’s more, I see it regularly in the comment threads on gaming news sites on a regular basis, particularly when there’s news about a more casual game coming out.
Based on the numbers I see, I’d say that there has definitely been some growth. However, there’s also been a lot of air sucked out of the market by WoW. It may have single-handledly put the nails in the coffin of the retail PC market, for example.
Actually, we have seen a steady price rise trend going on for a few years now. From when I started out in the industry to today, the core game has gone up by $15.
I didn’t go dig up links for all of the points I made because they are part of the context here — most folks here have read the dozens of preceding posts and presentations that are presupposed by what I am saying.
I also have to point out that I didn’t take sides in the casual versus core issue at all here, and in fact ended up saying that the gap would be bridged. You seem upset at something here, and I am not sure what it is.
PC World joins the fray!
[…] What will the gamers do? […]
[…] gets a lot of its assumptions�I won’t say wrong, but let’s just say not persuasively right. Go read the original post as well if you like (the Gamasutra version’s been “adapted”) but in essence, he’s simply saying […]
Sure, you can try to be the McDonalds of the gaming world. You’ll appeal to everyone – you might even be financially successful – but your product will ultimately be crap, and many will be left unsatisfied. Just because there’s a McDonalds doesn’t mean there can’t be a Chipotle, an Olive Garden, a Black Angus, or a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. You can’t force everyone to eat at McDonalds all the time.
The gaming market will not only widen, but mature. Audience taste will become stratified. Some games will appeal to the hardcore sci-fi fans, some to soccer moms, and others to everything in between. To think that you can appeal to everyone is a recipe for mediocrity. There’s going to be more tolerance for niche markets and large budget titles like Halo aren’t going anywhere because the hardcore gamer won’t die out and these things are fun as hell to play. Just because a market is niche doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in it. Case-in-point: EVE online.
Casual gamers are a one time cash influx because they play the game a few times and then quit. They don’t conduct microtransactions. They don’t buy expansions and strategy guides. They don’t attend fan events and cons, and spend hundreds of dollars on limited edition items, or hundreds on a con just so they can get a coupon for a free in game item. Hardcore gamers do that. Hardcore gamers are the ones that will keep a game going for months and months. Hardcore gamers buy everything they can, stretching their cashflow to the limit because games are what they care about. Hardcore gamers are the ones that preorder games. Hardcore gamers are the ones that really drive the industry and no amount of fearmongering is going to change that. Why else are studios like Battlefront.com thriving, while “casual MMO’s” like StarWarsGalaxies are dying?
Interestingly Raph, who keeps Ultima Online going? Hardcore gamers. Who keeps SWG going? Hardcore gamers. Who bought every expansion for SWG? Hardcore gamers. Every expansion for UO? Hardcore. The Hardcore gamers are the ones that will not only do that, but they will buy the collectors set just to get the limited edition map, and the exclusive in game item, every time you release one.
You keep trying to chase the casual gamer cash influx dragon while missing the long term economic benefits of developing and nurturing hardcore gamers. Blizzard knows. Wargamers know. Sports management sim and flight sim manufacturer’s know.
Think about it. You get 10 casual gamers who buy the game $50, and play the first month free. That’s 500 dollars. Say 5 of them play the 2nd month, at 10 bucks a month, that’s 50 bucks. 2 of them play another 4 months, that’s 80 bucks, and one lasts for a full year (6 more months), another 60 bucks. That’s about $690 bucks you get off those 10 casual gamers.
But look from another angle. Out of those $690, that one gamer that played the whole year made you $170 of that. Toss in the guy who made it to 6 months, and you have another $110, for a total of $280.
Think about that. Out of the 10 casual players you have, that one hardcore player is 25% of your revenue. Toss in the semi-hardcore player, who is 15% of your revenue, and you got 40% of your total revenue from those 10 players coming solely from the two hardcore people.
Now throw in the fact that those two hardcore players are going to be the ones who conduct microtransactions. They’re going to be the ones who buy strategy guides, and expansions, and play for months and years if you keep giving them epic content. Suddenly those few hardcore players are more important over the long run than your influx of casual players who will buy the game and then quit.
