I've been listening to a band called Signal Hill recently (for those interested they're an exceptional instrumental band from the States, I believe some of their music is being used in Irrational Games' podcasts - which by the way are also a great listen!). Anyway, it got me wondering about why I'm attracted to certain forms of music over others and why, for me at least, music is so much more a personal experience than games.
"A composer causes an event, which reaches me, the listener, in an acoustical way, causing me to have an experience. My reaction to the experience causes an effect which I can communicate to myself and, if I find words for it, to others" - Herbert Brum.
This sentence is talking about the relationship between composer and listener. I think fundamentally music has to be a dialogue, but you can only respond truthfully within yourself. A piece of music that you enjoy (or even one you don't!) is capable of stimulating thoughts and imagery seemingly from nowhere, be it a memory or an emotion or something new; the composer speaks and you respond.
I find music has a much easier time tapping into the more abyssal emotions - the stuff buried waaaaay down there - than video games. I guess this could be because games are a fusion of sound, visual and motor information, so perhaps music has more of your focused attention? It's interesting that I find the most poignant, meaningful music is void of lyrics. I wonder if musical sounds are simply more abstract than speech or visual signals so offer more room for interpretation?
It's pretty rare for games to offer emotional experiences that go beyond the staples of joy, fear, anger, surprise and interest. A couple of great examples of games that delve into complex emotions are Jason Rohrer's Gravitation and Rod Humble's The Marriage. According to the authors, both games were constructed with a meaning in mind but never specifically alluded to in the games themselves - all interpretation is allowed to flow from the player. Perhaps this is helped by the fact they are both quite abstract in appearance (The Marriage doesn't have audio at all), but that alone doesn't answer why something like Geometry Wars feels less emotionally complex. Then again, Geometry Wars was designed specifically to elicit joy, fear, surprise and by proxy probably anger when you die.
In the scheme of things Gravitation and The Marriage are hardly mainstream, whereas the kind of music that offers me complex emotion is available on a high street store or at the very least i-Tunes. When are we going to see games that have the same universal appeal as music?
Monday 29 November 2010
Monday 15 November 2010
Oldies are the best
Just a quickie: I've decided to change the name of this blog to The Subluminal Link. You can find out what it's all about by reading the post below but the long and short of it is it's slightly more exciting than Quiburg on..., though I suppose equally nebulous. Onward!
Saturday 13 November 2010
The Subluminal Link - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
I'm resurrecting a column I used to write for a site called The Second Dimension. The site was run by a friend and I but we've both since moved on to bigger and better things. The column was used primarily to review games with more of a journalistic slant and the name Subluminal Link was apt as I was notoriously irregular with updates to the site (note: it's subluminal rather than subliminal). I'll be using the column this time around to examine 5 design decisions within the game I'm writing about and what I thought the consequences of those decisions were along with alternate methods of implementing or improving them. As a side note I'd like to make these columns oriented around a bullet-point structure rather than lengthy essays, simply because it's easier to digest.
So, introductions over let's take a look at Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. It's a third-person action adventure with emphasis on environment traversal, platform mechanics and combat. The game's story is an adaptation of the classic Chinese text Journey to the West, written by screen-writer and novelist Alex Garland. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic near-future New York, the player takes the role of Monkey; a grizzled anti-hero with exceptional acrobatic abilities. The early moments of the game see Monkey team up with a young girl named Trip, whose great skill in manipulating gadgets and machinery can be used in tandem with Monkey's combat prowess to overcome puzzles and combat scenarios. Much of the core experience is in the player navigating environments while making use of Trip's special abilities remotely (the narrative explains this by allowing Monkey to communicate with Trip through his headband and vice-versa). Without further ado here are the 5 design decisions I've opted to discuss:
1.Objects the player can climb are highlighted, providing a breadcrumb trail to aid traversing environments.
Highlighting which objects can be climbed on helps stop players getting lost and generally gives them a nudge in the right direction while they navigate the game's vertical spaces. What strikes me in particular are the actual objects themselves and how they've been worked into the environment. It seems that each object Monkey can interact with has been designed to blend naturally with the surrounding environment, with some of the interactive objects more obvious than others (for example a horizontal pole offers more directional guidance than a loose brick in a wall). It seems that by applying more realism in the environment the developers found it necessary to artificially point out climbable objects with a shimmering graphical effect. I found this system gave the traversal mechanic a pedestrian feel after experiencing it for an hour or so; all the tension and fear I should feel by leaping over chasms and scaling vertical surfaces evaporated.
One alternative to this would be to create a more cohesive visual language for objects that the player can climb. An excellent example of this is in the Uncharted games, where interactive traversal objects have a distinct visual style but are also modelled into the environment. Another alternative would be to only show the shimmering visual for the 'tutorial' levels.
2. Tech orbs
Enslaved encourages exploration by placing Tech orbs off the beaten track, the orbs function as in-game currency and allow players to purchase upgrades from a shop. I found the orb's visual style and the way they sit in the environment abrasive to say the least; there's something about floating balls of energy that doesn't gel in a world otherwise preoccupied with realism. They really end up representing a video game trope.
