Category: Budget

AAA needs to adopt ‘Conscious Capitalism’

Middle Earth: Shadow of War. Microtransactions in a single player game... ffs
Middle Earth: Shadow of War. Microtransactions in a single player game… ffs

Everyone’s talking about loot crates and gambling mechanics sneaking into games. Even $60 full-price games. It’s a bit too obvious to make that the topic of this month’s blog, so let me just say this: Loot boxes are terrible in all their forms. Even cosmetic. Even free. Even in Free To Play.

That’s my personal opinion on the flashy flashy “dangling your keys over the dog’s head” (as I think of it) ‘mechanic’. At their best, loot crates break immersion and treat the player like they’re an idiot. At their worst, they teach children how to gamble and can lead families into some serious debt very quickly.

So, as someone trying to be an ethical human being, as a player, and as a game designer, I think loot crates should just die. They should have no place in games.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Conscious Capitalism

I’ve just finished reading a fantastic book that resonated with me on so many levels.

It’s called “Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business” and it’s written by John Mackey (the CEO of Wholefoods) and Raj Sisodia.

It speaks to how taking a more holistic view of your business’ activities, and its long term sustainability can demonstrably be a better way of doing business.

The book is filled with case studies on how profit-driven CEOs ran once-successful companies into the ground by striving solely to create shareholder value, and not caring about the other stakeholders (meaning anyone who has any interest in the business, including customers, employees, the government, and even the environment) of the business.

Reading it, I couldn’t help but draw parallels with how EA, Activision, and Warner Bros. have been milking their once loyal and enthusiastic customers to the point of maximum frustration and past ethical boundaries. They’re burning bridges with former fans in the hopes of maximising returns this fiscal year, and to the smug satisfaction of many, we’ve just seen EA’s share price take a $3 billion (yes, with a ‘b’) drop in value as a direct result.

I have a Commerce degree. I’ve studied economics. I understand capitalism (you know, basically), and I believe in the free market and (for the most part) lack of government intervention, at least in normal trade. But I’ve also been hugely affected personally by the Global Recession since the day I graduated college and continuing even until the present day. This has given me very socialist sympathies. It’s also soured me (and so many others) on ‘capitalism’, yet this book argues, quite correctly, that what we think of as capitalism is more often perverse ‘crony capitalism’ that is ultimately unsustainable as it exploits parties to the business (including the environment) and poisons the environment that it operates in. It’s not what capitalism means at its core, and it’s not how it has to be.

Milton Friedman. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics.
Milton Friedman. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics.

In the 1970’s, economist Milton Friedman argued that a firm’s sole responsibility was basically to maximise profits for shareholders. This doctrine has since been taken as gospel by the corporate world at large and has been hugely damaging to the environment and the stability of poorer nations from which we get so many of our resources (see last month’s blog on Venezuela, though I don’t get very political in it).

Another book that I haven’t yet read, but intend to, is Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I heard him speak on a podcast and (as well as some other startling confirmations) he mentioned how, before Friedman, corporations were presumed to have a responsibility to their local communities. That responsibility was (apparently, though I haven’t looked it up) even mentioned in the original Declaration of Independence.

Wait, isn’t this a games blog? Get to the point!

Okay! So clearly EA and other AAA publishers, judging by their actions of the last few months and years, still subscribe to the Friedman school of business ethics, and they’re losing their supporters in droves. Even those that stick around and pay are hardly becoming ardent fans of the companies.

Then take a company like CD Projekt Red, creators of The Witcher series, who, to date, have seemed perfectly happy to offer outstanding value to their customers and who truly invest in the intangible ‘Goodwill’ line of the Balance Sheet (yes, it’s a thing on the balance sheet, but how do you really calculate it? (rhetorical question)).

Their core $60 experience in The Witcher 3 was over 70 hours of gameplay with no microtransactions. Then along came two expansion packs (pay once, play forever model) of 10-20 hours each! Not a microtransaction or loot crate in sight!

They clearly care about customer satisfaction to a degree that the other major games publishers can’t claim. This gives them so many intangible benefits, including customer loyalty, more predictable sales numbers, and free marketing via positive word of mouth. 

Note: CD Projekt aren’t a perfect example because they’re known to have some internal problems with crunch time, and employee welfare is a core part of the Conscious Capitalism approach. Still, they’re still probably the best example.

“Games Cost More To Make”

AAA likes to argue that games cost more to create now, so they have to charge more somehow, but I don’t buy this at all – not as the only option. Undeniably, the games become less enjoyable when compromised by loot crates and microtransactions. The experience is soured, at least according to a huge subset of gamers. When disenfranchised gamers stop buying the games at all, they cease to be customers, and that’s a huge additional cost to doing business.