Instead, spend your time nurturing and developing your relationships with the hardcore gamers. I’m not saying ignore the casual gamers, give them content, but remember that you generally only need to develop content for them once or twice, and that content will work for every new group of casual players that come in. But the hardcore players need continual and increasingly more content delivered to them, and just like any drug addict, they keep needing and devouring more and more and the person who profits is the supplier. Everyone is happy, the supplier has money and a devoted fan base, and the addict is happy because he has his fix and a supplier that cares about him and is willing to continue to provide.
Is there? Give data!
I’d agree to that, but that is neither new nor surprising. The only thing I have to add here is that I disagree that games for the extremely core ever was not niche. For example PVP MUD was a niche of the MUD landscape, and MUDs certainly was a niche of game types.
It was a niche that got selected when PVP MUDs were picked as role-models for the early graphical “MUDs” (i.e. UO). That never made them mainstream. If PVE MUDs would have been the basis, the whole story would have been no less niche.
As a side-note, a question that would really interest me: When did the word “core” first appear in the lingua of game devs/gamers? That’d give some interesting background and historical context.
See there is this odd assumption that something called “core” was mainstream. I don’t believe this looking at the kind of gaming I have seen over the years. The original pong console can hardly be called “core” by any standards. Was pac-man core? Tetris? Little computer people? IRC chat games? Minesweeper or Solitaire? Gameboy or its momochrome single-game predecessors Game & Watch? Was M.U.L.E. core?
The word “core” is flawed not only in current context but certainly also historically. And the narrative that core was mainstream is kind of a false reflection of history.
But given this extensive caveat, I kind of agree that I think your growth predictions are right, I just don’t think that’s in any way new, or worrysome.
I disagree to the assumption as well. There is an important difference between game content and game platform. PC == core is flawed. Certainly if many people that the extreme core games (let me pick GH3, just because it mentioned before as “serious”) are multiplatform and certainly console games. The equating of PC == core may be a convenient narrative but I don’t believe it to be true.
Retail sales for PC are in a decline, I agree. But this misses the following PC bound markets: MMOs (RP or socal network types), browser bound games. Both of these are in rapid growths. So many of the doomsday articles about PCs as gaming platforms don’t actually take into account all gaming uses of the PC that aren’t covered in retail numbers.
Just to preempt more assumptions: I don’t agree that browser game == casual game, nor do I agree that MMOs have moved away from the extreme core, rather the opposite, most MMO titles heavily court the extreme core market (Warhammer, Conan to mention the two most visible upcoming titles).
WoW while blindly bashed as “casual EQ”, actually caters to the extreme core by offering raid content that allows 6 days a week a 5 hour raid schedule for extreme core players and keeps them in the game.
But again this misses the point. Many extreme core own a PC, an XBox360 (and have played GH3 and Viva Pinata long before their PC ports appeared), a Nintendo DS and a Nintendo Wii, plus a few gameboys. And they play Travian until their ears fall off (and without admitting it they play loads of facebook games too!)
But even for retail sales the opinions aren’t unanimous. Some analysts indeed saw one big problem of PC retail games unified broad distribution. Microsoft used to almost hamper PC games by pushing XBox hard as platform and offering loads of support for it. Now Microsoft tries to unify the “PC game” as platform brand again, but only after the console market has done that for years. If you go to most major airports, they shelf all major console games, but no PC titles. But analysts are divided so the final word certainly isn’t in on this one.
I’m agnostic as to that’ll turn out, it’s just another caveat how even analysts see the PC market going.
Basically this is a long paragraph addressing all the points I have reservations with in your brisk sentence.
PC != core, PC retail in decline but doesn’t tell the real story (MMO, browser etc missing), PC retail decline not uncritically doomed. That’s about a one line summary of it.
Which RPG takes 8 hours? Witcher takes more, I’d place it at a roughly 30+ hours minimum. Gothic 3? Morrowind? Heck I don’t recall Dungeon Siege taking 8 hours or even rather flawed titles like Loki.