The designers obviously wanted players to be able to see the orbs from some distance, maybe in hard to reach areas, to draw the player toward them. I think a better solution would have been to build the orbs into the world rather than them being disembodied glowing things. The narrative explains the orbs as sources of energy, so perhaps modelling a few different items capable of storing 'energy' (e.g. fuel tanks, cannisters, engines etc), placing them around the environment and getting players to smash them open to receive the orbs would have been less incongruous. Again, to return to Uncharted, its own collectables are part of the game's world: artifacts, statues, antiques etc, all of which adds to the sense of a believable world and not just a transparent mechanic laid out by a designer. Similarly the God of War series stores orbs in detritus; pots, barrels etc – all objects that fit in with the environment the player's exploring.
3. Enemy attacks are difficult to distinguish from each other.
Each enemy in the game has a set of combat moves, but I found learning which move the enemy was about to use on me difficult, leaving me unsure of how to react. This seems in part due to the animations for each attack being quite similar (not to mention most of the enemies bear a huge resemblance to one another, making distinguishing even harder).
When creating a combat system it's vital that players are able to learn enemy attack patterns, for example in the Halo series players are made aware that a grenade is about to be thrown at them through distinctive visual and audible cues: i) when an enemy is about the throw a grenade we briefly see it glow bright blue in their hands, ii) there's about a 1 second animation for the enemy actually throwing the grenade, which we can clearly see from a distance because of the grenade's colour intensity, iii) the grenade is thrown toward the player at a constant speed each time, so the player learns how to avoid it. iv) the grenade has a very clear and distinct sound, so even if players can't actually see the grenade they can still hear it.
4. Twitchy controls on the 'cloud' vehicle don't mix with instant-death and long gaps between checkpoints.
Monkey's 'cloud' vehicle (basically a hover-board) is primarily used for traversing large open spaces, however some of these sections require players to navigate tight spaces between bombs that instantly kill the player if they touch one. This feels like the cloud 's functionality is being extended beyond its original purpose. The issue here is that in order to navigate the tight spaces often requires the player move the cloud from a standing start. The acceleration from a standing start is quite high and the smallest movement of the analogue stick causes the cloud to move, leading to imprecision. This in itself could be forgiveable but coupled with the fact the player is killed for taking a wrong step and the lengthy spaces between checkpoints can be frustrating.
If the designers felt it necessary to include sections that require the vehicle to be used for different purposes then it's important the vehicle be able to handle them. In this instance there are several possible solutions: i) make the cloud less sensitive when moving from a standing start, ii) make the spaces between the bombs larger, iii) bombs cause less damage, iv) make gaps between checkpoints much shorter.
5. The Trip Shop doesn't expand Monkey's abilities, rather just incrementally improves his existing abilities.
The 'Trip Shop' gives a way for players to spend the resources they've collected, i.e. energy orbs, on upgrading their abilities. One thing I found surprising about the shop was how little the variety it offered in terms of providing opportunities for players to change the way play. The shop essentially allows players to incrementally improve their existing moves by perhaps increasing melee or ranged damage or shield duration. This is a very cost effective way for the designers to create an incentive for players to vest an interest in the game's economy; it's easy to implement and simple to balance. I find it to be a false economy though, as the lack of real variety or depth to combat scenarios is apparent after a few hours of play, especially in the later levels where combat provides a lot of the gameplay.
By creating more unique skills for the player to buy, the game's economy immediately becomes more relevant and more rewarding to invest in. For example in the Devil May Cry series the player collects red orbs by slaying enemies and exploring environments, the player is able to spend the orbs on different combat techniques that may appeal to the player's style. It's all about giving the player the choice of whether to save up for an upgrade they think sounds cool or perhaps investing in something a little more mundane but recognisably useful like more health, and although Enslaved has this system, the lack of new skills that the player can purchase limits the shop's appeal.
So, introductions over let's take a look at Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. It's a third-person action adventure with emphasis on environment traversal, platform mechanics and combat. The game's story is an adaptation of the classic Chinese text Journey to the West, written by screen-writer and novelist Alex Garland. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic near-future New York, the player takes the role of Monkey; a grizzled anti-hero with exceptional acrobatic abilities. The early moments of the game see Monkey team up with a young girl named Trip, whose great skill in manipulating gadgets and machinery can be used in tandem with Monkey's combat prowess to overcome puzzles and combat scenarios. Much of the core experience is in the player navigating environments while making use of Trip's special abilities remotely (the narrative explains this by allowing Monkey to communicate with Trip through his headband and vice-versa). Without further ado here are the 5 design decisions I've opted to discuss:
1.Objects the player can climb are highlighted, providing a breadcrumb trail to aid traversing environments.
