Always The Stick, Never The Carrot

Why game industry personalities feel compelled to speculate in public about things that can cause only blind rage in the larger gaming populace is something that defies most rational explanation.  Is it ignorance?  A trial balloon?  Confusion about the inner workings of the internet?  Epic President Mike Capps serves up this week’s helping of disaster with the bizarre idea that developers might charge separately for portions of their games to fight secondhand game resales.

Reasons this is a bad idea, off the top of my head: people resent being told what to do with what they consider their property; they don’t understand why developers consider it their “right” to take portions of it; they like to share with their friends; and many people only buy resold games and wouldn’t purchase the retail version at full price to begin with.

A modest proposal: why don’t developers enter the resale market?  Offer gamers the option to sell their games back to you instead of their neighborhood Gamestop.  You could potentially offer a lower price point, or even a higher one if you’re willing to create a “preferred gamer” loyalty program, with future game discounts, preferential news, gaming DLC, or what have you for those who sell their games back to you.  That way, gamers think you actually value them and are willing to reward them for their loyalty, instead of punishing them for doing what they feel they’re entitled to do in the first place. 

I have no idea if this is feasible, or if there are better alternatives.  But it seems like there’s plenty of room for win-win solutions here that don’t involve alienating your major customer base.

Creativity and Film

Valve’s Gabe Newell is interviewed here by Earthworm Jim creator Dave Perry on what it takes to become a successful entrant into the gaming industry with a developer.  I’m grossly underqualified to comment on any of the practical advice, but I thought one comment in particular deserved attention.

Newell:

Specialization and hierarchy are the norms in film production, and are antithetical to what needs to happen in the games industry. The reason for that distinction is that the game industry is more focused on invention than on repeatability/measurability. Programmers that can draw are going to be in much better shape than an animator specializing in putting talking mouths on cats. The solutions of tomorrow are not going to fall into the production or organizational categories of today. 

This may be true for a very specific sub-set of developers, but it’s not clear to me that this is generalizable to, well, most companies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stockpiling

A recent blog mentioned (I can’t find the link any more) how many games they had still in the shrinkwrap, and an NPD study discovered that up to 33% of gamers are behaving similarly.  Yet this behavior seems - at least at first glance - to be completely irrational.  You seem to derive no benefit from a game you haven’t played, and the same game that costs $60 today will be discounted, sometimes heavily, as few as three months into the future.  This is true in gaming even more than other pasttimes, where the hot title of today is the bargain bin stuffer of the future.  A wait of even a few months, when you finish your current backlist, would be financially and personally lucrative.

Why, then, do people buy games they can’t use?

Read the rest of this entry »

Irritating Gaming Conventions

Since I’m already irritable from my broken 360, here’s a few random thoughts.  Playing Order of Ecclesia has made me think about some of the gaming conventions that have sprung up in the past few years across certain types and genres of games.  These conventions often - and ironically - become hallmarks of their lineage despite being largely pointless, if not actively irritating.  In many cases, these might have been initial innovations, only to become stale and valueless over time.  A few that I could come up with:

(Post-SOTN) Castlevania Games: Take a series of escalating sword-type weapons, add various fetch quests, use the same area themes, and make sure that most secrets can only be uncovered through a combination of numbing persistence and blind luck.  And all with a disturbing lack of Belmonts.  Offenders: Well, most post-SOTN Castlevanias.

Survival Horror Games: Resident Evil’s crappy movement controls come to mind; RE 5 looks like it might start bucking the trend, but this has been an irritant for ages.  Offenders: RE 1-3, plus the intermittent quasi-sequels.

Adventure Games: Modern Zelda-esque dungeons/temples feel like they’re built from a template at this point.  Insert [Fire/Water/Light/Dark] Temples at will and populate accordingly.  I love Zelda, but the temple themes need to be shaken up.  Offenders: Zelda 3, Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, and Minish Cap on the Zelda side.  Plenty of similar problems in related games.

Insanely Difficult Games: Make a game so numbingly difficult that its difficulty becomes its only selling point and differentiating advantage.  Sell to masochists.  Offenders: Contra, Ninja Gaiden.