I do highly recommend for anybody to go back to the original bard’s tale and play it through again, to get out of the romanticism of how many hours of awesome gameplay old games offered. Even better play M.U.L.E. again! And I do think that M.U.L.E. is still awesome btw.
Yes BioShock was a tad too short (if you insist playing it on easy, when as extreme core you should be playing it on hard), but that too isn’t new. There were always titles that felt a tad too short or some not.
The cases of rather short content I have always interpreted as a problem of production cost of high quality content rather than an active attempt to cut it short. But I don’t sit in board rooms so what I’ll grant you that board rooms may infact contain stuff like “let’s not make this too long”.
Reality is actually that rather than having RPGs that last 50 hours, we have RPGs that last for 2 years+(!) and that for millions of people where the 50 hour titles reached maybe 30k? It just depends how you define the genre. Modern day RPGs like Gothic 3 or Morrowind as far as I have experienced it, top the content of their predecessors rather than shorten it.
In short I don’t agree to that sentiment at all.
Give examples? Again I think there is a certain romanticism here. If one considers all out open PVP extremely core and grieves the demise of this since UO, then one is plainly blind that the market of networked all out PVP in the context of FPS is live and well and people are bashing their heads in on CS, TF2 and many other titles with gusto.
The only genre where I am truely aware of a decline are traditional adventure games. They have a presistent market in Europe though and most companies that continue to put out titles come from that market. Funny enough I think a lot of people who would classify themselves as “extremely core” aren’t exactly the adventure game audience.
Some genres died simply because they existed mostly for hardware restriction reasons. Text adventures existed because of the lack of graphics tecnology. Jump & run and many other 2-D paradigm games existed in its traditional form because of technological restrictions. Many of them didn’t “die” but transformed. Rachet&Clank or Starwars Lego are Jump & run. BioShock or Witcher or WoW form a wide spread of followups to text adventures.
So which “core” genres died?
Not really, I said earlier that I appreciate your positive outlook for casual gaming. I do believe that the aspect about core gaming contains lots of hypothetical and does contain scares, I quotes the passages that justify that interpretation explicitly earlier.
I do not deny this. To mirror your way of phrasing things:
I read “but what about games for US?” constantly too. But oddly enough it’s more casual gamers asking for more accessible but high quality content. I can link you pages and pages of these in the odd case that you have missed them (or read Wolfhead and Tobold again as two examples). Purple who posted here is but one example. Where are all the fantastic high production value family games? One might consider that the “extremely core” also posts extremely more. That doesn’t mean that their concerns are any more real or pressing than those of a less verbal crowd, but I know you know this as you have blogged about that.
Many people are not turned on by Warhammer focusing on RvR (they really want collaborative PVE), or Conan focusing on gore (they want to play with their kids). Where are the family friendly MMOs? Where are the heavily collaborative games of high production value that don’t cater to a core crowd at the same time?
A big problem is that there has formed a certain rhetoric of core vs casual. Suddenly there is content envy and it goes both ways. Back in the days noone ever even wondered if little computer people was core or casual. You tried the game, if you liked it fine, if you don’t fine. Was there a core outcry over wasted production money when the Sims family first came around the corner? I don’t recall seeing any of it. As far as I am concered this core vs casual debate is relatively new. And it’s full of misguided stereotypes.
I have blogged extensively about this and won’t go into this again.
If your argument was: “Core gamers, expect for casual gaming MMOs to appear, the times of all RPG MMOs being core is gone.” I had no issue, because I’d at least hope for that to be true. One could add “but don’t worry, the main focus of the market still is very much core and even so called casual-friendly games can and might well have very core depth to them.” I don’t know if that’s true but it may well be. It’s the WoW model at least which is successful.
The problem with Startrek Online is not what it’s actual design will be, rather the problem is that some people if they read the word “casual” automatically equate the result with “suck”. For me that is just an indication how narrowminded that whole debate is and I’m glad to say that we completely agree on this point.
