Category: Marketing

Mass Effect Affects EA’s Prospects

Oops...
Oops…

Sorry about the title. It’s a little inaccurate but I couldn’t resist. This article is about the game Mass Effect: Andromeda and the fact that it’ll never be fully appreciated because of bad management decisions.

Andromeda, the 4th game in the Mass Effect series, and supposedly the first of a new trilogy, released on March 21st, 2017 in a broken, bloody mess, and has factually killed the series dead (well, cancelled and “on hiatus” is as dead as a gaming franchise ever officially gets).

So it must be a bad game, right? Well, no! Not the version I played (v1.08).

In an era where “games as a service” is increasingly becoming the norm, and hardly any big game is ever finished on release day any more, we see more and more games releasing in broken states or missing features and getting patched later. A large part of the reason is a (I argue) misguided adherence to schedules, budget and targets set by marketing departments and management, rather than listening to development teams who actually have their hands on the product.

It’s very easy to criticise, of course. There are good arguments to be fairly rigid with deadlines. Maximising the value of expensive marketing campaigns that are planned months in advance is one. Not making the development team complacent and feeling like they’ve infinite time to “get it right” is another, but when reviews still happen in and around launch day, and review scores are permanent, surely it must be better to take the financial hit of delaying the game than releasing a travesty and killing one of gaming’s biggest franchises of the past decade.

Not the first time

EA, Mass Effect’s publisher, frequently seem to be one of the worst offenders in this regard, with the infamous Sim City and Battlefield 4 botched launches being among the worst examples of the last 5 years.  You’d think they might have learned a lesson. To a degree, they did, but not well enough. Andromeda was delayed once, initially scheduled to release in 2016. EA even said that they would consider delaying the game again if it made for a better experience. Evidently, they should have. It’s not clear how collaborative the decision to release was between EA and developers Bioware, but undoubtedly, the wrong decision was made. That’s evidenced by the fact that just 3 months after launch, I’m playing an enjoyable game that I’d rate 7/10. It has its problems, but has none of the embarrassing animation gaffes that defined the game’s release.

This the 

The stuff of legends, though these types of problems seem to be fully gone now.
The stuff of legends, though these types of problems seem to be fully gone now.

This is, unfortunately, how Andromeda will forever be remembered, and it’s something that was only in the game for a few weeks around release. You won’t see that now (or at least, I haven’t) but things like this predisposed players and critics to see the game’s other faults in a worse light. There are some cringe worthy lines of dialogue here and there, but there’s also tens of thousands of good ones. “My face is tired” is the one that will be remembered, though, because it’s early in the game and while it passed me by without major upset, anyone already totally unimmersed by the animations would just see it as another nail in the coffin.

Still not perfect

I must say that audio problems persist and playing with subtitles is essential in v1.08 or you’ll miss a lot of response lines from anyone standing more than 2 metres away. Similarly, the dynamic camera zoom, which supposedly focuses the camera on the speakers when a non-cutscene conversation starts, all too often fails to frame either speaker and leaves you staring at a desk or a wall.

Another early complaint was that planet exploration had these unskippable flying transitions between planetary orbits. While they look cool, they get tedious. You can now skip inter-planetary cutscenes, but not inter-system ones, and not ones for entering or exiting a planetary level. I can only presume that they’re necessary to hide loading times, but other games would allow you to skip after maybe 5 seconds when the loading is done, instead of watching the full 20-30 second identical cutscene every time you come and go from the Nexus (which will be a lot of times).

More playtesting and development time could have fixed these issues, led to positive reviews, greater sales, DLC, a sequel, and the continuation of the franchise. Instead, the game was sold at 50% discount less than 3 months after release, after the series was cancelled.

There are a few things I’m trying to say here

1. To developers & publishers: “Prioritise quality, because gamers care!”

From what you’ve read so far, I’m sure you’d agree that in hindsight (or if they had just learned lessons from other failing releases) the better decision here would have been a second delay of 3-5 months. Sometimes smaller companies have no option, financially speaking, but to release now, but this isn’t true of EA/Bioware.

Players forgive and forget delayed releases, but a bad launch is bad forever.

2. To gamers: “PLEASE stop pre-ordering games”

I feel a hypocrite to write this, so let me first disclaim that as a developer, I currently do offer Sons of Sol for pre-order on this very site. I don’t push it, and I don’t particularly encourage you to buy it (though I do appreciate the support if you did) but it was necessary to sell a few units to prove that we’re “in commerce” for business-y reasons.

Come one, seriously! Who cares about this?!
Come one, seriously! Who cares about this?!

BUT! As a gamer, I never pre-order, and I always wait for reviews. You contribute to a culture of bad releases and broken games if you support this practice, particularly in the AAA world. When developers already have your money, they don’t need to make the product any better than ‘passable’. You’d think that, for their reputations, they’d want to deliver the best possible quality, but it’s not always the case. Look at Arkham Knight, Dead Island, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, No Man’s Sky, or now, Mass Effect: Andromeda. These are all games that you’ll find on lists of all-time bad releases, and all have earned their creators considerable scorn. It can drive gamers to piracy as well with the logic “I paid you for a good game. You didn’t give me one. I’m stealing your next one”. Never mind the illegality, and the paradoxical logic of ‘once bitten, go back for more’ – it happens, and it affects bottom lines.

The sad thing is, most of those games have gotten better with patching, and reached a state that gamers would have been happy with if they’d received that version at launch, even if launch were delayed.

If you don’t pre-order, developers will be more concerned with having good initial review scores and word of mouth, and will have to earn your money before taking it. Listen, forget about the horse armour, the classic skin for your character, or the unique handgun that you’ll never use in multiplayer. Just stop pre-ordering.

3. To gamers: “Consider waiting for sale”

I don’t think this will do the industry any favours if you’re already waiting for release and not pre-ordering, but if you’re a thrifty bargain-hunter, know that EA in particular are showing that they’re willing to discount their biggest releases to 50% off within just weeks of release. In December, I wrote about how Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 (both critically acclaimed but released in a busy pre-Christmas cycle) were selling at 40% and 50% off respectively in the Holiday sales. The same has happened with Andromeda in the Summer/E3 period, and I would suspect that the same will happen with Star Wars: Battlefront 2 at the end of this year. If you want to wait to see how that game is reviewed, you may as well wait a little longer in case there’s a hefty discount at Christmas time. This seems to happen a lot with multiplayer games, which can die on the vine if they don’t get a critical mass of players fast!

4. To EA: “Is Origin Access really doing you any favours?”

EA, and so many companies like them, want to move their customers onto more predictable monthly subscription models. I don’t like this as a consumer (it’s basically the same as pre-ordering everything the company do, and losing access to everything any month you don’t pay up), but I can see why it makes business sense, too. EA’s version is called ‘Origin Access’.

So, one of the incentives they offer to members is to “try new EA games before they’re released”. Maybe those words sound good in a board room, but it’s actually a horrible thing! This is because it means either

i) The game is ready and you’re holding it hostage an extra week so you can try to lure people into anti-consumer subscription models, or

ii) The game is not ready, and you’re letting the internet(!!!) get their hands on your unfinished game and tear it to shreds with memes, scathing YouTube videos, and negative reviews.

This is the very definition (totally in the dictionary, just take my word for it) of a double edged sword. EA hoped to cut into the market with one side of the blade, and instead got sliced with the other.

Never ones to learn, though, this offer still remains on the Origin Access website at time of writing.

The motives I’ve mentioned above are of course just my opinion, but if you have another way to read the situation, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

In Conclusion

So I’ve barely talked about the game itself, and that’s kind of my point. Nobody knows Mass Effect Andromeda as the good game that it’s actually turned into, because you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and the internet has an incredibly short attention span.

For me, this is what the old games felt like, and what Andromeda mostly succeeds in delivering.
For me, this is what the old games felt like, and what Andromeda mostly succeeds in delivering.

So, to give the game its due, my two paragraph review is that it’s quite enjoyable, and definitely worth the sale price I paid for it. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m well into the second Act, and it’s been reminding me a lot of the feeling of the first two games, of which I was a big fan. The breadth and depth of character interactions that you’d expect is there. Those awe-inspiring moments of stepping onto a spaceship bridge or a sheer cliff top and beholding magnificent vistas are the high points that make you feel the fantasy of being a space explorer. Andromeda didn’t lose that from the originals. The combat is a lot of fun. There’s less tactical squad management in combat (con, in my eyes) but it’s replaced with a verticality and movement focus that feels fresh (pro). There’s also nothing stopping you from hanging back and just sniping. The story is compelling (if a little too similar to ME2 in parts, so far). Unfortunately, excessive inventory management from ME1 came back, but I’ve been largely ignoring my armour pickups and R&D options and doing just fine at surviving. There’s also a fun co-op multiplayer segment very similar to ME3’s, though it has micro transactions so… look I just hate ‘reward crates’ in general, but the multiplayer doesn’t require that you buy and it is quite fun.

There are plenty of frustrations, though. Some still unskippable transitions, inventory management, poor menu layout for Research, some jarring dialogue, bad camera work and audio problems, but they all speak to merely a lack of polish, rather than a bad core game. The core game is good, and the polish has been improving with patches. I wouldn’t write this off if you haven’t played it yet, but don’t pay full price.

Concluding the conclusion

Game good. Silly corporate decisions bad. Hopefully both will get better. You can help by not pre-ordering or joining subscription services.

Until next time..

PS Sons of Sol (our game) has its final weekend on Square Enix Collective this weekend (July 1st & 2nd) and we’d love your votes and comments! Thanks!

Alternate Payment Models for Games

Deus Ex Mankind Divided tried some new ideas... in a premium game... it didn't go down well.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided tried some new ideas… in a premium game… it didn’t go down well.

So I wanted to follow on from last month’s blog and continue to discuss the possible future of games monetization. To briefly sum up what I’ve said before, I’m concerned by an increasing trend towards heavily discounting games earlier and earlier (Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Titanfall last Christmas, for example) and the effect that this has on the perceived value of games.

The success of Spotify and Netflix’s models in other industries concerns me and we see a bit of a move in that direction with things like Humble Bundles, EA Access, and console equivalents.

If we’re not careful, we’ll get to where there’s no money to be made in games and only the most trite, generic, relatively low cost and mass-appealing titles (the Call of Duties and FIFAs) will be financially viable. We stand to lose so much as gamers if certain trends take root over the next decade or so.

The problem as I see it is that there’s a race to the bottom happening with the traditional pricing models, and while many, including myself, still prefer to pay for and own a copy of the exact game they’re looking for, the margins are shrinking all the time and in the future we may have far less games to choose from as smaller developers may no longer be able to afford to run studios, and even larger ones will be far less willing (even less than they are now) to innovate with their games.