FPS Games: It’s been ages (since Duke 3D, possibly) since the weapon set of an FPS looked different enough from every other one to warrant comment.  Do we really need a shotgun, rocket launcher, and chaingun, people?  Can we try to come up with something slightly different?  Offenders: Lord, where do I start?

Sci-Fi Games: Let me save you some time: the problem was caused by a horrible experiment gone terribly wrong, probably aided and abetted by some shadowy government entity somewhere.  Bonus points if aliens are involved somehow.  Offenders: Half-Life 1-2, Dead Space, various Resident Evils, Metal Gear Solid…

I’m pretty sure there are plenty more out there… feel free to help me add to the list.  There are two requirements: the convention must serve no significant useful purpose that couldn’t be served in another (more creative) way, and it must appear in at least 2 games of the same type.  Thoughts?

Murphy’s Law

Naturally, just as I finish Dead Space and come home with Fallout 3 and Gears 2, my 360 stops working.  No red ring of death, but it freezes continuously after a few minutes (whether a disc or hard drive is attached).  Hopefully Microsoft will repair the damn thing, but I can’t say it endears me to the company that I’m going to be out of gaming commission for 3 weeks or so.

Re: Innovation

Site friend Ludwig Kietzmann comments a bit more on the topic of innovation with respect to survival horror games.  I had a post to that effect, although the graphics portion of Wordpress is currently preventing me from posting, so read his instead. 

Survival horror is one of those genres that’s so chock full of terrible conventions that you wonder why they’re retained.  Fortunately, some recent games have jettisoned them and so there’s hope on the way.

An Interesting Season

As Penny Arcade so artfully notes, this is indeed a rough month or so for gamers - albeit in a good way.  One odd question, though: it seems like the “holiday season” gets earlier and earlier each and every year.  Normally, we might expect the biggest titles to begin coming out a little after Thanksgiving, in time for the Christmas/Chanukah gift-giving extravaganza.

But each year, it seems like this time window pulls back bit by bit.  One possible explanation for this might be simply rational behavior on the part of game companies: if you expect your competitors to go to the market in mid-December, you’ll avoid competing as directly if you try to make your own game reach its audience a little earlier.  Of course, everyone has the same thought, so the end result is simply to push the crunch slightly earlier in the year rather than actually alleviating it. 

At the same time, this strategy only really makes sense if you think your title doesn’t have a clear likelihood of success.  If you think it can outcompete the other products, you’ll happily throw it up against the competition, and you’ll do so as early as possible.  Committing publicly (and irrevocably) to move close to a given date means that your competitors can see how serious you are, realize that they aren’t likely to outsell you, and move their dates up or back.  You win by default.  To the extent that this doesn’t happen, I can only assume that the risks - of being able to make the designated ship date, of knowing whether or not your property is so clearly stronger than the competition - are just too unknowable or quantifiable enough to justify acting on.

But let me suggest a drastic alternative.  I’ve often complained about the rush to publish in the winter holidays at the expense of barren spring or summer months.  This clearly has negative financial impacts - people can only buy so many games at once and so even a period that results in a lot of sales for a few titles consigns many more to the loser pile.  But the rest of the calendar carries enough extra empty space that it could presumably do just fine if people pushed their ship dates ahead or behind by several months rather than weeks. 

It also makes less and less sense to push things back the earlier it goes.  At some point, you’re so far removed from the holiday period that it no longer pays to keep moving the dates.  Can we consider this as a possibility next year?

Weekly Column - 10/26

Our weekly column is up at Joystiq.  The topic this week is about the nature of innovation in gaming and how it’s sometimes a bigger concept than we think.

For What Doth It Profit A Man…

How EA can expand its sales by 20% YoY this quarter and still lose $300M is sort of beyond me - not in the theoretical sense, but in the practical one.  Spore, Madden, Warhammer, Rock Band, Burnout: all of these were highly successful by any stretch of the imagination, and yet the company still can’t turn a profit off of their success (and the same with the previous quarter).

The workforce reduction of 6% is, presumably a start in this direction, but I can’t imagine shareholders are too pleased with John Riccitiello at the moment.

Anyone Tried Fallout 3 Yet?

I’m not even done Dead Space, and here we go again.