Noone even knows what Startrek Online will look like but assumptions flow like water based on a single word.
The problem is not that the “extreme core” actually loses, the problem is that they operate on quick judgement and simple assumptions!
That’s what the quotes on Startrek Online proves and not all that much more.
Taking WoW as an example, it does cater to the extreme core as to a casual crowd. Many of the most core EQ raiding groups now live in WoW land and it’s not because they accepted dumbed down content.
“May” “what if” “might” “could” all indicate hypotheticals 😉
It’s hypothetical, so it may not. The word on the impact of WoW in the medium term isn’t really in yet.
The flip side of the same coin is that maybe PC retail was supposed to die because retail simply wasn’t the right distribution model anymore.
Same actually goes for the predicted death of the PC as gaming platform. This, with the question of distribution is a question of technology change (broadband coverage by average households in the one case, and the way home electronics converge between PC, TV, console, other home entertainment electronics, portables, mobiles). None of these things are very particular to the question of “core” they are broad market, and with enough coverage any distinction disappears. Anyone doubting that eventually data lines (or wireles transmission) will have replaced most to all analog phone lines?
Yes so you may see gradients in the transition, but frankly that isn’t particular or new either.
Amazon undoubtedly has killed some retail, but that doesn’t mean that the market died, just that the distribution technology changed. The market actually grew.
Yes, but that’s not the context of your original argument. The price has gone up steadily for all games and platforms! The price rise from little computer people to spores is the same as the price rise from bard’s tale to witcher!
Unless your definition of “core game” in above sentence is anything that’s boxed retail, i.e. PC and consoles. But that collides with your PC==core assumption.
For MMOs it’s even worse of course, they have gone from free for the priviledged (MUD with internet access) to pretty pricy (WoWs boxes + subscription model), exclude dialup UO in Europe, which thanks to European local calls not being free was actually insanely expensive (at no earnings for the gaming company). I guess Tobold paying 500$ for a month of UO makes him extremely core, which I can’t help but find very funny 😉
For “casual games” I’d argue that they have gone up too! Because in the past many of these were freeware or shareware or just free (never paid for IRC gaming), and now they find online business models that actually end up paying for essentially very similar game concepts. Many Yahoo games may be free but they do come with banner ad earnings to Yahoo.
So in conclusion I don’t see a price rise in any way particular to “core” games. Whatever that nebulous “core” may be. I do see price rise across the board as production effort expand, and distribution methods change and of course consumer reach and expectations change.
In the past IRC and MUD games reached college kids without tangible income. Now “casual games” and “core” games reach adults with disposable income.
But I’m happy to be wrong. The real thing for me here is actually the that I don’t agree to assumptions and are not lead convincingly to the conclusion. I don’t think that core players have much to worry at all. They will have a larger spectrum of games to pick from and given all indications there is growth in their own market segment. The landscape will get richer. There are many sections of the landscape (which are not extremely core) which are underexplored though and spending effort on these would be useful, like family gaming, social gaming (playing of people who have diverging time available but real-life social ties, design that doesn’t segregate social groups through game mechanics barriers), broad accessibility, depth design (to allow concurrent “core” and “casual” play without the symptoms), etc.
See I care mostly because we spend so much energy on what I consider a non-topic or even topics that just rail up people, and so little energy on more worthwhile topics. The fact that people are railed up (about essentially nothing) makes it less possible to get to those topics as well.
This topic, even if I agreed to what you said comes down to. “Alright, go complain, then play on” as the added value. Isn’t that essentially your conclusion?
Basically I’m just realizing that I continue to try to get debates to something more helpful, like Purple’s concerns about family gaming which I consider much more tangible than whether “core” folks who have it rather good currently are justifyable or unjustifiably worried. And yes I heavily lean towards the latter given the evidence presented so far. But the evidence is kind of pointless given that the added value is basically nil either way.
It may simply be best if I talk about the topics that I find useful (best on my blog) and leave these kinds of topics, how intriguingly “controversial” they may be, alone. You can expect to read some on family and social gaming (there is some on my blog already) when I find the time to carve out enough of the background research still needed.