I want to look at what is being done, and what might be done about this.

What’s Happening Today?

Library Subscriptions

This is where you basically pay a subscription and get access to a library of games as long as you’re still paying. The Spotify or Netflix model. In the last post, I mentioned how things like EA Access or a potential Steam equivalent could be disastrous for smaller games, but this is one way that EA is already trying to battle the downward trend in the perceived value of games. Hats off for trying, but I really hope they don’t succeed with this. Imagine you get laid off from work (as is quite the modern reality). Suddenly you’ve way more time to play games, but now have to cancel your subscription because you can’t afford it. You’ve got nothing.

End of Game Subscriptions(?)

If WOW has gone Free To Play, that's saying something... then again, it's 10 years old so...
If WOW has gone Free To Play, that’s saying something… then again, it’s 10 years old so…

Eve Online and World of Warcraft have both been retreating a bit from their monthly subscription models, chasing after their dwindling player bases. Both now offer the game for free at lower levels of play, but retain the subscription if you want a more complete experience. Granted, these games are both over a decade old, but if these titans don’t think that a subscription fee for their games is completely viable any more then it’s doubtful that newcomers will adopt the model either; though it remains to be seen if this F2P/subscription blend will do the job for either of them.

DLC

AAA has been trying for years to squeeze extra pennies out of their fans by charging more for more content, and it’s gone as far as the total DLC costs sometimes now even costing as much as the core game. This was never a popular approach, but it did work, and it helped AAA games remain viable despite their massively inflated budgets.

Now, however, they’re beginning to realise that charging for extra multiplayer maps, and having only some players migrate over leaves all of their map servers underpopulated. We don’t have details yet, but Battlefront 2 this year seems to be saying that they won’t have DLC, or at least none that prevents all of their fans from playing together.

So we’ll see some changes to how DLC works, it seems, but it’s likely to stay around in some form for a long time yet.

Loot Crates

Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Battlefield and countless others are tapping into the dark side of human psychology by charging players to maybe win something they want. They’re actually working gambling into their games to keep the coins rolling in. Well, it had to happen eventually, and because it works, we seem to be stuck with it. The disgusting part to me is that they charge you money for the chance of winning one instance of a digital good that costs them nothing to produce. I hate this (which is ironic because of what I’ll argue for later, though it’s mainly the gambling element that I dislike). I have never and will never go along with it, at least not in a game I’ve already paid for, but this article is about how games are going to make money in the future, so this stays, and my personal tastes be damned.

Ugh..
Ugh..

Free To Play (F2P)

This is really looking like it may become the most popular payment model in future (it pretty much is now, especially in the East), but there are so many variations on it. On mobile it often means that you view ads or pay to unlock new levels, whereas in online traditional games it often means paying for cosmetics, XP bonuses, or in-game items.

We’re seeing that on YouTube, advertisers increasingly try to sponsor a video directly so that their message is given by the host, instead of in a skippable ad which usually isn’t worth their time. What will happen to mobile F2P when advertisers decide that they’re not getting the return they need in paying everyone else’s way? Because make no mistake; advertisers pay for the party, and we all hate looking at ads. Mobile payment models will have to change, and largely I have no problem with that. With the vast majority of mobile games that I’ve played, it seems that the payment model infects the game design and almost dictates that many of these games feel the same as one another. This might just be me, but the only mobile games I’ve truly enjoyed are ones that I’ve paid premium for; namely 80 days, Reigns, Monument Valley and some others, where I pay to get in and they cease trying to sell me things. I can get immersed then.

Players by and large don’t have a problem with these payment models except for when you can pay more to have better items than other players (“pay to win”) or when they’re mixed in with premium models (“fee to pay”. This is sadly becoming the norm, it seems).

Etc, etc..

Okay and there’s more examples and more combinations, but let’s move on.

Economics 101

I drew it myself. You like?
I drew it myself. You like?

I mentioned at the start how the value of games seems to keep falling. In traditional economics, the price is set where supply meets demand. The problem we face in the modern age is that with digital goods, supply is infinite (for all intents and purposes. Ignoring potential server costs). Demand for games is still a finite number because it’s based on people, but since we’re not tied to a limited print of 1 million physical cartridges (or whatever), one extra game code has no inherent value in the eyes of many. It has even less when you consider the sheer volume of games on offer nowadays.

People attempt to justify piracy and theft on this basis, but others are also less willing to pay the asking price for their digital copy of a new game because it doesn’t cost as much to produce as the physical copy on the GameStop shelf (they’ve got a point, but that’s another topic).

Whatever the extent of the problem today (we could argue on that) I doubt you’ll disagree that gamers seem willing to pay less and less for games, but are still willing to pay the guts of $1,000 (those who can afford to) for a new iPhone. Physical goods hold value because their supply is limited. Classic vinyls or SNES cartridges are more valuable now than when they first sold, but people think nothing of pirating The Doors’ Greatest Hits or emulating Zelda digitally.

So how do we shore up the value of our wares to prevent a crash when supply is unlimited? Appealing to consumers’ generosity and sense of idealism isn’t the answer. Pay What You Want models are rarely successful and we’ve seen CryTek almost go out of business attempting it with their game engine.

Well, just for fun, let me throw out a few ideas and we’ll see if there’s anything to be said for them.

What Might Be Done?

Let me disclaim that I’m not necessarily hoping to see many of these in practice, and currently gamers would never stand for many of them, but since I’m talking about radical changes to how games are sold anyway, let’s just go with it. The idea that everyone should be able to afford a game and that all games should cost around the same as their peers is fundamentally flawed, doesn’t apply to many other luxury goods anyway (like sports cars, watches, hotels, food, seminars, online training courses) and will likely be something we leave behind in the future. Just saying.

Limit the Supply anyway

What if you announced that you would only sell 10,000 copies of your game, but that it would cost $100? Could you sell it to your true fans? Probably. They wouldn’t want to miss out. Okay it would depend on what the game is and the reputation of the creator(s), but I do think it would work. The economic theory is sound, anyway.

What if you built an online, living, open world like nobody had ever seen and made a bounty hunting game, but you only allow 100 access codes to the game at any one time? Access costs $2,000 and when you’re done with ownership you can auction off your right to play (so its value may rise) and the developer gets 50% of the resale? I’m only throwing around numbers, but the theory holds, I think. Could I find 100 rich YouTubers who would pay a premium to be one of the few broadcasting this historical new game? I think so. They’d make their money back on the stream, then resell their access and make more.

Virtual Real Estate

Let’s talk about the apartments in GTA V Online, but this could apply to any hub world. You pay in-game currency to buy swanky (or not-so-swanky) safe houses to store your cars in and launch heists from. The suburban bungalows come in pretty cheap but the penthouse apartments cost a lot more. You buy them with in-game cash so it’s more of a progression reward than a monetization, but since you can also buy game currency with real money the lines are blurry.

It's a pretty nifty safehouse to be fair.
It’s a pretty nifty safehouse to be fair.

The thing is, the game just puts you into your own instance of the penthouse apartment. It might be the most exclusive high-end safehouse in the city, but pretty much everyone has it after a bit of play time or direct payment. What’s the value of that? There’s no exclusivity/scarcity. So what if they only allowed one instance of each safe house? Now, okay, since you can buy in-game cash with real world money then we would probably just have some entitled little troll lording it over everyone, and that’s not much fun for players, but I’m just trying to point out some lateral thinking. The game’s developers would be selling virtual property for real money. Real property holds value pretty well because it’s limited. Virtual property doesn’t offer real shelter, granted, but when limited in quantity it would suddenly be something that creates value. If it could only be transferred within the game, and the developers took a cut, then suddenly MMOs are still games, but now monetised by rules similar to real estate economics.

Say what you want about Star Citizen, but it’s proving that traditional payment models aren’t the only way to go. When they sell an Idris mini-carrier for €1,000 and say that they’re only selling a dozen of them, they’re snapped up in moments because the goods are (or will be when released – whatever) unique.

Pay for bullets

My friend Colm Larkin (Guild of Dungeoneering) suggested jokingly the other night that you could charge for bullets. Although he was joking, I’m going to address it earnestly. What’s the difference between a round of deathmatch and a round of paintball? Sweat and limited ammunition. That’s basically it. 

Airsoft is a hobby where those who can afford it buy all the best gear, sidearms, grenades, etc, and the others just rent the site’s bog standard gun and try to conserve ammunition over the day. Nobody really complains that it’s “pay to win”, yet it kind of is. What if you had an F2P shooter where you charge admission to the servers for a day, or a reduced rate for a month’s membership? Or if extra ammo cost real money?

Nobody would go for this because shooters are a dime a dozen, but fundamentally there’s not a whole lot of difference to the entertainment value of how you spend your Sunday afternoon. I pose the question: why couldn’t it work? After all, before home internet was much of a thing, my friends and I would often pay to hang out in the local internet cafe and play Delta Force, Unreal Tournament or Half-Life on a LAN. If you think that that’s a thing of the past, just take a look at South Korea, where going to a café with friends to play League of Legends all night is very much a common past time.

Airsoft pay to win. Click for the video.
Airsoft pay to win. Click for the video.

Rent the hardware

Speaking of internet cafés and the like, I’ve recently heard how VR is really taking off in China and Japan. They love it, but the size of the average home or apartment is way too small to house a VR system, so they go to shopping malls and arcades that have set up high-end VR PCs that can be rented by the hour (or so).

Here we have a limited amount of real estate and hardware being rented, so it’s not the case that digital games are providing fixed value here, but we’re still fundamentally talking about games and, if anything, this just proves my point that limited supply is how value can be created, and infinite supply is a problem for the future of video game pricing.

Cloud Gaming is becoming a thing, too. It’s now possible to have your games running on high end PCs “in the cloud” and streamed directly to your smaller, cheaper device that could never ordinarily run them. You can essentially rent someone else’s gaming PC as desired, and stream the results to your TV or tablet. Again, we’re talking about renting hardware, but you can imagine how certain specific games or controllers could only be provided by one proprietary company, and they then charge for access. Here, supply is limited, and price well be set where that supply meets demand. Think of the hang-gliding VR tech or the Virtuix Omni which most people couldn’t fit in their home. Tying your game to custom hardware may be more difficult to produce, but it does ensure that you retain value in the units that you do supply.

Competition Entry Fees

Here’s another quite simple option. You run tournaments in your game. Fighting games, sports games, or deathmatch games seem likely candidates for this, but it could even work with single player games where victory is determined by the highest score or fastest completion time.