Highlighting which objects can be climbed on helps stop players getting lost and generally gives them a nudge in the right direction while they navigate the game's vertical spaces. What strikes me in particular are the actual objects themselves and how they've been worked into the environment. It seems that each object Monkey can interact with has been designed to blend naturally with the surrounding environment, with some of the interactive objects more obvious than others (for example a horizontal pole offers more directional guidance than a loose brick in a wall). It seems that by applying more realism in the environment the developers found it necessary to artificially point out climbable objects with a shimmering graphical effect. I found this system gave the traversal mechanic a pedestrian feel after experiencing it for an hour or so; all the tension and fear I should feel by leaping over chasms and scaling vertical surfaces evaporated.
One alternative to this would be to create a more cohesive visual language for objects that the player can climb. An excellent example of this is in the Uncharted games, where interactive traversal objects have a distinct visual style but are also modelled into the environment. Another alternative would be to only show the shimmering visual for the 'tutorial' levels.
2. Tech orbs
Enslaved encourages exploration by placing Tech orbs off the beaten track, the orbs function as in-game currency and allow players to purchase upgrades from a shop. I found the orb's visual style and the way they sit in the environment abrasive to say the least; there's something about floating balls of energy that doesn't gel in a world otherwise preoccupied with realism. They really end up representing a video game trope.
The designers obviously wanted players to be able to see the orbs from some distance, maybe in hard to reach areas, to draw the player toward them. I think a better solution would have been to build the orbs into the world rather than them being disembodied glowing things. The narrative explains the orbs as sources of energy, so perhaps modelling a few different items capable of storing 'energy' (e.g. fuel tanks, cannisters, engines etc), placing them around the environment and getting players to smash them open to receive the orbs would have been less incongruous. Again, to return to Uncharted, its own collectables are part of the game's world: artifacts, statues, antiques etc, all of which adds to the sense of a believable world and not just a transparent mechanic laid out by a designer. Similarly the God of War series stores orbs in detritus; pots, barrels etc – all objects that fit in with the environment the player's exploring.
3. Enemy attacks are difficult to distinguish from each other.
Each enemy in the game has a set of combat moves, but I found learning which move the enemy was about to use on me difficult, leaving me unsure of how to react. This seems in part due to the animations for each attack being quite similar (not to mention most of the enemies bear a huge resemblance to one another, making distinguishing even harder).
When creating a combat system it's vital that players are able to learn enemy attack patterns, for example in the Halo series players are made aware that a grenade is about to be thrown at them through distinctive visual and audible cues: i) when an enemy is about the throw a grenade we briefly see it glow bright blue in their hands, ii) there's about a 1 second animation for the enemy actually throwing the grenade, which we can clearly see from a distance because of the grenade's colour intensity, iii) the grenade is thrown toward the player at a constant speed each time, so the player learns how to avoid it. iv) the grenade has a very clear and distinct sound, so even if players can't actually see the grenade they can still hear it.
4. Twitchy controls on the 'cloud' vehicle don't mix with instant-death and long gaps between checkpoints.
Monkey's 'cloud' vehicle (basically a hover-board) is primarily used for traversing large open spaces, however some of these sections require players to navigate tight spaces between bombs that instantly kill the player if they touch one. This feels like the cloud 's functionality is being extended beyond its original purpose. The issue here is that in order to navigate the tight spaces often requires the player move the cloud from a standing start. The acceleration from a standing start is quite high and the smallest movement of the analogue stick causes the cloud to move, leading to imprecision. This in itself could be forgiveable but coupled with the fact the player is killed for taking a wrong step and the lengthy spaces between checkpoints can be frustrating.
If the designers felt it necessary to include sections that require the vehicle to be used for different purposes then it's important the vehicle be able to handle them. In this instance there are several possible solutions: i) make the cloud less sensitive when moving from a standing start, ii) make the spaces between the bombs larger, iii) bombs cause less damage, iv) make gaps between checkpoints much shorter.
5. The Trip Shop doesn't expand Monkey's abilities, rather just incrementally improves his existing abilities.
The 'Trip Shop' gives a way for players to spend the resources they've collected, i.e. energy orbs, on upgrading their abilities. One thing I found surprising about the shop was how little the variety it offered in terms of providing opportunities for players to change the way play. The shop essentially allows players to incrementally improve their existing moves by perhaps increasing melee or ranged damage or shield duration. This is a very cost effective way for the designers to create an incentive for players to vest an interest in the game's economy; it's easy to implement and simple to balance. I find it to be a false economy though, as the lack of real variety or depth to combat scenarios is apparent after a few hours of play, especially in the later levels where combat provides a lot of the gameplay.
By creating more unique skills for the player to buy, the game's economy immediately becomes more relevant and more rewarding to invest in. For example in the Devil May Cry series the player collects red orbs by slaying enemies and exploring environments, the player is able to spend the orbs on different combat techniques that may appeal to the player's style. It's all about giving the player the choice of whether to save up for an upgrade they think sounds cool or perhaps investing in something a little more mundane but recognisably useful like more health, and although Enslaved has this system, the lack of new skills that the player can purchase limits the shop's appeal.