I believe that “core” was adopted as being a little more useful when we started to realize that players of casual games were often very hardcore about their casual games. This threw a bit of a twist on the old Hardcore vs. Casual discussion. We can’t really use the term “core” for “mainstream” because whether or not gaming is mainstream yet is also very much in debate. “Core” is basically the gaming audience that got us to where we are today and still provides the main source of revenue for the industry – PC and console gamers playing the traditional genres we all know and love.
Some time back there was analysis of trends in Japan. Apparently, PC is becoming an oddity in a household, and is perceived as a work machine.
Entertainment needs are being met by TV-oriented devices and cell phones.
PC, as it once existed is no longer what it once was. Majority of general purpose work today is done in a browser. Most of content today is provided by browser. The only desktop bound applications today are those that need high bandwidth (image/video editing, highly interactive applications that require millisecond feedback), and even those types of applications are moving to the “cloud” (youtube, google office, automated test/build clusters).
A better question that just games would be, hasn’t PC become obsolete? Right now, it still offers some benefits. But the sheer power desktops provide is going unused 99% of the time.
When it comes to gaming, isn’t long term perspective non-related to the platform? Web and mobile gaming is playing basketball in the yard with a couple of buddies. Sure, you bought certified basketball, signed by major league players, and you bought New-and-Improved-Now-Slam-Dunk-Resistant-Hoop. But still, it’s informal, it’s casual, it’s non-binding.
“Hard-core” gamers will always find something “hard-core”. A real basketball field, with everything that goes with it.
And in the same league, professionals will/have-already emerged. Playing under standardized rules, making a career, earning a living.
Doesn’t this make PC vs. console debate a rather pointless argument, when one should be looking at the content, not the platform?
Implementing/porting something over comparable hardware is trivial. But to remain with analogy, not everyone wants or needs basketball court in their yard, even if they can afford it (which isn’t that expensive).
Consoles have surpassed PCs with recent generation of hardware, and PCs will not catch up anymore, or they will cost several factors more.
Gaming has split not between platforms, or even genres, but simply by fidelity. Pushing polish via polygons is hard-core. Game-play remains independent from that.
I guess its this simple for me:
I don’t want to mix power disparity with time or monetary investments. I don’t want to endlessly chase an ever-rising plateau.
Don’t forget, if you do it right, your communities create most of what keeps the community there, anyways.
Gene said:
Hmm that is very interesting. It’s kind of a self-referencial and dynamic definition. See I would argue that before WoW launched there was a specific expectation what the “core” would be. And what WoW would keep after the initial craze is that “core”.
This assumption is very well justified because it does reflect past behavior. Just thinking Starcraft, WC3, DiabloII etc it is very easy to think of a “core” crowd keeping these around through networked gaming and tournements. Some other commenter has argued that what keeps legacy MMOs alive is that “core”.
I think WoW actually has shattered this assumption somewhat if not drastically. Because WoW retains people who would never engage in competitive tournement type play or fit the assumpted “core” personalities that hung around for the above mentioned examples. Yet loads and loads of people engage in play that was intended for the “core” but ingame they are called “casuals” now.
In some sense WoW apparently has exploded “core” by a hundred-fold (from thousands to tens of thousands increased to hundreds of thousands to millions) give that dynamic definition. Look at TBC launch day sales. We are talking ~3 million if I remember correctly but certainly a million figure. By your definition these are all “core”.
If everybody who does stay around is “core” another problem is that you have no dimensions to describe the difference that still exist within that crowd. And loads of “core” cs “casual” debates are debates within these population.
This leads to the problem that the word “core” doesn’t actually have just this one definition. There are many and they are conflicting. Even if one finds just one, there is the open question how much of gamer behavior is actually properly described by that one label.
See my blog post that Raph though was a reaction to this. It contains elaborations on the problem of “core” vs “casual” as classifying categories. I have also blogged on this earlier.