Let’s say 50 people pay $5 to play. There’s $250 in the pot. The winner takes $100 and the next two runners up take $35 and $15 each. The developer then has the remaining $100 per tournament to pay server costs, staff, and recoup development costs.

Would that work? Why not? Games are pretty social now, so I don’t see a whole lot of difference between this and going to bingo or a table quiz, especially if some of the money went to charity.

Be a Superstar

You know how most actors wait tables and earn very little from acting but Brad Pitt earns millions for the exact same job? It’s not because he’s a million times better than the next guy, it’s just because he’s not subject to the market forces of supply and demand for actors. He’s not in the acting business. He’s risen above that. He’s in the Brad Pitt business. He can sell watches or fragrances or cars. It doesn’t matter.

If the vast majority of games were being sold for 99c, and Hideo Kojima made a new game, do you think he’d also sell for 99c? No. He’d charge $50-$100 and (as long as the game reviewed well/was finished/etc) people would pay it. Gladly. Because his name carries weight. In a world where any simpleton like myself can teach themselves how to make games in less than a year, it pays to be a celebrity.

Jonathan Blow managed to charge over the odds (for an indie game) for The Witness because he’s the guy who made Braid. It didn’t have anything to do with The Witness being twice as good as the next indie game out there.

Isn’t that a little uh….?

Sort of. I mean, I’m happiest when I pay GOG a fixed fee (under $60) for a DRM-free copy of a game that I want to play and replay whenever I want. I’ll be very sad if this goes away, but things are shifting too. I hate Season Passes, most DLC, and especially fee to pay or loot crates, but I also don’t want to see my games on a service like Spotify-For-Games earning me $100 in their entire lifetime, because then I won’t be making games. I’m just trying to look ahead here.

We have to remember that games used to be extremely difficult and try to kill you off quickly so that you’d keep pumping quarters into the machines… and we loved it!! It was the birth of the modern games industry, but you could see that approach as being pretty nefarious, too. The fact that we want everything free now because it costs less (not ‘nothing’, remember) to produce each additional unit is a fairly entitled view and, I suggest, it would lead to the destruction of the  games industry in the same way that it’s gutted the music industry.

In Conclusion

This topic is wide open to debate and interpretation, but the core idea that got me thinking was “what happens to the Supply and Demand model when Supply is infinite”? Price has to drop. When the price drops too low, games will cease being made. There’s no arguing with that core logic, but what happens over the next decade is fairly wide open and hard to predict.

What trends do you see emerging or disappearing? I’d love to hear from you so hop into the comments.

Until next time..

Greenlight turning red!

It’s February 28th, 2017. Last day of the month, second day of GDC (the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco), and our Greenlight campaign for Sons of Sol (please vote here) is 15 days old, but was born prematurely. The original due date was approximately February 26th.

So this month’s blog is a bit more personal than usual as a major industry change affects RetroNeo Games directly.

What is Greenlight?

If you already know, consider skipping this section, but to sum it up quickly; Valve are the company behind Steam, an online digital storefront responsible for 90+% of all PC games sales. If you want to have a business that develops PC games, you need to be on Steam, basically.

Up until 2012, it was very hard to get on the store because each game was vetted on its way through to the platform. This takes time and so the bigger titles from bigger studios/publishers were prioritised. That’s probably an oversimplification, but it’ll do..

In August 2012, Steam Greenlight launched. It’s a process where first-time developers pay $100 to place a game on a community voting subsection of Steam, called Greenlight. They can’t sell their game from here, but instead throw up early videos, screenshots and a description of what the game will be, and the community vote on whether or not they would buy the game if it became available on the actual store.

To this day, nobody really knows what it takes to get through. A few thousand votes and waiting a few weeks is a virtual guarantee, but a few hundred can get a completely fake scam game up as well, or see real games languish in limbo.

Even Valve said that it was an imperfect system, and was basically a stop-gap, but it’s taken them nearly 5 years to move past it. The theory of crowd-sourcing some quality control and democratising access to the platform was solid enough, but in practice it allowed all sorts of scams and asset flips (where you buy a functioning game prototype or several assets, intended for learning or fast prototyping, then try to sell that as an original game on Steam with a minimum of effort to get from A to B) to flood the store and give Greenlight a bad name.

Broforce was one early Greenlight mega-success.
Broforce was one early Greenlight mega-success.

To be sure, Greenlight is also how the real indie successes got through to Steam as well (“over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each” – do the math on that!), whereas before they may never have had a platform to be noticed, but the rubbish gets through as well. Greenlight has done a lot of good, but it’s broken, with all sorts of workarounds (trading game keys for votes, for example) gumming up the gears of a well-intentioned system.

There are community groups and YouTube channels like Jim Sterling dedicated to highlighting the scams.

Red Light for Greenlight

On Friday February 10th, Valve announced that it would be shutting down Steam Greenlight forever “this Spring” and replacing it with Steam Direct, a system that does away with the community involvement in favour of a verification process “similar to setting up a bank account” and then a recoupable fee for each game submitted. Greenlight used to allow the same developer to submit additional games for free once their first had passed through.

This is intended to reduce “noise in the submission pipeline”, which most would agree is a desirable goal. The problem is how much the fee will be set at, and how exactly it can be recouped. It has to be high enough to dissuade the scam artists, but low enough that legitimate small-time studios (and especially ones based in countries with lower average incomes) can still manage to get their games on Steam.

To be blunt, there is going to be no good number here. Valve are taking feedback and mentioned that they’d been advised on fees ranging between $100 and $5,000! No matter what it is, some scams are going to get through, and some developers are going to fail to get on the store. Since profitable games are meant to be able to recoup the fee, perhaps less well off developers who believe in their game could borrow to pay the fee, but frankly, game development is already very expensive and risky. A high fee here is quite an unwelcome added expense for the little guys.

In true Valve style, they seem to be prepared to make sweeping changes and “listen to the community” (which is good, but also points out that they don’t really have a solid plan) just to see what breaks, and fix it later.. well, that’s one way to do it, and it’s their platform so what can I say?

They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater and waiting to see what the next baby looks like, basically.. and it’s not actually the worst idea..

Re-emphasis on publishers

..for them at least. They can set this fee quite high to try and clean up their store. This just means that serious indies will have to go to people with deep pockets to get their games published. Re-enter the publisher! 

The Kickstarter revolution (also circa 2012 – for games anyway) meant that games could raise lots of capital from the public, without needing to be beholden to a publisher. But with the success rates for Kickstarter campaigns (for digital games) falling off in the last couple of years, and with a potentially high barrier to entry to the commercial storefront in this Steam Direct fee, we may see the power back in their hands.

Kickstarter changed the way that games are made.. well, some games... a little bit... for a while..
Kickstarter changed the way that games are made.. well, some games… a little bit… for a while..

Publisher Raw Fury announced just days after Valve’s statement, that they would cover the Steam Direct fee for developers who couldn’t afford it, without obligation. They won’t own part of the game or anything. Their aim is to develop closer ties with talented developers, and to garner good will and make a bigger name for themselves, generally. That’s a great idea, since personally I hadn’t heard of them before, and now I think of them as quite a forward-thinking publisher who isn’t gunning for your back pocket. Good will earned!

How many others will do the same, or similar? That’s when I realised..

Valve’s Genius

Raw Fury will obviously be vetting the submissions that they get to try and put through the games most likely to recoup the Steam Direct fee. That means they will be doing quality control for Steam!! Think about that! Valve have just outsourced their quality control department, and Raw Fury will pay Valve for the privilege!

People were long arguing that Valve, a multi-billion dollar corporation that employs approximately only 360 people (2016 figure) should hire more staff to oversee Greenlight submissions. They could most definitely afford it. The number of new Greenlight submissions averaged just a few dozen per day normally. That’s certainly something that a small new department could handle. Valve just don’t want to say ‘no’ to anyone truly deserving, or ‘yes’ to any hate speech or copyrighted material that sneaks by a human worker. They’d prefer instead to let their automated systems take the blame for any missteps.

Again, that’s probably fair enough, though.

How this all affects RetroNeo Games

RetroNeo Games’ plan was to launch our Greenlight campaign to coincide with our new ‘vertical slice’ demo of the game that shows off our home carrier, some characters, new sound design and music, and a bit more gameplay. This same demo would be ready for GDC for any publisher or press meetings we might stir up.

But with Valve’s announcement that Greenlight would be gone during Spring (when I was in school in Ireland, I was taught that Spring was Feb – Apr, so we were already in it by my count..) and that it would be replaced with a potentially very high pay wall, the team had a quick emergency meeting over Skype on Saturday and decided to shift focus to doing a Greenlight trailer and page, sprucing up the website, and launching by Monday. The trailer would basically be the one we’d released just weeks before but with a Greenlight logo at the end. Previously the plan had been to shoot new footage from a playthrough of a newer demo and put that on the trailer.

We chose to move up our timeline because we knew that hundreds of other developers would be thinking the same way as us, and that the Greenlight servers would be absolutely flooded in a matter of days. We were only a few weeks from our intended launch anyway, so we figured we had an advantage in terms of the quality of the submission that we could make.

It’s a pity because I’ve done a lot of research in the past year (one 2016 Gamasutra blog stood out in particular) as to how to maximise your launch on Greenlight. This included having a playable demo ready, having YouTubers play said demo, try to get press to talk about it, translate the page into multiple languages, and hook up Google Analytics.

Now, just two weeks shy of accomplishing all of this, we had to go off half-cocked. Seeing the green light turning red, we basically had to rev the engine to try and make the amber, because the red might be too expensive to… eh.. this metaphor is falling apart, sorry!

So, without translations, a press mailing list, a MailChimp campaign, or a demo, we launched. About the only thing we did get from our list (because it was the quickest thing to set up) was the ability to take some preorders on the site to prove to certain legal bodies that we’re “in commerce”. They’re still available at the time of writing, heavily discounted, but limited in quantity.

How have we done so far?

Well in the first week we got about 300 votes and made it 18% of the way to the top 100. There’s no specific target to meet, but thousands of votes and being in the top 100 is certainly desirable (and normal for games getting through in the past).

The problem is that now, after a second week, we’ve gotten almost no further!

The reason we wanted all our ducks in a row was to maximise the ‘yes’ votes while Steam’s algorithms were still sending natural traffic to our site. Just by launching, you’ll get a certain number of referrals from normal Greenlight users browsing, but after that you’re on your own to generate your voting traffic. In normal circumstances, the Steam algorithms send people your way for a few days.