The best approach is to grow the market, not to exploit the current one to the maximum possible level.

Many would say that loot crates are the business model of the future so get used to them! I say ‘why’? As a gamer, I hate them, and know that many others do too. As an entrepreneur I know that there are countless alternatives and ways to innovate. The “games cost more” excuse only keeps getting used because some gamers have started to believe it.

Battlefront 2 (well, it's '4' really) undeniably looks amazing, but it didn't have to cost as much as it did to make. Who'd have missed one less level, or one less character? Budgets are variable.
Battlefront 2 (well, it’s ‘4’ really) undeniably looks amazing, but it didn’t have to cost as much as it did to make. Who’d have missed one less level, or one less character? Budgets are variable.

Games have budgets. Conscious Capitalism argues that you budget for all stakeholders, including, very importantly, the final customers. If they don’t want loot crates, you can plan not to give them to them. Rule them out completely! After that, your budget adjusts. Now just don’t make a game that exceeds that budget and projected profit levels. It’s actually quite simple business. You can sell to more final consumers if more of them would be happy to buy your product.

Many, such as myself, just won’t touch a game with loot crates. But I bought Wolfenstein 2 and the XCOM 2 expansion happily. Firaxis have fostered so much intangible goodwill from me over the years that they’re the only company I’ll pre-order from. At this point I won’t even buy Battlefront 2 if it went 90% off.

In Conclusion

Hey, I think this is my shortest blog ever! I’ve been trying to cut them down. I’d better get back on point, quick!…

My conclusion? Don’t support business practices you don’t like, and don’t presume that the example set by EA, Activision, Warner Brothers, and others, is the only way forward. Vote with your wallet as a consumer.

As a game developer, use your conscience and innovative spirit to think outside the box. Trust in goodwill as a long term pillar of your business strategy.

And yeah, consider buying the book ‘Conscious Capitalism’. I’ve no affiliation with it whatsoever, I just really enjoyed it. My apologies to the writers (yeah, like they’re reading this blog..) if I misrepresented any of its ideologies in my paraphrasing.

Until next time…

 

Bonus Content!

I saw this a few days later and had to add it 🙂

Spotify, Netflix, and Games

Before I start, I just want to thank everyone who read last month’s blog and voted for Sons of Sol on Greenlight. We got through on March 16th and are very appreciative of the support.

So with doing Greenlight recently, setting up our preorders, applying for competitions, funds, chatting with publishers, and doing some general reading of material from entrepreneurs like Daniel Priestly, Mike Dillard, and Richard Branson, something that’s been on my mind a lot is exactly how we’ll sell our game. How can we stand out in such an oversaturated marketplace and is there any way we can think laterally to avoid simply joining the race to the bottom that games are currently suffering price-wise.

When a market is over-saturated you need to innovate to stand out, after all, yet we don’t see an awful lot of that, and I can’t think of any particularly encouraging examples.

That said, we’ve nevertheless been assuming a traditional approach with Sons of Sol so far. I priced our preorders on this site at €5 marked down from an estimated final price of €15 or €20 (and showed this info). Anyone I’ve spoken to is pretty much of the opinion (and so am I) that we need to be on Steam and selling for €15-20. 

However, as I wrote about in December’s blog ‘AAA-pocalypse?‘ I’m very conscious of the nosedive that the industry is taking regarding the value of games, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the problem. After all, I don’t want to come to a place where I can toil away for years making a quality product that can’t pay me a decent wage for the time I put in. Indeed, that’s where a lot of indie devs and even AAA studios find themselves more and more, but there is still money to be made if you do everything right and have a little luck (getting into games isn’t the most sound business decision you could ever make, but you can make the best of it).

Squeezing out variety and fostering homogeneity

While there is still money to be made from games, I worry about the direction it’s taking. As we see with Netflix for TV/movies and Spotify for music, people are all too willing to forego ownership of a relatively expensive copy of some entertainment product in favour of unlimited access to far more titles as long as they keep paying a small fee.

I think this has been disastrous for the music industry. While digital distribution and the rise of piracy hit the music industry hard, it’s virtually impossible to make any money as a new artist since Spotify came along, no matter your talent. I can’t think of a single music venue in Dublin that actually pays a band to play nowadays (excluding traditional Irish music). Instead, you now have to pay the venue to play. 
If you want to be a big music success, you almost have to go through some trite reality TV contest where a couple of moguls take all the money and tell you what to sing.