I think there may good uses for labels of gamer behavior, but likely we first need more clean definitions and secondly they likely aren’t just binary opposites, but a whole array of things and more than one dimension. And yes, some of them may end up being dynamic due to their definition. The “core” debate is kind of flawed at its “core”, i.e. it’s ill defined, and filled with tacit assumptions.
@Antheus:
I mostly agree with what you say, I think there are in fact many splits and categories. Fidelity certainly is one. But then again console fidelity has gone up over the years, but console turn-around seems slower than graphics card turnaround, but I’d love to see data on this. In any case I have no doubt that fidelity of consoles will rise with technology. The thing about the Japanese market is that it really is a poor reflection of US/European market behavior. Palm size book reading is a huge market in Japan but there is no sign of that working in US/Europe for example. And Japan is gadget crazed in a way that even the rather gadget happy Europeans never matched. It does seem kind of hard to match market expectations across these markets.
[…] Podcast is. Oh yeah, she wants you to call her more.This is the message from Raph Koster in one of his recent blog posts. In this post he writes about how the Wii and browser based games are invading the industry and […]
Zomboe wrote:
You’re assuming that you would know if you derived additional value from microtransactions. Given that I’m not familiar with what microtransaction experiences you’ve had, I can’t give you a straight answer.
Moroagh said,
Well, kind of. WOW is a boxed MMORPG on a subscription model. Retail is still a big part of it’s distrubution strategy and the fantasy MMORPG is a traditional genre. From a sales, distribution and design standpoint it’s not fundamentally different than Everquest. It has either grown the size of the core gamer audience or it has attracted core gamers away from other products. (more likely the later)
Core is only a useful term when talking about the change that is happening in the market currently. This includes the emergence of the casual market in 2002 (Popcap’s fault mostly). Yes, it’s always existed (Tetris), however it was around this point, I think, that we starting treating it as distinct from the rest of the market because the audience and typical distribution model was different. So we need a term to call everything else that wasn’t casual (traditional? retail? old school? hardcore?) Core seems like a good choice.
This was exacerbated in recent years with the emergence of the web based MMO (Club Penguin, Runescape, Habbo) and new revenue models (RMT). There is massive growth happening on the web and in RMT with the number of players and types of investors (VCs, MTV, media companies that had no apparent interest in gaming prior to 2006), so we still needed a term to call the stuff that isn’t casual and isn’t part of this new web thing – “core”
The core market has many problems it’s dealing with. The next-gen console and graphics capability of new PCs has put massive upwards pressure on costs, lead to vastly more use of overseas outsourcing, larger teams and shorter games (BioShock is just the canary in the coal mine – remember it takes 2-4 years to make a game and the full effects of this change is still coming). Even with these adjustment, life looks bad on the balance sheets because the core gamer is only willing to go so far at Wal-Mart and $100 games at retail is not realistic.
So many of the traditional industry players (EA, NCSoft and others) are now looking to the new stuff that looks promising on the balance sheets (RMT, the web, casual, new distribution models) and lots of ruckus is happening in their boardrooms right now.
Moroagh, I’m not debating here. I’m just explaining the debate and what the rest of us, I believe, are treating as the accepted backdrop to this debate.
And please don’t ask for stats on this. Most of us see it and live it everyday. We see the massive increase in team size with our own eyes, the outsourcing and the new hardware. Well, not me anymore – I make games in my basement 🙂 It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that an XBOX360 game cost more to make than an XBOX game, yet they still have a price range to stay within at retail – something’s got to give.
They don’t have to be. I played a lot of games in arcades in the 80s. I put my quarter in the machine, had fun, and didn’t think about the money once I was playing. I think an arcade-style (or “micro-subscription”) model would work pretty nicely today.
Imagine when you log on to your MMO of choice, you are charged $0.25. You’re then allowed to play for the next 24 hours. Log on after that window and you’re charged another $0.25. Go away for a week and you pay nothing. No obligation, no intrusion. Probably no ads, either.
I love the idea of free stuff, but paying for an ad-free MMO experience doesn’t have to be the monolithic subscription-style affair it is today, and it doesn’t have to involve buying imaginary magic swords with US$.
