Pag on Games

Sometimes I feel like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. When I was a teenager, admitting to liking computers was social suicide, now fancy computers are created specifically for fashion-conscious women. Going on a BBS was the height of nerdity, now all the cool kids use Facebook. Computers were big beige boxes that cost the price of a used car, now the tiny EEE PC costs a few hundreds.

PCs have become a cheap commodity. They’re not really exciting anymore, you buy one to browse the web and hope you won’t have to buy another one for as long as possible. Price is what matters for most  people, not performance.

Buying a 500$ video card doesn’t make much sense when the rest of the computer costs less than that. The enthusiasts who are willing to get an expensive PC to put that card in are also technologically knowledgeable enough to pirate games — and chances are they will if they want to save the money to buy their next PC.

As PCs become an inexpensive commodity, it makes less and less sense to target the most powerful computers on the market. Indeed, casual games are booming while hardcore games have a hard time becoming hits.

PCs will still be good platforms to put games on, but I expect they’ll get fewer high-performance games in the future. The most successful PC games will make creative use of the PC’s unparalleled network access and openness.

Distributing games online is an obvious thing to do, but what about dynamic pricing? You could make a website that sells your game at a price that varies according to its popularity. The first 100 buyer get it for $1, rewarding the early adopters, the next 100 get it for $2 and so on.

The system could look at sales in the last few weeks and base the game’s price based on that, trying to find the optimal balance between offer and demand. The more popular a game, the more expensive it is. Old games already get discounted, why not automate it?

While I have to live under the iron-fisted rule of the ESRB, I have to say I hate this secretive order of censors. Here’s why.

• The ESRB is a censorship body.
  There’s no way around it, their whole reason to be is to censor games. I’m against censorship in all forms and so I can’t support an organization that’s fundamentally against freedom of expression. Don’t kid yourself: games do get changed because of the ESRB and not just to avoid an AO rating — if a publisher wants an E rating, everything that could put the game anywhere near T territory is cut.
• The ESRB doesn’t prevent laws against games to be passed.
  That’s the whole job of the ESRB, isn’t it? It exists so the government doesn’t create laws to regulate gaming. Yet the American government does create such laws. It’s not the ESRB that stops them, it’s the constitution. The UK, Australia, Germany and other countries have their own rating laws. The ESRB does diddly-squat to stop anti-games laws to be created, they just add another layer of bureaucracy.
• The ESRB ratings don’t inform parents, they make decisions for them.
  It’s not hard to know if a game is for a mature audience — publishers don’t exactly hide this fact. Take Grand Theft Auto — how could you not know it’s for mature audiences? Just Google the name, ask the store clerk, read the box, or, hell, just read the name of the game. Parents who buy games based on ESRB ratings just let some anonymous moral authority make decisions for them instead of thinking for themselves what would be appropriate for their kids. That can’t be good.
• The ESRB is secretive.
  Who actually rates the games? Nobody outside the ESRB knows. They won’t tell us. Are they biased? Do they have conflicts of interest with the games they rate? Are they qualified to make decisions that affect millions of gamers? You’re not allowed to know — the identity of the censors is kept in strict secrecy.
• The rules for the ESRB ratings are vague at best.
  Do you know the difference between an E10+ rating and a T rating? I don’t, and no one can answer me clearly. Can a E10+ game show blood at all? Can a character smoke a single cigarette in a T game? If a character says “damn”, “shit” or “fuck” in a game, what rating does the game get? I’ve tried to get answers to those questions, but nobody can answer me. I’m supposed to make games that fit within a strict moral code, but no one will tell me what the code is.
• The ESRB makes stupid decisions.
  Dead or Alive 3 was rated T. It features sexy girls throwing each other off tall buildings among much violence and fighting. Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball features the same girls playing volleyball in bikinis. It was rated M. It seems Guitar Hero, a game featuring music that plays every day on the radio, isn’t suitable for players less than 13 years old. Neither are The New York Times Crosswords for that matter.

Books have existed for centuries and they work great without any kind of ratings. Why can’t games?

Xemu has posted detailed notes on many of DICE’s presentations:

• NPD
• Tools & Middleware
• Narrative Panel
• NanaOn-Sha
• Electronic Arts
• Character Design
• Massive Black
• ESA
• Activision
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi
• Shane Kim Q&A
• Blizzard

Greg Costikyan recently gave a keynote presentation at Game Focus Germany. I didn’t attend this conference, but the Powerpoint presentation is available online here. It’s a great overview of possible business models outside of the typical developer-publisher relationship.

via Intelligent Artifice

I’m not telling you anything new by saying piracy is a huge issue on the PC. Call of Duty 4, last year’s best-selling game, sold over 7 million copies in total, but less than a million of those were for the PC. Both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, two major PC games, had lackluster sales number. Given this, it’s unsurprising to see fewer big titles being created for computers.