Our natural traffic died off in under 12 hours. That’s a measure of just how many other new Greenlight games were going up just 3 days after Valve’s announcement. At that stage we were closer to 200 votes. The next 100 votes we got during the first week were basically from friends and colleagues through Facebook and Twitter shares.

I’ve heard similar stories from many developers who are struggling with the campaign because they were forced to launch early and are just drowned out by the noise.

Our votes after 24 hours
Our votes after 24 hours

What did we try?

Since the launch I’ve been working every day for at least 12 hours, but not so much on the Greenlight campaign. Getting the demo ready for GDC to wow press and publishers was still a better priority – after all, nobody knows how many Greenlight votes you really need anyway, nobody knows when Greenlight is actually shutting down, and we had a request from a publisher to see a new build of the game. So, after launch and until yesterday, a new demo was priority number one!

I suspect that once Valve stops taking new submissions for Greenlight, they’ll probably let through a lot of what remains in the following weeks, though they have kept their options open by declaring that anyone who has paid the $100 Greenlight fee and who doesn’t get through will be reimbursed. So, who knows?..

That doesn’t mean that I’ve ignored Greenlight either, though. Not at all. Over the coming days I ran a tentative €5 Facebook and €5 Twitter ad campaign (well targeted, with video) to see what happened. We got about a dozen clicks total and about 2 new votes. So, probably not worth investing too heavily there, then. One issue is that you have to log in to Steam (if you even have an account) and often have to be emailed a security code for a ‘new device’ (so sick of doing that!), so anyone clicking a mobile or browser link would not likely be logged into Steam, and probably wouldn’t bother doing so.

I got the Greenlight page translated into Russian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese and German. Even though the algorithms had stopped sending us traffic, I hoped that a new language detected might send us users from those territories. It didn’t. Absolutely nothing! So I decided not to proceed with French, Spanish and Italian.

I also contacted about two dozen Greenlight community user groups who exist to highlight legitimate Greenlight games. I especially targeted groups interested in space games. We did get included in four collections, but I saw no corresponding increase in traffic to us, unfortunately.

What now? 

Well, with the GDC demo complete, I now get to turn my attention to contacting proper press outlets and YouTubers. I’m a big fan of grassroots marketing and using your own networks, but having tapped the social circles and developers that I know already we seem to have reached the limits of what that can offer us – namely, 320 votes.

Contacting press and YouTubers is a very low probability game, but one good bit of coverage can do wonders, and there are some existing relationships that I can leverage. That’s now the stage that we’re at to try and get more votes. 

I have confidence in our game, our trailer, our demo, and our team, but we’re fighting in an oversaturated market. 

To Conclude

This has felt like a bit of a weird blog to write. I often write about the industry somewhat abstractly, but I’m right in the middle of this one, and it’s an incomplete story. Greenlight isn’t gone yet, we haven’t yet been accepted for or refused press coverage, and nobody, including Valve, knows much about Steam Direct yet.

I do hope I can do a positive follow-up to this blog in the near future. Until then, I can just thank you for reading, ask that you vote for us if you haven’t yet, and consider sharing our Greenlight campaign with your friends.

Thank you! If you’d like to hear the end of this story, sign up to our mailing list below to be notified when new blogs go live.

I’ll leave you with our Greenlight trailer. And don’t forget to try our free demo. Download it from the Sons of Sol page.

Until next time..

Single Player Campaigns Bounce Back!

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog lamenting the decline in first person shooter campaigns in favour of multiplayer components. Last month, in a blog addressing predictions of a games industry crash, I gave a little time to arguing that single player content may well be the way forward for the AAA industry. I’m writing today to give a bit more time to that idea and to act as a counterpoint to my blog of a year ago.

I won’t be giving much attention to the (awesome and always-inspiring) indie scene today, but everything that I argue for AAA here can apply down the foodchain as well.

Titanfall 2 had the best single player campaign in a AAA shooter last year, hands down!
Titanfall 2 had the best single player campaign in a AAA shooter last year, hands down!

2016’s Legacy

As I wrote last month, 2016 left us with a lot of high quality AAA games that reviewed well and sold poorly. This could have been down to genre fatigue (‘sequelitis’), consumers being more wary of the hype machine, or just saturation of releases. Most likely it’s a combination of all of those things.

Even though Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (COD:IW) picked up its sales slack a few weeks after release, Activision were surely hearing alarm bells when they realised that the multiplayer servers were underpopulated because most COD fans were still playing last year’s Black Ops 3. This was further exacerbated on PC by the fact that Steam owners were unable to play with Microsoft’s paltry number of buyers on their Windows 10 games store.

So many games in recent years have reduced or foregone single player content in favour of focusing on multiplayer audiences. The problem there is that without hitting a critical mass of players, those who want to play your game will have nobody to play the game with. There are only so many players to go around, but they’re being offered more and more games to choose from, and then often being subdivided into those who have bought DLC maps and those who haven’t, and usually further divided by what platform they own the game on. Late 2016 may have been the early warning needed (whether it will be heeded or not remains to be seen) to alert these companies that current trajectories may not be sustainable.

Earlier Warnings and Reversals

We saw some foreshadowing before 2016, however. Titanfall (2014) was well received but criticised for its lack of any single player content, and that story came full circle when Titanfall 2 (TF2) released with a short (normal length for AAA nowadays, though) 5-6 hour campaign to great critical acclaim (but, sadly, poor sales) and was praised as one of the best AAA campaigns in recent years. Having played it, I wholeheartedly agree!

Star Wars: Battlefront in 2015, rushed out to coincide with The Force Awakens movie, was similarly criticised for being multiplayer-only, though later added a single player element. Its sequel is set to release at the end of 2017 and seemingly is reintroducing single player content as a selling point.

We hope you like other players! The later addition of a free single player mode was welcomed by many.
We hope you like other players! The later addition of a free single player mode was welcomed by many.

While most of the Battlefield games in the last few years have featured single player campaigns, their delivery had been seriously under par until Battlefield 1 (BF1) last year, and again, critics and fans praised the focus on this.

While single player content is more expensive to produce, developers must realise that its absence from a €60 title is a deal breaker for a lot of customers (the price should at least be reduced to reflect this, many feel). More than that, though. Single player content leverages risk for the consumer. As we’ve seen recently, if multiplayer only games don’t have enough players, then there is no game! It used to be the case that players bought games primarily for their single player content and then spilled over into the multiplayer for a little more of the same, but with a twist. Now that trend has probably reversed for many, but not all. I, for example, have no interest in multiplayer only games, especially at the €60 price point, but I did want to play COD:IW, BF1, and TF2 for their single player, and in the case of BF1 and TF2 I spent a little time on multiplayer as well.

But even if I’d bought them primarily for multiplayer, and the servers then shut down from lack of players (whether in 2 months or 5 years), I’m glad to still have a game to play. Without single player, some gamers aren’t prepared to pay top dollar for that risk, and that’s worth developers considering.

We sadly saw Dead Star, which featured a great multiplayer twist, shut down in October 2016 – just 6 months after launch! Evolve has also shut down, and Battleborn looks to be treading water as well, despite being a perfectly solid and enjoyable game!

I’ll note that Overwatch is an exception to my argument, but Blizzard seem to be the exception to every rule anyway. Indeed, their success is part of why all these other games are failing – especially Battleborn.

So what about 2017?

It’s looking good for fans of single-player content. If you allow that coop modes are hybrids of single and multiplayer (usually single-player-style crafted content intended for 2-4 players), then Ubisoft are releasing Ghost Recon: Wildlands in March (and it’s listed is playable in single player), and For Honor in February, which has single and multiplayer.

A big one is Mass Effect: Andromeda from EA and Bioware in March. It has a multiplayer mode, but its main focus is a 20-30 hour single player campaign. The last Mass Effect game was 3 in 2012.

Are we looking forward to this? Despite earlier skepticism, yes!

I already mentioned that the new Battlefront will have single player, and the end of the year will likely also see a new COD game with a 5 or 6 hour campaign. These aren’t terribly exciting for the purposes of this blog, but the fact that they’re holding course instead of veering towards multiplayer-only is noteworthy.

We’ve also just had Resident Evil 7, and this year will also see Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Prey for the PC, Horizon: Zero Dawn for PS4, and Red Dead Redemption 2 for consoles (and hopefully the PC later, as with GTA V). So there’s no shortage of single player games releasing this year, and they seem to be getting greater focus, but how they perform will be crucial.

The way forward for AAA publishers?

If these games perform well, and doubtless many of them will, one hopes that it will convince developers that single player is not only not a thing of the past, but that these titles can produce their own runaway successes and that they can help publishers leverage their risk with more predictable sales figures. Players won’t often buy a multiplayer game if their friends aren’t playing it, so sales are vulnerable to a cascade effect. With a single player game, people buy just for themselves, and sales should be more easy to predict. Multiplayer-only may often have a higher profit potential (by eliminating campaign creation costs) but one thing we know about AAA publishers is that they’re more concerned with reducing risk than innovating. That’s not a criticism. It’s a necessity for them.. mostly.

With single player games, in the same way as with cinema releases, people will often buy in immediately for fear of having the story spoiled from them. This can protect against launch slumps. With multiplayer, people are more likely to wait for a sale as they won’t miss much. We saw this at the end of 2016. I would think we’ll see at least a couple of developers attempt to put greater emphasis on a great story with an unbelievable twist, in order to increase day one sales. Pre-order bonuses aren’t cutting it in the same way as they once were, seemingly.

In Conclusion

I pretty much already concluded in the last section, actually. All that’s left for me to say is ‘thanks for reading’. This is a very uncertain topic, of course, and these are only my thoughts. I’d love to hear yours in the comments. If you liked the article, do consider sharing.

Oh and if you haven’t seen it, we’ve just released a teaser trailer for our own game ‘Sons Of Sol’. I encourage you to check it out below and like/subscribe/share/all that good stuff.

Until next time..

AAA-pocalypse?

How can one blogger adequately sum up 2016, and what even to write about?..

Modern warfare was remastered this year, but only available with infinite warfare pre-orders. So it seems nobody owns it..
Modern warfare was remastered this year, but only available with infinite warfare pre-orders. So it seems nobody owns it..

A ‘memorable’ year

While 2016 has been a harrowing year for most (who survived), it’s actually been probably the best in recent years for gamers. We saw the long-awaited releases of Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian. Hideo Kojima’s new studio teased something in Death Stranding that looks as inaccessibly nonsensical and impossibly crazy as anyone could have hoped for. Overwatch has delighted millions. Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 were great offerings, and even the less popular COD: Infinite Warfare was, I found, trying new things in the single player. Doom blew everyone away with a spectacular 20 hour single player campaign of the kind that shooter fans had been starved for. My new favourite game, XCOM 2 (sequel to my old favourite game) was released early in the year. I lost several weeks of productive work to it, but it steeled me for the year ahead, teaching me how to deal with loss and what to do when everything turns to shit (hint: keep fighting!).