How is it that despite posting in many other places over many years, I seem to get into the most trouble when I post here? 😛 (Although Ernest Adams did once lose his cool in my direction on the old GAMDEV forum on CompuServe, but that’s been a while. And it wasn’t even about game development!)
Todd, I take your point, but with a couple of reservations. First, I question whether your suggested revenue model is the one that most developers are thinking of when they think, “Hey, let’s consider microtransactions.” I’m not suggesting that $0.25 for 24 hours couldn’t work (it would actually be less than half the cost of $15/month); I’m just asking whether it’s a realistic assumption about what gamers can actually expect to see from the typical microtransaction-based game.
What is the “typical” microtransaction concept, anyway? Does such a thing exist yet? If a consensus is ever established, what might it look like? Is it likely to involve in-game sales using out-of-game money or not?
Secondly, and more to my original point, I’d suggest that there’s a meaningful difference between most arcade games and most MMORPGs. Namely, arcade games generally don’t try to simulate worlds (including especially the dynamic social aspect of worlds), while MMORPGs do.
When I play PacMan there’s never any question that I’m just playing a game. I don’t mind feeding quarters into the box; doing so doesn’t break any magic circle because there’s virtually no circle there to break — it’s a game, not a world.
But for a world like the typical big MMORPG — and I suspect this holds true whether the game-y part of the system is casual or hardcore — a significant portion of the entertainment value for some players comes from the literary experience, from the willing suspension of disbelief that allows one to enjoy pretending to be another person in another place. The edge of the magic circle is much sharper here than with an arcade game because the core RPG experience requires the establishment and preservation of a constructed reality beyond rules-based gameplay.
Which is why, if I assume that the typical microtransaction system is both more frequent and more in-game than a subscription model (and I’m still open to being shown how that’s a bad assumption on my part), I can’t help but perceive it as more intrusive. For a gamer whose goal is not so much “play in” as “live in,” having to make choices while inside the magic circle about things outside that magic circle (like how much real money to spend) can’t help but interrupt the “live in” experience that they’re paying for.
I suppose what I’m really asking is whether the experts feel that there are ways to implement the kinds of microtransactional revenue models that developers/publishers are currently interested in that will enhance, rather than detract from, the “live in” play experience. I’d hope that this is so; I just haven’t seen it discussed much at all.
(Of course, I’m also assuming here that developers care to court the gamers whose main interest is to “live in” an alternate world. If that group is actually of much less business interest to developers, then the kinds of concerns I’ve tried to describe here are probably not worth more discussion.)
[…] A recent post on Raph Koster’s blog describes a tectonic shift in the games industry—particularly the console segment—towards a repositioning of target audiences to the casual crowd… or at least more casual than in previous generations. “Away from the core gamers” is the salient detail, at any rate. Core gamers, it seems, are upset by this. Some seem to feel that the niche markets are being abandoned, and the games they grew up on will become fewer and more scarce in a steady downward spiral until they virtually cease to exist by any mainstream consideration. […]
[…] and in fact if you look back you’ll find some on social gaming in various guises already. The following comment by PurpleCar caught my interest: I am the Mom. I have a lot to say about this. In fact, I could go on for hours […]
As promised, a first few thoughts on family gaming.
Bart Stewart wrote:
Microtransactions are usually constrained as “transactions that are smaller than efficiently processed by credit systems” (as offered by Wikipedia.) For example, mobile telephony and long-distance calling services are paid for with microtransactions; however, these microtransactions are typically processed at the end of either a billing or usage period.
I choose to construe microtransactions, in a broader context, as line-item payments made in pursuit of a larger transaction, such as fulfillment of the needs particular to an interactive experience. This is why to me most exchanges, from grocery shopping to real commerce in virtual worlds, we consider transactions are actually micro- in nature, or rather, in spirit.