At the risk of sounding old and cranky; music (on radio and TV at least) all sounds ‘the same’ to me now. The only interesting stuff seems to come from acts that established themselves 10 or more years ago and are still going. Record labels won’t take a risk on the unknown and so they’ve distilled pop music down to a succinct money making formula. At the moment, the only new music I’m really interested in is games music, and I come from strong music background before I got into games.

Click to listen to the EP 'Conversations' by Ódú. Consider buying :)
Click to listen to the EP ‘Conversations’ by Ódú. Consider buying 🙂

A quick aside: While you’re reading, have a listen to my incredibly talented friend Ódú, who doesn’t gig very often and doesn’t get radio play because she can’t afford to! Talent doesn’t get paid any more. It pays. We’re living in the upside down. 🙁

Almost all new bands you hear are hobbyists, because nobody will pay them to actually hone their craft. Therefore they’re not as polished and practised as they could be, and can’t get their music out there because the radio only plays the same few identical chart toppers.

The same for games?

We can see the games industry beginning to turn perilously towards a Spotify-style model with EA Access, Humble Monthly, and Xbox and Playstation’s online services also giving you a collection of free games each month in return for a flat fee.
It seems like they’re trying the Netflix/Spotify model on for size.

Thankfully, the games industry is enough of an oligopoly (a small number of large companies, rather than one big monopoly) that while EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, etc are all pulling in different directions we won’t likely see one service like Spotify scooping up all of the games. If that were to happen some day you can be sure that we’d lose the amazing variety of games that we have nowadays. 

Imagine the amount of talented indie developers already who learn so much by making one game, but it flops, and they can’t afford to bring their experience to bear on a second title so they go get “a real job”. We might have one good game out there because they made it on their savings with the hopes of turning a profit, but we’ll never have another, better game. The talent has moved on to some office cubicle somewhere, never to emerge again.

Now imagine that at the outset, they knew their game would only net them a few hundred dollars at most, and that virtually nobody would ever own it, because it was only available on a subscription service and netted only a couple of cents per play. Would even that one game still get made? Probably not.

Steam already feels a bit like this since Greenlight opened in 2012, and I don’t think that Steam Direct will change the situation all that much, personally. But imagine if Steam were to offer you access to all games on the site for just $12 a month. Would you do it? You probably would. Personally I like to own a copy of my game that doesn’t need to be verified and that I can play in 10 years if I so choose, but it’d become a more expensive way to go, for sure. By the way, I don’t have a Spotify account and still buy music I like.. I just don’t really like any any more :P.

Games take a lot longer and cost a lot more to make than a music EP, but there are a lot of similarities between both industries. Music and games are both substitute leisure goods. Generally, if one game or artist is too expensive, you’ll just buy a cheaper one. There is a huge amount of choice, so artists have very little power, and the value placed on their work only ever goes down.

Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Jonathan Blow made a name for himself with Braid, so when The Witness came along in January 2016, he decided that his reputation could demand a higher price for his game, and he set it at $40 instead of a more ‘normal’ $20 for an indie game, in order to fight the downward trend in indie game pricing. In his case, it worked out. That said, just over a year later, it’s the lead game in next month’s Humble Monthly bundle, so you can get it (and several other games) for just $12, so the higher price was very short-lived.

Titans of the industry EVE online and World of Warcraft, both going for over 10 years, used to command monthly subscriptions from all players, but have since introduced Free To Play elements, up to a certain level cap. This is to help combat a dwindling player base, which makes sense in games that old, but newer subscription-based games haven’t really taken their place. They’re just “too expensive”. Or at least, they are seen to be by an entire generation of gamers that expect everything for free or close to it.

The near future

Some say that we’re heading for another games industry crash. We’re not. It’s a $100bn industry that isn’t reliant on physical distribution any more. Games can be produced and distributed cheaply, which wasn’t the case the last time the industry crashed.

However, we are going to see some major shifts and a lot of big companies (not to mention thousands of smaller ones) will likely go out of business. Monopolies aren’t good for anyone so I really hope we don’t see a single Netflix-style company taking over. We won’t any time soon because there are a lot of powerful companies in the ring who would have to go under or be bought out first, but in 10 years, who knows. Nokia was the leading name in mobile phones just a decade ago. Times change, fast!

Games have one advantage over music, at least. They demand your full attention. They’re entire other worlds that you can immerse yourself in. Players therefore are usually quite discerning about what they buy. It’s not just background music. While games are substitute goods to a degree, there are huge numbers of gamers who play one game and nothing else (League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, etc), so they’ll cooperate with whatever payment model that game uses and other models won’t really affect them.