On the indie games front we’ve seen incredible successes and a more mainstream acceptance of these games as a result. Games of note include That Dragon, Cancer, SuperHot, Stardew Valley, Owlboy, Firewatch, Inside, Abzu, and dozens upon dozens of others.

I’d planned to do a game of the year article this month, but the sheer volume of quality games made this impossible. One problem was that I couldn’t play them all. Another was that, after increasing my efforts during the Holiday break and playing all the main shooters, there were then just too many to talk about! (In short, Doom is the best single player shooter, I largely liked Battlefield 1’s single player and multiplayer, Titanfall 2 does have a great campaign, and Overwatch is probably where to go if multiplayer is your only interest, though it isn’t for me). In my book it’s a good gaming year when there’s too many titles for one writer to approach even a best shooter or best indie game list.

So, what to write about then?

Well, I recall that as we entered 2016, there was still talk of the Indiepocalypse – 2015’s hot topic. It was still on everyone’s lips (either seriously or derisively) for the first half of the year. Talk of it then petered out as people accepted that game dev would always be hard, and you just have to commit, build a game worth building, plan wisely, reach your audience as best you can, and see what happens. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

Image: Steam Spy
Image: Steam Spy

In the closing weeks of 2016, Steam Spy released a statistic that approximately 40% of all games on Steam were released in 2016. This news hasn’t exactly run its course yet, but it’s clear from most reactions that this number is considered ‘high’. Many consider it to be a bad thing; for AAA, but for indies particularly. Consumers have said that the Steam marketplace is just flooded with crappy games and asset flips (partially true), that Steam needs better curation (ideally, yes), and many businesses have been somewhat alarmed, realising that this high an increase in competition can’t be spun positively. Optimists (it appears some have survived 2016) say ‘the more games the better’.

The interesting thing is that I, for one, haven’t really heard more about the Indiepocalypse since that statistic was released. What I have heard about in the last few weeks is talk of disasters coming to the AAA world!

The final quarter release schedule was jam-packed with huge titles, and the news from most of them was that they were under-performing. Battlefield 1 was first, and did pretty well, actually, but Titanfall 2 came out straight afterwards and has performed extremely poorly despite great reviews. This is most likely because people were already playing EA’s Battlefield 1 still and/or waiting for this year’s Call of Duty (Infinite Warfare) to release just a few days later, or Dishonored 2 a few days after that. Infinite Warfare’s reveal trailer was the 2nd most disliked YouTube video ever, signalling either (or both)  a dislike of the move to space, or complete apathy towards the 12th annual COD in a row.

Genre Fatigue

Apparently Infinite Warfare has sold only half as well as last year’s Black Ops III and a leading reason why is that many COD players are still playing BLOPS3. Activision are competing with themselves! The multiplayer in each game is extremely similar, after all, so there’s really very little reason to move on.

Should Activision give COD a break for a few years? The problem is that they have 3 studios creating a different COD game all at once, so we’ll probably see one next year and maybe one the year after even if they decided today to apply the brakes.

Ubisoft did wisely decide to give Assassin’s Creed a break this year, but in its place we had The Division and Far Cry: Primal early in the year, and then Watchdogs 2 releasing in that same crowded end of year schedule (not to mention the Assassin’s Creed movie). Watchdogs also performed way below expectations. This could be because people are tired of Ubisoft open world formulaic games, or because there were too many games to choose from at the end of the year (Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian also released in this same period for PS4 owners). However, it’s also quite likely that people’s disappointment over Watchdogs 1 caused them to adopt a wait-and-see approach with the sequel.

Back to back releases!

Image: Extra Credits (who are awesome!)
Image: Extra Credits (who are awesome!)

The problem is that most gamers don’t wait and see, even if they mean to. They wait and move on to the next giant title in a few weeks, maybe picking up the forsaken game at an 80% discount 12 months later and playing a few disinterested hours.

Ubisoft alone are continuing to push Rainbow Six: Siege and The Division content, while their next big launch, For Honor, is due in just over 6 weeks, with Ghost Recon: Wildlands due later next year, and let’s not forget that Assassin’s Creed will likely make a return. They’ve also numerous smaller titles like South Park, and multiple sports/racing games like Steep or The Crew.

Most of these games, and many similar ones from other publishers, are multiplayer focused, hoping to keep players engaged long term and buying DLC and other microtransations until that company’s next big game comes out.

These current AAA strategies ignore the fact that there are a half dozen other massive publishers doing the same thing, and the market is getting carved up into smaller and smaller pieces while game budgets grow and grow.

It’s unsustainable! The games market in 2016 was most definitely over-saturated, and that’s even if you count only AAA releases and ignore the indies. Gamers didn’t have enough time or money to play everything that they wanted to. You could argue that Final Fantasy, Overwatch, The Last Guardian, Battleborn, Doom, XCOM 2, and others weren’t annualised releases and so next year won’t be as busy, but you’d only be half right. Those same publishers will have new games next year even if they’re in different IPs. And people may still be playing Black Ops III, or finally have moved onto Battlefield or Infinite Warfare. You also have to consider that many who drank the Overwatch cool aid in May haven’t played a single other game since!

So, AAA-pocalypse? Can the indies take some guilty pleasure in seeing the big guys fail for once? Well, no, not exactly. But something has got to give. CryTek, admittedly less of a content creator and more known for their CryEngine engine, just announced that they’re closing 5 studios. One of these, in Sofia, Bulgaria, then announced that they’re becoming an indie studio. So for every major studio that does suffer poor sales and has to close down, we should remember that many of the talented and experienced developers in that studio will decide “now’s the perfect time to try to make my dream game”, and suddenly where you had one big competitor, you now have a dozen smaller ones, all of whom are likely to be more talented than the vast majority of Steam’s overpopulated developer base.

What might we see?

That’s all assuming that we will have companies failing left and right. Despite disappointing performances, Infinite Warfare and many of the other games mentioned still grossed millions upon millions of dollars. After breaking even, profit is profit. Profitable studios don’t usually close. But companies who see declining profits do usually try new things.

I would think that we’ll see some shift away from the constant focus on multiplayer games and user retention. As a gamer, this year I more and more appreciated short games because they let me experience something in its entirety, and move on to the next thing. Most people who played Doom loved it and would recommend it to anybody, but nobody is talking about its multiplayer mode. It has its players, sure, but it’s not the main draw. Gamers acknowledge that there’s loads of games that they want to play, but AAA developers are still trying to keep them locked into just one or two titles for as long as possible. There’s an opportunity to listen and adapt here.

While single player content is expensive to produce, it can be a safer sale, with gamers knowing that this one game won’t demand all their time or hook them for the next 6 months. Single player games also don’t need to reach a critical mass of players to populate their servers, and can have a much longer sales tail because the experience will be the same whether the game is bought at release or in ten years.  iD’s Wolfenstein and Doom reboots are my two favourite shooters of recent years because they gave me a high quality experience with a fun, passable story, and then let me move on. They’re worth the money and I’d buy more of the same. I can’t play 6 different (‘different’ being a generous word) multiplayer games simultaneously. I also sadly can’t afford to pay €60 a pop for multiple games with only 5 hour campaigns. It’s just not worth it. Black Ops III did start selling their multiplayer component cheaper if you didn’t want the single player stuff. I’d love to see that in reverse!

Sales sales sales!!

One sign that the big publishers are sweating is the size of discounts on even their newest releases. I picked up Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 just a little over a month after their initial releases at 40% and 50% discounts respectively! Infinite Warfare was also heavily discounted and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was a whopping 67% off on Steam!

That’s unprecedented! It’s also self-destructive as now next year there’s likely to be even less pre-orders and early adopters for the new games, as they know they can probably get huge savings if they wait until the Holiday sales. So the early COD adopters may have nobody to play with and abandon the game by the time the Holiday sales purchasers arrive, who in turn will themselves have nobody to play with. That’s short-term thinking on the publishers’ parts, and they’ll definitely have to think smarter to compete in an oversaturated (as proven by their discounts – increased competition decreases prices, after all) marketplace.

Pre-Order Culture

Pre-orders of most of the later games of 2016 were down too and I’d suspect that the massive disappointment that many felt over No Man’s Sky and Mafia 3 earlier in the year has a lot to do with it. Square Enix’s ridiculous pre-order campaign surrounding Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (adjusted after considerable backlash) wouldn’t have helped things either, and I’ve already talked about why Watchdogs 2 had low pre-orders.

It can only be a good thing if consumers are finally doing as the watchdogs (and other consumers) have been urging them to do for the longest time and not pre-order, as it perpetuates a cycle of releasing less and less finished games at release time and only maybe fixing things later.

In a crowded marketplace, this sort of thing won’t fly for much longer. So that’s one positive. Pre-orders also just don’t make sense for digital goods. The store can’t run out!

In Conclusion

Much as I couldn’t resist ending the year with a twist on how we started it (AAA vs Indie -pocalypse(s)) I don’t think we’ll see either, really. Studios large and small will continue to make games, grow and shrink, hire and fire, and just do as businesses do. Talk of a repeat of the game industry crash surrounding Atari in the 1980s is just alarmist and ignores the fact that digital distribution removes the need to shift physical cartridges from actual shelves. It also ignores that, unlike the 80s, when a games company goes out of business there are literally thousands of developers ready to take their place. Almost anyone can make and publish a game nowadays without the same skill or distribution barriers to entry. While consumer confidence is being eroded and genre fatigue is setting in, reviews, Let’s Plays, and refunds do a lot to combat that problem.

No, I think the industry will be fine, though it will see some uncomfortable shifting, for sure. Companies who listen to their fans and innovate are likely to do well, while most suit-driven ventures to make the next big MMO or eSport are likely to fall by the wayside. We may also see a lot of lower-cost, smaller AAA launches that focus solely on single or multiplayer as publishers try to protect themselves while figuring out just which way the winds are blowing. It’s an interesting time to be a gamer.

Final Thought

Unrelated, but I just want to add this. 2016 has been a harrowing year for most people in the world, for all sorts of reasons – certainly for anyone with an ounce of empathy. Games are a great way to escape to another world, to switch off, and to protect your mental energies from the whirlwind of negativity that plagues our media (social, real, and especially fake media).