Tuesday 9 November 2010
Why you should care about...paper iteration
Our two-man indie studio is currently prototyping a game we've codenamed ZOMG. In this post I'd like to share our experience of prototyping and iterating ZOMG's early design, what went right, wrong and how we can improve this process in the future.
Starting out as a junior designer for a big development studio I was keen to prove myself, coming up with impressive and complicated solutions for the features I was working on. They were going to be the best, most awesome features that would change the state of play forever! Of course, when reality hit and the features were already half-implemented I realised they weren't the most awesome things ever. The whole team was in serious crunch so ripping out the code for a redesign simply wasn't an option. All that was left to do was clumsily edit the features as best as possible, which lead to some incongruity with the rest of the game.
At the time I felt pretty crappy but I came away from that experience with a better understanding of the importance of paper iteration. It seems obvious, but you don't need to wait until a feature makes it into the game to start the process of iterating and refining. Iteration on paper can save you a lot of headaches; it's cheap, can give you a clear picture on what you're trying to create and saves programmers' valuable time by not having to overhaul your system when it doesn't work out (and trust me, it won't work out first time).
You can design anything on paper so don't be put off by the fact your game is action oriented. Be creative during this process, for example if you want to see how a particular puzzle plays out in a third-person action game you can lay out the environment top-down on graph paper, use cardboard cut-outs to represent moving scenery and Warhammer figures to represent the player or enemies. You may know roughly how fast the player-character runs or climbs or takes to perform certain animations so try and recreate that in your paper prototype – use anything that can help express the experience you want to make. If you have the time and skills you could even use other game engines to mock-up your designs – whatever works! Xbox Live Arcade hit Shadow Complex used nothing more complex than cardboard and graph paper to allow the designers to play the entire game before anything was committed to code.
There is, of course, a downside. Just because something looks good on paper doesn't necessarily guarantee it'll be fun when it makes it into the game. Our initial designs of ZOMG went through several paper iterations and when we were confident we'd hit the money we made a first pass getting something playable in-game. The prototype raised more questions than it answered and eventually lead us to completely rethink the core experience.
So, what could we have done to prevent this? Well, it's difficult to be sure if additional time spent on the paper prototype could have told us the design was effectively no fun but I think if we were more thorough we'd have spotted some of the more glaring usability problems. The initial design we coded was essentially a 2D platformer where all movement and jumping was handled by the game (yep, we actually made a game that played itself - that's how we roll) and it was up to the player to control whether the character was facing forward, therefore in obstacle avoidance mode, or facing backwards, therefore shooting his pursuers. It was designed to be fast paced with twitch gameplay. What we found almost immediately was that players had no reference point to how close to an obstacle or pit they needed to be for the game to avoid it for them. There were some solutions we entertained, such as marking out 'jump zones' to indicate where the player needed to be to jump, but really it just solidified the fact that it wasn't a great idea. We were fortunate in the sense that a lot of what we'd prototyped wasn't wasted, for example the procedural terrain generator and the 2D platform engine were both proven in the initial prototype.
It's important not to treat in-game prototypes as dumping grounds for whatever ideas crop up in brainstorm sessions and to keep revising ideas until you're confident they can work in-game, but don't be afraid to discard ideas if they don't cut the mustard.
One last pointer, if you're not the one coding the feature into the game don't forget to take your paper prototype to the person who's actually doing the work. There's nothing worse than a programmer receiving a doc just dictating what they should do. It's imperative that they have ownership of the feature too, they may even come up with better solutions or spot flaws you haven't!
Starting out as a junior designer for a big development studio I was keen to prove myself, coming up with impressive and complicated solutions for the features I was working on. They were going to be the best, most awesome features that would change the state of play forever! Of course, when reality hit and the features were already half-implemented I realised they weren't the most awesome things ever. The whole team was in serious crunch so ripping out the code for a redesign simply wasn't an option. All that was left to do was clumsily edit the features as best as possible, which lead to some incongruity with the rest of the game.
At the time I felt pretty crappy but I came away from that experience with a better understanding of the importance of paper iteration. It seems obvious, but you don't need to wait until a feature makes it into the game to start the process of iterating and refining. Iteration on paper can save you a lot of headaches; it's cheap, can give you a clear picture on what you're trying to create and saves programmers' valuable time by not having to overhaul your system when it doesn't work out (and trust me, it won't work out first time).
You can design anything on paper so don't be put off by the fact your game is action oriented. Be creative during this process, for example if you want to see how a particular puzzle plays out in a third-person action game you can lay out the environment top-down on graph paper, use cardboard cut-outs to represent moving scenery and Warhammer figures to represent the player or enemies. You may know roughly how fast the player-character runs or climbs or takes to perform certain animations so try and recreate that in your paper prototype – use anything that can help express the experience you want to make. If you have the time and skills you could even use other game engines to mock-up your designs – whatever works! Xbox Live Arcade hit Shadow Complex used nothing more complex than cardboard and graph paper to allow the designers to play the entire game before anything was committed to code.