The situation is even worse in parts of Asia — at least in North America you’re unlikely to find stores openly selling pirated games. Unable to make a profit selling games, Chinese and Korean game developers have turned to online games. MMORPG like World of Warcraft are massive hits there, and so are free games like MapleStory that make you pay for special items.

A game, as a product, can be copied and distributed very easily. A game, as a service, cannot be duplicated and each player must pay for his experience — pirating a service isn’t possible. While western PC gaming is crashing down because of piracy, eastern PC gaming is booming despite piracy.

Games as service are coming on our side of the Pacific ocean. MMORPG are already popular and a few companies are hard at work bringing to our shores the free games model from Korea. This change in business model will have a big impact on the games we play, starting with a bigger focus on multiplayer. I expect consoles to follow this trend too, now that they’re able to go online.

Would you go see a movie without having seen a trailer for it? A game without a demo is like a movie without a trailer.

A game trailer isn’t enough because you can’t convey interactivity properly through a non-interactive video. You’re showing all the superficial aspects of the game without showing what it’s really about: gameplay.

While no one could accuse Hollywood of being unwilling to create sequels to their hit movies, their efforts are nothing compared to game publishers. You rarely see movie titles ending with a number larger than 3 these days, whereas it’s practically the norm in gaming. This isn’t because movie makers are more creative than game developers, but simply because game sequels have more financial success than movie sequels. There are two main reasons for this.

The first reason is that movies have to reinvent themselves with each sequel. You can’t have the same story in a new location with slightly different enemies; a movie must have a new story for each sequel. A different story brings the risk that it will be worse than the previous one, leading to a poorer movie.

Games on the other hand can get away with repeating the same gameplay — even the same story — multiple time in a row. How many times will Link rescue a captive Zelda by finding a sword, a bow and a boomerang along the way? The risks of ruining the magic behind a succesful game is much lower if all you do is create a few new levels.

The second reason is that a movie’s sequel often costs just as much to make as the original. New sets must be built, actors must be paid, special effects must be prepared, etc. To be profitable a movie sequel must be just as popular as the original.

Game sequels often cost less to make than the first in the series: characters are already modeled, enemy AI is already implemented and tuned, the engine is already up and running, etc. Making a sequel to an unprofitable game can actually bring the franchise to profitability, whereas making a sequel to an unprofitable movie is just spending good money after bad.

So that’s why we have so many game sequels: they’re easier and more profitable to make than movie sequels. However, sequels are generally more of the same and cannot really expand the audience for video games. That’s why original games are so important to transform video gaming into a truly mainstream media.

Everybody I know is really busy, nobody has a lot of free time, sadly, between work and family. Then why are most games made for people with over 10 hours of free time? That made sense when most gamers were bored teenagers, but those teenagers have grown up and now have more responsibilities and less free time.

Why not make 3-4 hours long games and sell them for $20? They’re the same bang for buck as 9-12 hours long game for $60 — don’t kid yourself, 60 hour games haven’t been the norm for years — and they’d be closer to most people’s “impulse-buy” price. Used games would be less attractive at that price too.

The Nintendo DS is dominating sales charts. For months it has been at the top of consoles sales world-wide, far ahead of any console of the new generation. Nintendo announced last October that it sold 50 million copies of the two-screen wonder. With a huge install-base and low development cost, it’s a great platform for publishers to focus on.

But they don’t. Publishers outside of Japan don’t seem to care whatsoever about the number 1 console on sales today. According to Game Rankings, there isn’t a single game in the top 20 best reviewed DS games that was released by a non-Japanese publisher. In fact Nintendo has published 16 out of the top 20 titles. There isn’t a single non-Japanese title that breaks the 85% average score.

Why is this? I can’t understand it. A great DS game with good production value and good marketing could be a huge hit — just look at the success of Phantom Hourglass. But North American publishers keep on making mediocre licensed games built with the lowest budget possible. A typical DS game has a budget around 1 million dollars, while the next-gen Spiderman 3 game cost more than 35 million to make. You could make a dozen AAA DS games (with a 3 million dollar budget) for the price of one multi-platform console title — and the DS has sold more than the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii combined.

This seems like an obvious missed opportunity. What am I missing here? Why aren’t North American publishers caring about the number 1 console on the market?