Use that to protect yourself if you have to, but don’t use games to hide indefinitely. We have to be able to still cope with the real world (because that’s where the eyes, ears, and hands that we use for gaming live). Don’t neglect your health, and don’t neglect the world around you. It needs good people to stand up for what’s right. We’re more educated and have access to more information than any generation before us. We have to be able to find the right ways forward for all, and it will take your (yes, your) involvement in the real world.

If we could all act from a place of equality, reason, and conscience, the world would be a much better place to live in, and playing games might feel like a reward instead of an escape.

Now get pumped for 2017 with my favourite trailer from 2016. Fight Like Hell!

Happy New Year!

Until next time..

How We Name Sequels

Enough! Stop! I call shenanigans!!

Allow me to present my opening argument in the form of a screenplay.

The Screenplay

[Setting the scene. Entertainment media news room. Young anchor seated at a desk covered in Nintendo Ameebo and (new) Star Wars stormtrooper toys, smiling and speaking animatedly into the camera]

Anchor: “..in other news, this week saw the release of Battlefield 1, the first game in the new Battlefield franchise. While it’s unusual to actually give the number ‘1’ to a new intellectual property, it shows a bold confidence on Dice and EA’s part in their new…”

[Anchor pauses, puts one finger to their ear]

Anchor: “..wait.. my producer is saying something.. sorry about this folks..”

[Mumbling ensues ]

Anchor: “.. THE FIFTEENTH Battlefield game?!?!  NOT including expansions?!”

[Anchor glances nervously at the camera, then turns aside, pressing one hand to their ear and speaking more quietly to producer off-camera].

Anchor: “Is this a joke? Seriously, tell me now. Is this just a prank on the new recruit or…. you’ve got to be joking…. so Battlefield Hardline was the same ser… and Battlefield 4 was actually Battlefield 13?? Holy mother of… I suppose next you’ll be telling me that Assassin’s Creed 4 was…. it was the 6th?…”

“So, wait, what do I say about Battlefield 1?…..”

Anchor (now shout-whispering): “..JUST BECAUSE IT’S SET IN WORLD WAR 1?! THAT’S THE STUPIDEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD!!”

“Okay, okay. Yes, okay. I got it”.

[Anchor lowers their hand, turns slowly back to the camera and recomposes their “tv-smile”]

Anchor: “Ahem.. excuse me. Battlefield 1 released to great critical claim this week, with reviewers calling it ‘the best Battlefield game since..”

[Anchor looks confused for a split second, but ploughs ahead]

Anchor: “..Bad Company 2.“

“And lastly, new DLC has just released for Doom, the new shooter IP from id Software and Bethesda that took the world by storm earlier this year…

[Anchor pauses and their smile half drops as they appear to listen again to their producer. Turns aside again]

Anchor: “..not new?…. 1993?.. But surely nobody would remember one solitary game with crappy graphics from over 20… FOURTH DOOM?!… So why didn’t they just call it…? ..who the hell are the ‘two Johns’??… ‘Quake’? No, Quake is coming out next year, I’m sure of that!… no.. no.. look, forget it…

[Anchor stands up, head now out of the shot, and begins to remove their clip-on microphone. Banging noises can be heard as fabric rubs against the microphone]

Anchor (now less audible): “.. No, I quit! Forget it! This is ridiculous! Until you can grow up as an industry, how is anyone going to take you seriously?”

[Now free of the microphone, the anchor walks out of the shot, becoming increasingly less audible as they leave the room]

Anchor: I’m going to try get that internship back with Fox. At least Fant4stic had the right number somewhere in the name.

[Someone can be heard replying]

Anchor: “Only the third?!”

[Shouted curses can be heard receding, ending with a door slamming]

[End Scene]

The Article

Ain’t satire fun?

So there’s a humour to how ridiculous game names are becoming, as we live through it, but there’s also a real threat to game preservation, or historical research for those who come after us, or even just twenty years from now. Most people don’t care about the problems of tomorrow (that’s what made us the world we are today, after all) so I’ll focus on the humour, but please also open your mind to what this will all look like to someone in the future. Will they see this time as a golden era of game creation, or will it be marked as a time when ravenous consumers didn’t seem to know or even care what they were playing, but were in fact every bit as gormless and fickle as the big marketers presently seem to think that we are?

Disclaimer

To be clear, I’m not saying anything against any of the games mentioned here. Most of them are brilliant! My only issue is with how games are getting named, and it’s the more successful series that create the problems, because they have so many entries.

Hopefully from my “screenplay” above you can see the problem I’m highlighting. I could say “naming conventions are out of control”, but in truth, there appears to be no naming convention in place at all in the games industry other than “marketing think that the target demographic likes this number this week”.

What are movies doing?

The movie and games industries get compared all the time, and I don’t relish doing it, but I will be doing so today because there are great parallels and lessons to be learned.

The movie industry most definitely seems to have a more mature approach to naming conventions where long-running franchises or reboots of old ones are concerned. Despite the fact that the problem (if you agree that it is one) of seemingly constant reboots in both of these entertainment industries originated (at least as a recognisable pattern) in the movie industry, to their credit, they did seem to handle the issue far more tidily. With the exception of RoboCop (2014), most reboots pick an altered title or subtitle to clarify (Batman Begins, The Amazing Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk – and yes, it is mostly superhero/action movies that seem to get the reboots).

I don't know. It's a lot, but it makes sense.
I don’t know. It’s a lot, but it makes sense.

Where numbering sequels are concerned movies now seem to dodge that bullet by rarely adding a number any more and instead favouring a subtitle. Marvel is a good example as their interwoven movie narratives can be quite complex and it can sometimes even be hard to figure out who the lead character is. Take Captain America: Civil War. Was that The Avengers 3 or Captain America 3? Or Civil War 1? Well, ignore the numbers and give it a name. That works.

To be clear, I’m not trying to claim that naming conventions used to make more sense or be more consistent either (Jaws used numbers, then number/names, then subtitles: Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, Jaws: The Revenge) but what I am staying is, that with the notable exception of RoboCop (and probably a few others that aren’t coming to mind), franchises are rarely so muddy that I couldn’t tell which exact movie you were talking about if you use the correct name. And I can’t think of any examples where “Movie-name 3” is not actually the 3rd movie, or at least the 3rd in the current reboot.

There is no common convention, but there does seem to be a deliberate attempt to clarify when rebooting a series or making sequels. This is far from the case with games.

Clarification Note: ReMAKES in film often carry the exact same name as the original, but they’re usually a once-off remake of a classic 40-50 years old (3:10 to Yuma, 101 Dalmations, Alice in Wonderland). ReBOOTS usually follow several related sequels, by starting a new string of sequels related to each other but not the older works. Take ‘Star Trek’ (2009). The original 1979 movie was called ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’. They haven’t used an identical name. Although admittedly they could have used a subtitle in 2009 if they wanted to make my point better for me.

What are games doing?

Well, as I see it, there’s two approaches that both muddy the waters to varying degrees (and a third in movies where series-related movies don’t share a name, eg. Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal). These create problems when using search engines, or even just talking to someone and trying to communicate which game you actually mean.

Throwing Numbers Around, ‘Whenever’

I’ve never seen a movie do this, but games series seem so ashamed of their age that they’ll constantly fiddle the numbers. While the reasons for doing this could be both to hide the quantity of games (to counter the perception of over-saturation), or to differentiate between split story lines (Command & Conquer: ‘Tiberium’ series and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1-3), or even between releases on different devices, it’s still a messy practice.

Movies, once they abandon the numbers, tend to stay away from them. After 6 numbered Police Academy movies, the 7th was just subtitled Mission to Moscow. Superman hasn’t had a numbered movie since IV despite having a later sequel and an even later reboot.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was the 4th GTA, and before GTA IV (TWO games later) I used to refer to Vice City as “GTA 4” for short. 5 is really the 7th, and so on.

Assassin’s Creed III was the 5th game in that series.

The recent Gears of War 4 is the 5th GOW, also.

If you open your Origin library, most expansions and premium editions are listed separately. Battlefield 1 doesn't even fit in the first 40 icons.
If you open your Origin library, most expansions and premium editions are listed separately. Battlefield 1 doesn’t even fit in the first 40 icons.

If you’ve read my last few articles, you’ll have seen me snipe at the name Battlefield 1. I’m getting it out of my system today, okay?

My satirical ‘screenplay’ already picked on Battlefield – probably the worst offender. 3 games deep is the earliest that you can really get inconsistent and they did so by going: Battlefield 1942, then Battlefield Vietnam, and then screwed the pooch with their 3rd game, Battlefield 2. The numbered games have been meaningless since then, only highlighted (for me anyway) by the fact the I’ve seen nobody else bat an eyelid that the new game is called Battlefield 1. It’s so ludicrous, and it’s actually a world first, as far as I’m aware, to name a newer title ‘1’. It’s all the worse considering that, given that with this game they were very much returning to their roots by moving away from modern or sci-fi settings, they had an opportunity to return to their original naming convention (Battlefield 1942) and call this one “Battlefield 1916″ (or anywhere from 1914-1918, I just say 1916 because a recent trailer made a point of being set then, and the year of release, 2016, is a nice, round century after that). I don’t care what anyone says, the marketers definitely missed a trick with that one. And I’ve a degree in marketing so I feel I get to say this with at least a little authority:

If they were so dead-set against a year in the title for whatever reason, Battlefield: The Great War would still have been less of a joke than Battlefield 1, as a name. Okay, I’ve had my say. Great game, horrific name, moving on..

The thing about this trend with all those aforementioned games is that the only way to fix it is to own up and call the next game the correct number. Like “Battlefield 16“, which they’ll never do, especially coming straight after 1, in their case. 

Preferable to that would be to continue using subtitles forever once you’ve started, but the problem there is that sales will be lost because less die-hard fans might lose a named game through the year-sized cracks without realising it.

As ridiculous as that all is, it doesn’t exactly cause a major problem for searchability, and a Wikipedia search can quickly inform you if you forgot that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood existed, if you really wanted to know. I mentioned the benefits of being dishonest-thus at the top of this section anyway. 

On to the bigger problem.

Naming Reboots The Same As Originals

Doom, Star Wars: Battlefront, Battlezone, and the game that actually prompted this article, Prey are all guilty as hell here.

At E3 this year, we saw a teaser trailer for a new game called Prey. I thought to myself “people seem a bit overly excited at this. What do they know that I don’t? Hang on, the name sounds familiar. Wasn’t there a game named something like that just a few years ago?”