There is, of course, a downside. Just because something looks good on paper doesn't necessarily guarantee it'll be fun when it makes it into the game. Our initial designs of ZOMG went through several paper iterations and when we were confident we'd hit the money we made a first pass getting something playable in-game. The prototype raised more questions than it answered and eventually lead us to completely rethink the core experience.
So, what could we have done to prevent this? Well, it's difficult to be sure if additional time spent on the paper prototype could have told us the design was effectively no fun but I think if we were more thorough we'd have spotted some of the more glaring usability problems. The initial design we coded was essentially a 2D platformer where all movement and jumping was handled by the game (yep, we actually made a game that played itself - that's how we roll) and it was up to the player to control whether the character was facing forward, therefore in obstacle avoidance mode, or facing backwards, therefore shooting his pursuers. It was designed to be fast paced with twitch gameplay. What we found almost immediately was that players had no reference point to how close to an obstacle or pit they needed to be for the game to avoid it for them. There were some solutions we entertained, such as marking out 'jump zones' to indicate where the player needed to be to jump, but really it just solidified the fact that it wasn't a great idea. We were fortunate in the sense that a lot of what we'd prototyped wasn't wasted, for example the procedural terrain generator and the 2D platform engine were both proven in the initial prototype.
It's important not to treat in-game prototypes as dumping grounds for whatever ideas crop up in brainstorm sessions and to keep revising ideas until you're confident they can work in-game, but don't be afraid to discard ideas if they don't cut the mustard.
One last pointer, if you're not the one coding the feature into the game don't forget to take your paper prototype to the person who's actually doing the work. There's nothing worse than a programmer receiving a doc just dictating what they should do. It's imperative that they have ownership of the feature too, they may even come up with better solutions or spot flaws you haven't!
Saturday 6 November 2010
The trouble with trials.
I'm rather surprised at how unsophisticated the App Store is when it comes to trial versions of software. Right now the only option for customers to try before they buy is the 'Lite' version of an App; a separate free download that reserves certain content for the full version, or in some cases is the full version but funded by in-game ads. Inevitably some developers opt out of creating two separate SKU's, leaving consumers to chance a purchase.
I write about this in particular as I recently made a purchase on the App Store using my iPod Touch. The game in question is rendered in 3D (though has '2D gameplay') and runs quite poorly on my iPod, enough to negatively impact the 'twitch' gameplay experience at any rate. With no free Lite version available I had to purchase the game to find out it was effectively unplayable. You could argue that at £1.19 it wasn't much of a loss but that shouldn't even enter into it; had I known this beforehand I wouldn't have bought the game.
In this respect the App Store seems completely backwards, especially in comparison to the more elegant Xbox Live Indie Games trial system where you download the full game right away but until you unlock the full version you can only play for a limited time. Of course, this wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for digital distribution services like Steam where games can run into the giga-bytes, but for the App Store or other services it's baffling why consumers don't have a clear way to try the product they're buying.
I'm not entirely sure of Apple's mentality behind a system that encourages developers to release two SKU's to allow consumers to try their product. Having a 'trial' option similar to XBLIG's, where consumers are prompted to make a purchase after a set time would surely translate into more sales, especially if the player is already hooked on the game when they receive the message.
UPDATE: Check here for some conversion rates from trial to full game (courtesy of Mommy's Best Games): http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2010/04/shoot-1up-daily-sales.html
I write about this in particular as I recently made a purchase on the App Store using my iPod Touch. The game in question is rendered in 3D (though has '2D gameplay') and runs quite poorly on my iPod, enough to negatively impact the 'twitch' gameplay experience at any rate. With no free Lite version available I had to purchase the game to find out it was effectively unplayable. You could argue that at £1.19 it wasn't much of a loss but that shouldn't even enter into it; had I known this beforehand I wouldn't have bought the game.
In this respect the App Store seems completely backwards, especially in comparison to the more elegant Xbox Live Indie Games trial system where you download the full game right away but until you unlock the full version you can only play for a limited time. Of course, this wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for digital distribution services like Steam where games can run into the giga-bytes, but for the App Store or other services it's baffling why consumers don't have a clear way to try the product they're buying.
I'm not entirely sure of Apple's mentality behind a system that encourages developers to release two SKU's to allow consumers to try their product. Having a 'trial' option similar to XBLIG's, where consumers are prompted to make a purchase after a set time would surely translate into more sales, especially if the player is already hooked on the game when they receive the message.
UPDATE: Check here for some conversion rates from trial to full game (courtesy of Mommy's Best Games): http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2010/04/shoot-1up-daily-sales.html
Tuesday 12 October 2010
Hello
How rude of me! I got rather carried away there, let me introduce myself. My name is Quiburg and I am a games designer. I live and work in the north-west of England. I'm currently in the early stages of prototyping a top secret project for a fledgeling independent games company with a good friend of mine. It's going to be a lot of fun! I'll be using this blog as a dumping ground for my thoughts on...well, anything industry related really but hopefully I can offer something of interest as we design and create our game over the next few months.