Today’s MMORPGs are built as virtual theme parks, not virtual worlds and certainly not as truly immersive experiences. Maintaining suspension of disbelief as a user is near impossible when you consider that most virtual knights say “bro”; just about everything is quantified and visualized in a numerical format; strategy guides, walkthroughs, and item databases are constantly accessed prior to, during, and following play; and misspellings and other defects are rampant. But that’s not all…
The real world is constantly penetrating your “magic circle” (e.g., dogs barking, phones ringing, instant messages stealing focus, Internet connections dropping, keyboards and mice sticking) to the extent that your magic circle is merely idealism, and that actually trying to maintain the so-called integrity of that magic circle is just not practical.
These issues have been, and are always being, discussed. Whether you recognize those discussions as such is another matter.
Firstly, let me say that I was swearing at the corporate suits and the ignorant decision-makers that are driving the gaming industry. They marginalize and stereotype me (as an Oprah book club fan!) and ignore my family’s gaming needs. I didn’t mean to insult individual game developers here, so I’m sorry for that.
Secondly, thanks to those of you that understood my anger wasn’t for them and are truly thinking about how to support further development in my “niche” (which is huge, trust me). Even a simple mention of it in your next meeting or a bit of guidance to new developers is all I can hope for at this point.
Thirdly, I don’t understand this thread. The jargon is way above my head. None of you have addressed me directly here but if you want to discuss you can email my yahoo address at ccp6867. I’ve pretty much said my peace, though, and despite the rude description of “Mom” I appreciate the post and the opportunity to speak.
-PurpleCar
‘Core Gamer’ is an interesting term. To my mind it’s anyone who spends the majority of their leisure time (however much that may be) playing games, any games. They also don’t mind spending money to play their games of choice (as it’s their main form of entertainment). The method of payment really doesn’t matter folks – what matters is that there’s perceived value.
I don’t fit a good demographic for being a core gamer but have played games all my life, diving into computer games back when I got my Commodore 64 – think I was like 28 (I’m female by the way – yes really and no I’m not going to send you a picture). I remember losing myself in Sierra’s Imagination Network, Sim City, Civilization etc. I don’t particularly like RPGs but do love MMOs – the difference to me is the chance for what I call social strategy gaming. Currently playing Sims 2, Sim City Societies, POTBS, and Horizons.
My dream game is one where I don’t have to kill anything (except of course when I go brain dead from crafting – amazing what killing a few rats or Lord Nyak followers can do to calm you down), allows me to build a house and fill it with whatever I want including furniture my avatar can actually use, and help build up my community infrastructure. This is combining major play elements from a ton of games into one, and gets further complicated when I explain that I hate gathering resources and it’s not fair if I can’t get them easily and have to rely on other players for my fun. I guess my point is that it will be the rare game that has all the elements I love. That doesn’t stop me from spending money trying to find it:)
I went home for Christmas to discover that my mother had bought herself the exact same pretty crimson Nintendo DS Lite that I have. It’s funny, because I was thinking of getting her that one (with the Brain Age 2 bundle, naturally). She has always wanted cars exactly that color, so I knew it was just the one for her.
One thing that’s important to remember is that a lot of us older core gamers were originally raised on games that would be considered “casual,” by modern standards. Nintendo hasn’t abandoned the core gamer so much as they have rediscovered their roots.
Many of us don’t even realize the fact that we’re casual gamers. In fact, I’m going to be a little radical here, and suggest that CounterStrike is a casual game.
What?
No, seriously, it’s easy to pick up, can be played in short sessions, and has relatively simple rules. It’s the kind of game you can play over your lunch break at work. Don’t be fooled by the 3D engine: By the time the updated Source version came around, you could easily run the original Half Life engine on sub-$600 machines from Walmart. Really, the only thing that kept CS from being a full blown casual game was the fact that you needed to own a copy of Half Life to play it.
[…] think Raph is on to something when he suggests here that the gaming industry is in trouble because its too focused on hard core gamers. I think all […]
[…] Lum says it, does it have more weight than my articles? Maybe Raph Koster? I hope so, but whatever the case, the corporate beancounters will have to pull their head out of […]