Spotify managed to seize most of the music market very quickly, and only certain gigantic artists such as Taylor Swift or Prince had the power to turn them down for their tiny commissions and continue to make a living from their existing fan bases. I can see that while EA might be happy to shift everyone over to EA Access, Blizzard won’t feel the need to do the same because their players are very loyal and tend to play their games for years or decades, rather than just a few months. 

Right now there’s too much money to be made and too many ways of making it for any one payment method to come out on top just yet, but it’s going to be a very disruptive few years to come.

Adapt, Engage, Survive

Well, at least EA are experimenting; taking their 2007 hit Crysis‘ tagline to heart. So are other big publishers, though usually by just overcharging for Season Passes and adding microtransactions. 

Regarding the EA Access approach, I just don’t happen to think that a subscription service model will be good for developers, or for consumers who want variety in their games. Not in the long run. As a gamer I’d much rather pay more and value a game, than suffer the choice paralysis and actual stress that comes from playing a game when you know you have fifty more lined up to play that month. I already have this just from Steam Summer and Winter sale purchases that I haven’t gotten to yet! I don’t need more choice, frankly. And as a dev, I’d also like to think that my efforts will be worth money to somebody when all is said and done. 

That said, times are changing. Companies big and small should reconsider just how long the $20-$60 premium pricing models (and others) will be viable in the face of never ending sales, bundles, and subscription offers.

Wrapping up

I wanted to get into some alternatives today but this preface has already turned into its own thing so I’ll leave that for a follow-up post.

What do you think of all this? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you like as consumers, and where you think the industry is headed. Comment below, and consider signing up for the newsletter to be emailed when the next blog is posted.

Until next time…

FREE game. Shadow Complex (Remastered).

In August I did a two-parter about PC Gaming on a budget. Taking advantage of the occasional free game was one of the obvious pointers, and this ties nicely in with that.

Donald Mustard from the developer ‘Chair‘ was at the Game Awards 2015 a few weeks ago to reveal the trailer for Shadow Complex Remastered and to make a comically awkward announcement that the game was free to PC users who downloaded the game this December from shadowcomplex.com. The game will return to normal price in January but (and I’ve confirmed with Epic Games by email) the game will remain in your library if you downloaded it this year. It’s yours for keeps!

Intrigued, I downloaded it. The only catch is that you have to download the Epic Games launcher (whose shortcut icon now joins the rapidly swelling ranks of game launchers on my desktop alongside Steam, Origin, UPlay and GOG Galaxy). The promotion seems to serve the dual purpose of hyping the game in anticipation of console sales, and getting more PC users aware of and using the Epic Games launcher. If doing that and creating an account sounds like a step too much for you, fine, but let me tell you that you’re actually getting a quality game in exchange for just your email address.

Admittedly, another minor annoyance is that you can’t shortcut to the game directly. You have to launch it from within Epic Games’ launcher; something the other launchers don’t force you to do. However, opening it did remind me that Unreal Tournament (the new work-in-progress one) is free to try through the launcher as well.

Okay. Enough logistics!

What is Shadow Complex?

So it’s free. But what is it? Is it worth your time? 

The original game released for Xbox 360 in 2009 and was fairly well acclaimed, scoring as high as 9.4/10 from certain media outlets, IGN being one, and being nominated for several Game Of The Year awards. This remaster seems to be an attempt to capitalise on that success by releasing to a wider audience via PC, PS4, and the new Xbox. But we on the PC are the only ones getting it for free! Go Master Race! (I kid, I kid).

I never played (or even heard of) the original so I was totally going in blind.

The game is a 2D side scrolling action game (‘Metroidvania’ as the kids are calling it) set inside a top secret facility run by a masked (and therefore, evil) antagonist and his gigantic hidden army who are intent on “liberating” the United States from its corrupt government. Again, these are supposedly the bad guys. Go with it. Your character stumbles across this secret base (one of many, as I understand it, though the game is set in just this one) while hiking in the mountains with your new girlfriend who is kidnapped while you’re separated. I finished the game feeling like there was a lot of story I was missing, and indeed, it turns out the events of the game are set alongside events of the novel Empire by Orson Scott Card. Hidden Empire is a follow-up novel. The story you do get is humorous and silly in a B-movie kind of way, and dutifully takes a back seat to the gameplay. All the same, I’m tempted to pick up those novels.

Note: There was controversy surrounding Card because of his positions on homosexuality and some called for a boycott of the game (Card had nothing to do with this game, though). In 2013 Card reversed his positions against gay marriage. Do with that info what you will.

2D Open-World

What’s very interesting about the game is how it feels. While your character moves in 2D space, the environments are fully rendered in 3D, and enemies even utilise the whole 3D space at times (mostly when entering the area, but sometimes positioned on catwalks slightly behind your playing area). There’s a healthy amount of auto-aiming the game does to allow you to hit the enemies in the background if you’re aiming in their general direction, though it can get frustrating in certain sections. I started the game on the hardest difficulty but quickly lowered it.