Monday 11 October 2010
Who gets a slice of the pre-owned pie?
Do games offer us value for money? Charging £40 (~$60) for one game is a contentious issue for frequent gamers and when we examine the fact that only a fraction of players actually complete single-player games* it’s no wonder that many consumers wish to trim spending on their favourite pastime.
So, is it even possible to measure value? Afterall, value is pretty subjective and we all know the phrase “one man’s trash is another’s treasure”. Well, let’s assume that we can measure value by calculating the hours of the entertainment something provides. Let’s also assume that entertainment is binary; either you're being entertained and therefore engaged with a medium or you're not (this is somewhat a gross simplification but for the purposes of this post humour me).
Based on these assumptions we could say that a game costing £40 and providing 10 hours of play gives an hourly entertainment value of £4. Not too bad. The average cinema ticket price here in the UK is around £6, coupled with an average run-time of 120 minutes for a summer blockbuster and you've got an hourly entertainment value of £3. Per hour it looks like cinema has more immediate value per hour but the truth is the numbers are probably closer together when you factor in costs associated with actually getting to a movie theatre in the first place. For argument's sake let's just keep things simple and keep outside factors to one side.
All right, now let's spice things up a little. The percentage of gamers who actually complete games is pretty low, conversely the amount of people who watch a movie all the way to end is pretty high! Just think back to the last movie you saw, unless it was a real rotten tomato most if not all of the audience stayed for the duration. So what happens if a player stops playing? Consider a scenario where a player only completes 50% of “Cover Shooter 3's”single player campaign. Now if we apply the same calculation (assuming that 50% is equal to 5 hours play) then we get an hourly entertainment cost of £8.
So, Timmy’s bored of “Cover Shooter 3” but really wants to try out “On Rails Shooter 2” but can’t afford to fork out another £40. Enter the pre-owned market. The pre-owned market has recently seen a surge of growth, and last year Game reported that preowned sales made up 18% of their profits for that year! These salivating prospects have lead many high-street chains to offer more shelf-space to pre-owned games than new! Of course, this has excited the interest of major publishers since none of the profits generated from pre-owned sales goes to them. In their eyes that’s money lost on their investment (see EA’s notorious “Project Ten Dollar”).
For consumer and retailer alike pre-owned is an obvious win-win; the consumer gets to part-exchange their unwanted game and the retailer gets to sell on the second-hand game and keeps all of the profit (traditionally, retailers receive slim profit from new game sales).
On the other hand it’s quite easy to empathise with the publisher – what if only one game had been sold as new but the pre-owned copy of the same game sold to ten different people? Good news for the retailer, not so great for the publisher. What if Timmy was just trading in his pre-owned games for more pre-owned games over and over again?
Neither publisher nor retailer wants to compromise here but ultimately it’s the consumer that bears the weight of the decisions being made. Thus far, publishers have sought to discourage buying pre-owned games by including single-use codes for downloadable content (that they’re valuing at $10 if you want to purchase the content from a pre-owned game). There are also a host of other options being explored, ranging from the recent legal action against pre-owned sales to shipping disks with codes that lock out parts of the game to anyone other than the original owner.
What's fascinating is that publishers and developers know that a large portion of gamers never complete their games, yet surely a bored gamer is more likely to trade the game sooner after its initial high-street release – a period which we know yields the highest volume of sales, as marketing presence is at its highest level. An interesting by-product is that many developers tend to focus quality near the opening hours of their games and it’s become something of a meme in the developer community: “oh it doesn’t matter, no-one completes games anymore” which I’ve often heard uttered with increasing seriousness. Perhaps the general attitude is becoming more about keeping consumers entertained for the week or so after launch so they’ll be less likely to trade the game in during the ‘launch window’. This is something of a subjective attitude and I can only say it’s true from personal experience (I find many games to be a real repetitive grind as they near their finale, of course this isn’t true of all games – Uncharted 2 saves some its best set-pieces for last and there are a whole host of games that increase their longevity by offering up superb multiplayer experiences such as the Halo and Modern Warfare series).
The next year will likely see a resolution to these issues in some form or another. Publishers are increasingly certain that the current business model for retail is unsustainable, especially in the face of rising development costs and economic uncertainty. Retailers face a similar dilemma; they can’t survive by selling new games alone – it’s telling that Game (the UK’s largest specialist games store) has closed down a number of its stores around the country with future downsizing planned, even large multi-media chain HMV and supermarket Tesco want a slice of the pre-owned pie.
So what options do publishers and retailers have, surely there’s a compromise? Well, there are a number of ways to meet in the middle that could satisfy both publisher’s and retailer’s needs, for example, retailers could impose an embargo on trade-ins for a set period following a game’s release, publishers could sell games to retailers for less (perhaps in return for trade-in embargos), retailers could agree to give a percentage of pre-owned sales to publishers or retailers could simply increase the RRP of new games (most likely crippling them in their battle with online sales). The easiest to manage would be for retailers to share pre-owned profits, thus alleviating further needs for the publisher to restrict usage rights on consumers.