Ten years. It was only ten years ago, no sequels since, and they’re putting out a game with the exact same name. What are fans supposed to say after the second comes out? “Oh I hate Prey, I much prefer Prey.” Ridiculous! Even if there’s were a discerning in-fiction reason (parallel universes or something) that gave an actual good reason to call the games by the same name (let’s give a lot of benefit of the doubt here, for the sake of argument) then you still have to worry about marketing to the general public and internet searchability, and the uninitiated aren’t going to be as sympathetic to your confusing of the issue by ‘staying in character’ or whatever.

Maybe someone more in the know can tell me a good reason to confuse traffic in this way (like there’s already an established number of searches for that topic, thereby making it cheaper to piggy back on the old game’s presence), but if there is such a reason, it seems ludicrously short-sighted and cynical.

Which brings me to Star Wars: Battlefront, which is actually Battlefront 3. The fact that it’s made by a different studio doesn’t change the fact that I bought, played and enjoyed two prior Battlefront games, one of which was called Star Wars: Battlefront. However, Disney does seem intent on overwriting absolutely everything bar the movies from pre-2012 Star Wars. When the reboot was announced I tried to Google the name of the original game to see what year it was released, as it seemed too recent to be smothering up the name in the same manner as you might get away with in a 50 year old movie.

2004. *weeping* “It was only twelve years old! It had its whole life ahead of it”. Comical as that sounds, there’s a point to note there. Any distinctly named game will presumably be searchable for decades to come. At a time where the preservation of digital art is becoming an increasingly hot topic, knowingly smothering the presence of any game that came before is irresponsible, and seems almost even callous.

By the way, to find the answer ‘2004’, I had to search for Battlefront 2 and work my way back from there. If I hadn’t known of the sequel, let’s say I’m a 10 year old, not 29, those two older games may as well never have existed, unless someone tells me about them.

Now try this on for size: The Playstation VR title Battlezone is a reboot of the original Atari Battlezone from 1980, and not of the 1998 Battlezone or its 2016 re-release “Battlezone 1998 Redux”, nor of 1999’s Battlezone II: Combat Commander. Do you see how complicated this starts to get? And historically, these are very interesting games! Often underappreciated, yet doing all sorts of new things each time the name appeared. This is a prime example of games we should want to preserve and research in the future. Why the newest version couldn’t just have been called Battlezone VR is beyond me.

Battlezone (1980)
Battlezone (1980)
Battlezone (2016)
Battlezone (2016)

You’ve gotten my point by now. Doom (2016) should be called Doom 4 or even “Doom 2016″, but it wasn’t. Sorry, Doom is a game that already existed and that still has thousands of concurrent players daily. In five years time, I’ll be you anything that more people will be playing classic Doom than current Doom, as great as the new one is. You don’t get to steamroll the older title and pretend it didn’t exist. Which is ironic to say because 2016’s version is clearly such a love letter to the original. It seems a shame to me that it copy/pasted the name. Imitation is the best form of flattery, but not when it extends to cutting off and then wearing your idol’s skin.

In Conclusion – What have I missed?

It’s clearly a growing trend to name newer games the same as the originals, even after as little as 10 years, and I can only think of negative consequences for doing so. Is it just more ‘hip’ to drop the number?

It actually disgusts me. The notion that we’re so fickle that we’ll forget about the originals, or somehow appreciate the newer versions more because they didn’t have the number 4 or 5 in the name. You might argue that new players are more likely to pick up a game if they don’t feel like they’ve already missed 5 instalments, but to hide your game’s ancestry for that reason alone is so sardonic! That theory also sounds like something that overpaid marketers may have merely convinced themselves is true rather than something sales data has actually backed up. After all, I bought Assassin’s Creed IV, Civilization V, Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and Fallout 4 all without having played prior games. And I know many who have done the same.

Fudging the numbers in this way is being done by the biggest companies with the biggest marketing departments. There must be some logic to it. It doesn’t seem like something that someone convinced themselves was now trendy while sipping on a 50% hops IPA that is actually brewed in old French wheelbarrows (I’m trying to say “the latest thing that someone suddenly decides is hip”). I’m convinced that there must be real concerted logic at work, here, but I can’t figure it out.

Whatever the logic, or lack thereof, it’s damaging to the preservation and searchability of games. I can hear the response “don’t care, old games don’t sell well. I’ve a monthly bonus to stretch for. I’m not concerned with history”, but can I counter with this example?

A new player comes to Gears of War 4. Loves it. Decides they want to play all the other Gears games. You know; 1, 2, and 3. You’ve made 3 extra (albeit lower-priced) sales on the back of 1. Well done. What about Judgment? You lost that sale didn’t you? Why, because it wasn’t very clear that it existed, and that’s the most recent and thus highest-priced of the previous games that you failed to sell.

So, what of it all? I’m afraid my advice is simply “just be honest with the damned numbers or don’t use them! And never use a name that’s already been used”. Hell, if you use a name even similar to somebody else’s you get sued.  Bethesda initiated legal proceedings against Mojang when they announced Scrolls a few years ago because it sounded too similar to their series The Elder Scrolls. But you’re allowed do it to yourself because it’s your property? Legally, okay, sure, but what about the consumers?

I’ll leave you with a section from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)’s website about trademarks.

What is trademark infringement?
Trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of a trademark or service mark on or in connection with goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services.

“Unauthorized” doesn’t apply, but the rest is worth thinking about.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time..

E3 2016. In Summary

This past week Los Angeles saw E3 2016 come and go in its usual flamboyant fashion – if a little less spectacularly than other years. Indeed, many worry about the future of E3. EA, Activision Blizzard, Disney and Wargaming all declined to exhibit on the show floor, though EA did retain their own press conference.

It seems that the rise of streaming events and online coverage is making the (sometimes) million dollar spots on the show floor less and less attractive to the big companies. Foot traffic was down to 50,300 from 52,200 last year, yet online streaming platform Twitch (alone) set a new record of 12 million unique views.

You know what they say; the one constant is change. Whatever the future holds for the expo, E3 2016 did happen, and here’s my overview.

Disclaimer: I couldn’t possibly mention everything, but I’ll give some of the bigger news first, then some items of interest to me, then wrap up with a quickfire section of headlines for you to follow up on if you like.

More of the same

I mean this insofar as a lot of the games we were shown were first announced last year, and the show certainly felt less spectacular that 2015’s when it came to new reveals. You can read my last year’s coverage here… you know, if you really wanted to.. can’t see why you would now, to be honest.

You may recall that in 2015 we were given a plethora of new reveals including Doom, Fallout 4, Shenmue 3, Scalebound, Sea of Thieves, The Last Guardian, Gears of War 4, Recore, Horizon: Zero Dawn, For Honor, Final Fantasy VII, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, Dishonoured 2, and many more. All of those were brand new (or at least very recent) reveals for E3 2015 and from that list, this year (apart from Doom and Fallout 4) we were just seeing more of those games. And even one of Bethesda’s big announcements was that Doom and Fallout 4 will be coming to VR. 

So it felt like we’d less new announcements and largely just updates on what we knew about. C’est sera, sera.

Top New Announcements & Gameplay

These are just a few of my pics of the brand new announcements or gameplay that aren’t VR related (VR follows).

Battlefield 1 (Gameplay)

I still hate the name for like the 19th Battlefield game just because it’s set in World War 1. It’s dumb as all hell! Moving on..

We already had the reveal trailer a few weeks ago but E3 was the first time we saw gameplay. You can find a star-studded gameplay event on YouTube where celebrities play a map from the new game. Plenty of streamers and YouTubers have gotten their hands on the demo by now as well so there’s a lot to check out if you desire.

The game and the destruction are looking beautiful visually and the zeppelin crashing down on the map (its fall location is based on where it is when destroyed, not preset) and crushing buildings is spectacular. The zeppelin also seems to spawn in for the losing team to try to help them claw back, which should help to combat the horrifically one-sided battles that can sometimes occur.

I loved Battlefield 1942, mostly because of the combined arms. The planes were slow so they actually were interacting with soldiers instead of being jets that scream past the entire map in two seconds. This is the first Battlefield game since the original where we have slow-moving planes again and that excites me, greatly!

There also seems to be a ‘driver’ and ‘pilot’ class to the game. Could Dice finally be focusing on lending some importance to the vehicles apart from having them just be expensive taxis to the front lines for Assault players who then just abandon them? Here’s hoping.

I gave up on Battlefield after 3 (played 4 a little though). This could be the one to bring me back in. Let’s hope the single-player story is nowhere near as f***ing stupid as Battlefield 3 and 4‘s. That stuff was hard to take..

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Again, we knew about this, but knew virtually nothing about it. Now we have a sweet-looking gameplay trailer, a glimpse of the female playable character and some Krogan, Asari and Salarian NPCs, and the Mako (the only directly pilotable vehicle) in action.

I don’t like how Mass Effect 3 left off, or how subsequent DLC was sold with the hint of clarifying it when it didn’t (see the Indoctrination Theory), but I loved the first two and a half Mass Effect games. The endings of 3 also don’t come into play in Andromeda, so I’m actually excited for this.

Quake Champions

Bethesda opened their press conference with this video teasing Quake Champions. What do you do after a remake of Doom? Why, a remake of Quake, of course!! It’s set to be an arena shooter with eyes on the eSports market (and it’s not a MOBA. Apparently people somehow thought that. Don’t ask me why). We didn’t see any gameplay but the new Doom really delivered this year! This should have Quake fans excited.

New Elder Scrolls?

It wasn’t part of Bethesda’s conference, but in subsequent interviews we’ve learned that they’re working on a new Elder Scrolls game (a new Skyrim, for those who forgot that Skyrim was actually called The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim).

They’re also working on two other unannounced big titles. I might hazard a guess that one is Fallout 5, and one could be a brand new IP? I’d be surprised if we hear anything about them before E3 next year though.

The Last Guardian Release Date

It’s coming October 25th, 2016. Playstation 4 only.

Hideo Kojima’s New Game: Death Stranding

Hideo Kojima made his first on-stage appearance since leaving Konami (which was nice to see. Almost like a prisoner of war returning home) and announced the new game he’s working on with this trailer. 

Look, get as hyped as you want, but we know nothing about this game. We already knew he was working on something with Sony and that Norman Reedus was probably involved. Now we’ve just confirmed that it promises to make at least as little sense as his Metal Gear games, if not less. Nice to see a trailer, though. Definitely one to watch.

Halo Wars 2

The first Halo Wars I actually really enjoyed, and it remains the top selling console RTS of all time (though that’s not saying an awful lot). I’ve really gone off Halo since 343 Industries took over but if this is dealing with a different story line to that of Halo 4 and 5 then I could get on board.