That all makes the game feel very fresh, however. I really haven’t played something quite like it before (though I’m sure people can point me towards a few examples). The 2D plane is also broken up a few times when you hop into turrets and pan around, and this really gives you an interesting perspective that you won’t find in other games.

Navigating the world is a treat. The base is gigantic, and you reveal more and more of it on your map as you progress through the game and hack into terminals. There are secret rooms and powerups that you may never find before you beat the game. For example, I got a grappling hook eventually that felt awesome but I was only ten minutes from the end at that stage. Given where it was, I realised I could have explored and gotten it earlier. 

This game is NOT small! The map reveals to you only gradually so it takes a while to find out just how much you're in for.
This game is NOT small! The map reveals to you only gradually so it takes a while to find out just how much you’re in for.

You can nearly always back-track (or find a way around if you have the right equipment) and there are often two or more ways to get to where you want to go. The story gives you a waypoint to the next goal but you don’t always have to follow the planned route, and ignoring it in favour of exploring an older part of the map with a new missile launcher can pay dividends by finding you upgrades behind formerly impenetrable blast doors.

Exploring in this way reminded me of Metal Gear Solid 1 &2 (the walking robots helped there too, and they feature in plenty of cool boss battles) but this is not (at all!) a stealth game. The action can be quite basic, in fact, and it’s one of my few complaints. You pretty much just always shoot until the enemy dies. You have unlimited bullets but limited health, grenades, and missiles. While there are plenty of environmental hazards to take (usually hilarious and satisfying) advantage of, it still often feels like choosing whether or not to use your limited explosives is the only meaningful choice you make in combat, at least early on. This is definitely somewhere that 3D games have the 2D action genre beat. If you want a 2D open(ish) world stealth game, I recommend Mark of the Ninja. However, I mean it when I say I really enjoyed this game, regardless.

Progression

You at the start.
You at the start.

This is handled really well. When you start, you can only do a single jump and shoot bullets. You’ll see areas that you think you should be able to go to (your map often confirms this if you check it) but you can’t quite reach it. Similarly, you’re taught early on that your grenades can grant you access to areas that are hidden behind green highlighted obstacles (when you shine your torch on them) but you also see red and purple ones and it’s a long time before you reach the powerups required to get through them, which encourages (but doesn’t demand) back-tracking and exploration later on.

Your character finds an incomplete suit of advanced armour and collects more components of it as the game goes on. The scuba gear allows you to explore the sections that you flooded earlier in the game and finding the jet-pack grants the ability reach greater heights, and later to double jump. Finally reaching a balcony that you’ve seen ten times before can feel greatly satisfying. There’s a wealth of other upgrades rationed out to you over the 6-8 hours that it might take to beat the game’s story, and I really liked when I realised that the game wasn’t actually going to take me to some of them if I just followed the waypoint directly. Player agency is a great tool in games and I love it when developers ease up on the hand-holding a bit to let you play your own way.

The flip side of this freedom is that you can spend a long time going back to somewhere you think you can get to (twenty minutes for me in some cases) only to realise there’s one locked door or high-jump at the end that made the journey fruitless and then you have to spend another twenty minutes getting back to where you started from. I can see why some people report the game taking them over 20 hours to get 100% completion. However, later in the game the whole map does become revealed, including the locations of the remaining armour pieces. Once you have those you know you can reach everywhere, so I’d recommend holding off a little before doing too much back-tracking.

You towards the end.
You towards the end.

Polish

This release is a remaster, so if you’ve played it before the gameplay and story that I mentioned won’t have changed. I also didn’t play the original so I can’t speak to how much better the game is in the sound or graphics departments. I do know that there are (of course) improvements that have been made in those areas, as well as the addition of a lot of new close-combat animations and new achievements. I can’t speak to how much mileage you’ll get out of this if you played the original, but I can say that the game looks beautiful. The environments have been very convincingly created, rendered, decorated and lit. I’ve no complaints about the music or sound effects and the voice cast includes Nolan North (you may remember him from EVERYTHING!!) and Eliza Schneider (almost everything).

In Summary

The game is basically what would happen if Metal Gear Solid, James Bond, Metroid, and Uncharted all got together to make a fun B-movie-style game that you can enjoy in 6-8 hours. I had a lot of fun with it. I recommend you get it for free on PC before December 31st and enjoy it over the holidays. I’d even recommend you buy it (price dependant) when it comes out for general release early next year.

Until next time..