The question is: is it fair? Regardless, the law currently states that consumers can sell on their games after purchasing them – but with publishers pursuing action against pre-owned sales more aggressively the retailers may find they have no choice but to comply!
The other problem retailers’ face are digital downloads. Digital downloads have increased in popularity over the past couple of years but according to recent studies aren’t yet a threat to retail models. However the advent of live streaming services such as OnLive could challenge traditional pricing structures.
Which leads us nicely back to the topic of value for money. When you pay £40 for a triple-A title, what you’re actually paying for is the potential to be entertained for however many hours. What if you could pay only for what you actually played, rather than what you could play? With a live streaming service there’s no reason this model couldn’t be implemented, what’s more it could prompt developers to create a more consistent experience for the duration of a game’s playtime, rather than saving all the good stuff for the beginning. It’s an interesting concept but surely if it was profitable the MMO studios would have adopted it? Well, the truth is MMO’s rely on their customers playing for extended periods of time –psychologically, paying $10 a month is far different than paying to play per hour: the basic thinking is that after paying the upfront fee of $10, you’re going to want to maximise the amount of playtime you get from that (a small part of what makes MMO’s so addictive). If you pay per hour then you’re more likely to stop. If the average American gamer spends 13 hours a week playing, then $10 per month equates to roughly 0.19 cents per hour. Not much, but you’d probably be watching the clock a lot more if you felt like you were on a timer. It could be argued that you can apply the same logic to paying per hour for a triple-A single player experience. Perhaps one solution would be to have a maximum payment roof for a particular title, say £40. I guess the real problem with this pricing structure is that it simply goes against the exploratory nature of gameplay – if there was a challenge you couldn’t overcome in the game you’d get frustrated because it would effectively be costing you more money, any hope of players exploring the game world at their own pace would likely be ruined. Perhaps this is a little far fetched, an easier model to manage may be a similar approach to episodic content delivery as seen in last year’s Fable 2 re-release over Xbox Live, where the game is free to play up to a certain point and then charges per ‘chunk’ of gameplay.
Anyway, I don’t want to get into pricing structures in this post. The perception of value is totally subjective and the current retail pricing model operates on the assumption that the disk contains the potential for multiple hours of entertainment. When consumers buy a game it’s their decision if they don’t want to play it anymore and the sooner publishers embrace this rather than fight it the better it’ll be for all parties involved, especially the consumer.
*UPDATED - After some digging around I've actually found some figures to back this up: The graph shows the most popular 360 games from 2008 and charts the average percent completion rate of around 14000 players using specific campaign related achievements. It's showing that around 52% of players completed the single-player portion of the games listed.
So, is it even possible to measure value? Afterall, value is pretty subjective and we all know the phrase “one man’s trash is another’s treasure”. Well, let’s assume that we can measure value by calculating the hours of the entertainment something provides. Let’s also assume that entertainment is binary; either you're being entertained and therefore engaged with a medium or you're not (this is somewhat a gross simplification but for the purposes of this post humour me).
Based on these assumptions we could say that a game costing £40 and providing 10 hours of play gives an hourly entertainment value of £4. Not too bad. The average cinema ticket price here in the UK is around £6, coupled with an average run-time of 120 minutes for a summer blockbuster and you've got an hourly entertainment value of £3. Per hour it looks like cinema has more immediate value per hour but the truth is the numbers are probably closer together when you factor in costs associated with actually getting to a movie theatre in the first place. For argument's sake let's just keep things simple and keep outside factors to one side.
All right, now let's spice things up a little. The percentage of gamers who actually complete games is pretty low, conversely the amount of people who watch a movie all the way to end is pretty high! Just think back to the last movie you saw, unless it was a real rotten tomato most if not all of the audience stayed for the duration. So what happens if a player stops playing? Consider a scenario where a player only completes 50% of “Cover Shooter 3's”single player campaign. Now if we apply the same calculation (assuming that 50% is equal to 5 hours play) then we get an hourly entertainment cost of £8.
So, Timmy’s bored of “Cover Shooter 3” but really wants to try out “On Rails Shooter 2” but can’t afford to fork out another £40. Enter the pre-owned market. The pre-owned market has recently seen a surge of growth, and last year Game reported that preowned sales made up 18% of their profits for that year! These salivating prospects have lead many high-street chains to offer more shelf-space to pre-owned games than new! Of course, this has excited the interest of major publishers since none of the profits generated from pre-owned sales goes to them. In their eyes that’s money lost on their investment (see EA’s notorious “Project Ten Dollar”).
For consumer and retailer alike pre-owned is an obvious win-win; the consumer gets to part-exchange their unwanted game and the retailer gets to sell on the second-hand game and keeps all of the profit (traditionally, retailers receive slim profit from new game sales).
On the other hand it’s quite easy to empathise with the publisher – what if only one game had been sold as new but the pre-owned copy of the same game sold to ten different people? Good news for the retailer, not so great for the publisher. What if Timmy was just trading in his pre-owned games for more pre-owned games over and over again?
Neither publisher nor retailer wants to compromise here but ultimately it’s the consumer that bears the weight of the decisions being made. Thus far, publishers have sought to discourage buying pre-owned games by including single-use codes for downloadable content (that they’re valuing at $10 if you want to purchase the content from a pre-owned game). There are also a host of other options being explored, ranging from the recent legal action against pre-owned sales to shipping disks with codes that lock out parts of the game to anyone other than the original owner.
What's fascinating is that publishers and developers know that a large portion of gamers never complete their games, yet surely a bored gamer is more likely to trade the game sooner after its initial high-street release – a period which we know yields the highest volume of sales, as marketing presence is at its highest level. An interesting by-product is that many developers tend to focus quality near the opening hours of their games and it’s become something of a meme in the developer community: “oh it doesn’t matter, no-one completes games anymore” which I’ve often heard uttered with increasing seriousness. Perhaps the general attitude is becoming more about keeping consumers entertained for the week or so after launch so they’ll be less likely to trade the game in during the ‘launch window’. This is something of a subjective attitude and I can only say it’s true from personal experience (I find many games to be a real repetitive grind as they near their finale, of course this isn’t true of all games – Uncharted 2 saves some its best set-pieces for last and there are a whole host of games that increase their longevity by offering up superb multiplayer experiences such as the Halo and Modern Warfare series).
The next year will likely see a resolution to these issues in some form or another. Publishers are increasingly certain that the current business model for retail is unsustainable, especially in the face of rising development costs and economic uncertainty. Retailers face a similar dilemma; they can’t survive by selling new games alone – it’s telling that Game (the UK’s largest specialist games store) has closed down a number of its stores around the country with future downsizing planned, even large multi-media chain HMV and supermarket Tesco want a slice of the pre-owned pie.
So what options do publishers and retailers have, surely there’s a compromise? Well, there are a number of ways to meet in the middle that could satisfy both publisher’s and retailer’s needs, for example, retailers could impose an embargo on trade-ins for a set period following a game’s release, publishers could sell games to retailers for less (perhaps in return for trade-in embargos), retailers could agree to give a percentage of pre-owned sales to publishers or retailers could simply increase the RRP of new games (most likely crippling them in their battle with online sales). The easiest to manage would be for retailers to share pre-owned profits, thus alleviating further needs for the publisher to restrict usage rights on consumers.
The question is: is it fair? Regardless, the law currently states that consumers can sell on their games after purchasing them – but with publishers pursuing action against pre-owned sales more aggressively the retailers may find they have no choice but to comply!
The other problem retailers’ face are digital downloads. Digital downloads have increased in popularity over the past couple of years but according to recent studies aren’t yet a threat to retail models. However the advent of live streaming services such as OnLive could challenge traditional pricing structures.
Which leads us nicely back to the topic of value for money. When you pay £40 for a triple-A title, what you’re actually paying for is the potential to be entertained for however many hours. What if you could pay only for what you actually played, rather than what you could play? With a live streaming service there’s no reason this model couldn’t be implemented, what’s more it could prompt developers to create a more consistent experience for the duration of a game’s playtime, rather than saving all the good stuff for the beginning. It’s an interesting concept but surely if it was profitable the MMO studios would have adopted it? Well, the truth is MMO’s rely on their customers playing for extended periods of time –psychologically, paying $10 a month is far different than paying to play per hour: the basic thinking is that after paying the upfront fee of $10, you’re going to want to maximise the amount of playtime you get from that (a small part of what makes MMO’s so addictive). If you pay per hour then you’re more likely to stop. If the average American gamer spends 13 hours a week playing, then $10 per month equates to roughly 0.19 cents per hour. Not much, but you’d probably be watching the clock a lot more if you felt like you were on a timer. It could be argued that you can apply the same logic to paying per hour for a triple-A single player experience. Perhaps one solution would be to have a maximum payment roof for a particular title, say £40. I guess the real problem with this pricing structure is that it simply goes against the exploratory nature of gameplay – if there was a challenge you couldn’t overcome in the game you’d get frustrated because it would effectively be costing you more money, any hope of players exploring the game world at their own pace would likely be ruined. Perhaps this is a little far fetched, an easier model to manage may be a similar approach to episodic content delivery as seen in last year’s Fable 2 re-release over Xbox Live, where the game is free to play up to a certain point and then charges per ‘chunk’ of gameplay.
Anyway, I don’t want to get into pricing structures in this post. The perception of value is totally subjective and the current retail pricing model operates on the assumption that the disk contains the potential for multiple hours of entertainment. When consumers buy a game it’s their decision if they don’t want to play it anymore and the sooner publishers embrace this rather than fight it the better it’ll be for all parties involved, especially the consumer.
*UPDATED - After some digging around I've actually found some figures to back this up: The graph shows the most popular 360 games from 2008 and charts the average percent completion rate of around 14000 players using specific campaign related achievements. It's showing that around 52% of players completed the single-player portion of the games listed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)