The big bit of news about it is that it will be playable on Windows 10 (though not simultaneously with Xbox users, so no cross-platform multiplayer) with full mouse and keyboard controls.

Fifa 17

I never thought I’d write news on a sports game, let alone the annual love-child of the most corrupt sports organisation in the world and EA (who we all love to give stick to but who are actually angels by comparison) but something actually happened in the franchise. Yes, I know they added female teams last year, but it was still the same game and gameplay.

Now the game has a story mode! ‘The Journey’. It’s optional, and it’s separate from the traditional modes of play, but finally – some innovation!

Apparently you can only play forward and mid-field roles because the story and dialogue require it. It’s not clear whether you control just the one character for the whole game (I somehow doubt it) or whether if you score too many goals you could fail the story objective (of losing, let’s say) and have to restart the match (I also somehow doubt that) but I’m very interested to learn what they did. How interesting would it be if Rocket League had actually convinced them to focus on single-player controls? I’ve always thought a sports game would be interesting done from the point of view of a single player.

It’s also shifted to using the Frostbite engine? Yes, the same engine as Battlefield and Battlefront.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Nintendo finally showed us some more of the new Zelda game and it’s been charming the pants off of people! Earlier this year it was announced that it’s been delayed until 2017. It was rumoured to feature a male or female Link but it’s now confirmed that you can only play as a male Link. I thought the gender was always unspecified before, no? People just assumed it was a guy? Made it more interesting I thought.. ah well.

It will be out on the Wii U and the new console, NX. There is also Amiibo functionality.

It focuses on open-world gameplay and exploration, survival, cooking, physics-based puzzles, and, of course, combat and boss battles.

Sword Fighting Games

If you read my sword fighting in games article, you may forgive my giving these games their own section.

For Honor

For Honor showed off some story in a new trailer and announced a release date of February 14th, 2017. Valentine’s Day. You’ll play through the campaign and switch factions as you do so, starting with Knights, then Vikings, and finally, Samurai. It still has the multiplayer mode, of course.

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord

I loved Mount & Blade: Warband for its melee combat, first and foremost, but beyond that it was an incredible RPG, open-world, trading, political, war simulator. Most simply described as a feudal-simulator where you could do just about everything.

Bannerlord seeks to take this further and their E3 trailer showed off a 500-person siege battle complete with murder-holes, siege towers, catapults, and crumbling castle walls. Siege battles were one of the weaker aspects of the original and they seem to be turning that weakness into a strength. I’m super excited for this next year!

Mirage: Arcane Warfare

It wasn’t a new announcement, but the PC Gaming Show at E3 was the first I’d heard of the new game from Torn Banner Studios, the team who made Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, an imperfect sword combat game, but still one of the best ones out there.

The new game adds magic and spells to the melee combat of Chivalry to bring a bit more movement and range to combat. Swords and close-combat are still a part of it, but this move seems to have spread the fighting out a bit. The big weakness of Chivalry was that sword fights in multiplayer became about just swarming a player and moving on. 1 vs 1 was always interesting but any other number ruined what the game was about, in practice.  If you’re charging a powerful attack, getting hit with a quick, light one will cancel the attack, which should make the fighting more deliberate and considered. 

Absolver

I’ve heard this be compared to the combat of the Jedi Knight games, but it looks far more refined than that. It’s a third person open-world melee combat game with elements of Journey, CCGs, RPGS, and fighting games all rolled into one.

You choose a combat stance and build a deck of moves within that when fighting AI or other players. You can also team up with up to two other players with a gesture system, which leads to actual chat if you’re online with friends.

This IGN interview shows the trailer but also goes into some depth on the combat and the game in general. If you’ve any interest in melee combat, check it out!

Age of VR?

Everyone heavily invested in the VR space will tell you that 2016 is the year of VR. They would. The need it to be so. They might say that next year too, or VR might prove to be a very shot-lived thing in the games industry, as Oculus and Valve split the already tiny market either with exclusive titles or by virtue of the fact that games taking full use of the Vive’s movement controls may not work well on Oculus Rift. That remains to be seen. However, if you’re one of the few who have invested in a VR headset, there’s some nifty looking titles coming your way at least. First person games, especially.

The Announcements

Serious Sam VR, Killing Floor: Incursion VR, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Star Wars: Battlefront (X-wing VR mission), Final Fantasy XV VR Experience, Batman: Arkham VR, Farpoint, Doom, Fallout 4, Star Trek: Bridge Crew, and more. The problem I see is that VR still largely doesn’t know what it’s doing in gaming. Most of those games mentioned (especially if you recognise the brand or see VR in the title) are just short modes of larger games, of branches of larger games that they decided would make a nice VR spin-off.

I’m not trying to throw a wet blanket on VR, but I’m just saying that I remain sceptical because very few of these games look like they prove VR’s worth. Most of the shooters have you standing still (Serious Sam was about fast movement and lots of shooting. Now it’s just about shooting) or using a teleport to get around. They clearly haven’t figured out how to get first person shooters into the VR world yet (perhaps they don’t belong there, but time will tell).

VR works better where you’re sitting driving a car or a plane. So the Battlefront X-Wing mission looks exciting, but it’s not a full game, either.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew looks fun, but doesn’t necessarily prove VR. Games like Pulsar and Artemis are already doing the same thing without VR or the flashy brand name, and have proven to be a lot of fun.
If Batman: Arkham VR is in third person view like the other Arkham games then it could work. The public haven’t seen it but a few reports say that it’s good. I say this because third person VR games like Lucky’s Tale have been proving quite popular. Again, though, VR isn’t a key component in something like Lucky’s Tale, it just happens to be a worthwhile way of experiencing the game.

Giant Cop is one of the most “right” VR games out there I think.

PC Gamer have a good summary of some of the interesting VR seen at the IndieCade booth, too. Check it out for more.

My Favourite? Eagle Flight!

In my March article on VR I mentioned Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight. We saw a little more of this at E3 (it was the same demo I’d played at GDC). For me, this is the only game I’ve seen that convinces me of VR. The movement feels correct. You don’t trip on the wires because you don’t have to walk around. You don’t need to clear out a whole room to play. The steering controls (tilt your head to turn and look at where you want to go) feel precise and are the only way you could reliably pull off some of the precise manoeuvres seen in the video.

Other New Announcements

In the interest of speeding things along, here’s where I switch to bullet points. All entries are still newsworthy but these aren’t getting the full treatment either because we lack information, because we already had enough information, or because they’re fairly pedestrian announcements. 

  • Referencing the tradition of shareware that made the first Doom (and other games of the era, where you’d get about 1/3 of the game totally free forever and developers hoped you’d pay for the rest) so popular, Bethesda launched a 1-week free demo of just the first level of the new Doom….. cough. Shareware and even the idea of demos are very dead, then. The week’s almost up as I write, too. I can tell you this, though: Just buy the game. You won’t regret it.
    Update: A few days after writing, Bethesda announced that they would leave the demo available for the time-being. Presumably in response to feedback like this. Good job, team. 😉
  • There will be a HD version of Skyrim.
  • Fallout 4 will be fully playable in VR.
  • Microsoft announces the 40% smaller (physically) 2TB XBox One S console, for release in August.
  • To soon make the S irrelevant, they also announced an Xbox One Scorpio which will be (to paraphrase) really really really really really good. It’s their VR-ready console but it’s a long way off and we don’t have specific specs. Just a video of developers saying that it’s great.
  • By contrast, Playstation announced before E3 that they wouldn’t be showing their advanced console (Neo) because they basically had no games to make it worth showing yet. Both companies’ approaches are valid I guess. Predictable, also, so neither announcement is particularly exciting.
  • Xbox Play Anywhere means you can buy a game once on either Windows 10 or on Xbox and play it on either. It follows Microsoft’s policy of bringing the two platforms closer together, but 99% of gamers don’t care, I wager. They’ll play on their platform of choice and see no need to use the other, a lot of the time.
  • EA showed a video announcing a lot of new Star Wars games, but not what any of them actually are. So this isn’t news. We all knew that there will be many Star Wars games coming down the pipe. We also knew that Jade Raymond and Amy Hennig were involved. Now we just… know it more?…
  • Watchdogs 2 was announced. It’s set in San Francisco, features a black protagonist, and lots of drone use. The first game was a total mess when it came to gameplay fitting with story though. It felt all wrong (pretty solid gameplay, but too GTA if you ask me). If you liked Watchdogs 1, get excited, but forgive me if I don’t just yet.
  • A new Spiderman game from Insomniac Games was announced for PS4. Not sure if we’re getting a PC version. The trailer looks great but there’s virtually no gameplay to be seen. Superhero games can be hit and miss but this looks good so far.
  • Gwent, the card game seen in The Witcher 3, is becoming a new game in its own right.
  • State of Decay 2 is happening. Hopefully it will be a bit less glitchy and come together better than the first one, but that’s good news for anyone not sick of zombie games yet.
  • Dead Rising 4, also, for Windows and Xbox.
  • Sea of Thieves was announced last year but little was shown. It’s starting to look like a lot of fun, though. Multiplayer pirate crew-based sandbox game for PC & Xbox.
  • Titanfall 2 will have a story mode and release on October 28th, 2016.
  • Oxygen Not Included was announced from the makers of Don’t Starve.
  • Day of Infamy, a World War 2 mod for Insurgency, is becoming its own game, but the trailer actually looked pretty poor with bad voice acting and graphics that looked about 10 years old. Still, gameplay is king.
  • Ark: Survival Evolved gets a new (gigantic) dinosaur and a mode where you can play as every creature in the game, from a T-Rex to an ant. There’s also a new ‘mate’ button to go with the ‘poop’ button.
  • Trials of the Blood Dragon is a new title from Ubisoft out now. It seems to be in the same faux-retro OTT testosterone-infused action vein as Far Cry Blood Dragon but based on the Trials Fusion bike platforming game.
  • Steep is Ubisoft’s big new sports title and is a socially-oriented snow sports game based in an open-world (ish) Alps area where you can ski, snowboard, hang-glide and even wingsuit race down custom race tracks crafted by players on the open mountain.
  • The Surge is a sci-fi action game inspired by Dark Souls. It should be interesting for those who have heard great things about the Souls games but for whom fantasy just isn’t their thing.
  • Sony announced God of War (4! It’s the 4th one! Put 4 in the bleedin’ name!!) at their press conference with a ten minute gameplay walkthrough.
  • Dual Universe is an emergent sci-fi MMO that looks like it sits somewhere between Space Engineers, Star Citizen, No Man’s Sky, and Minecraft. Is there room for another game in there? Sure! Particularly if Star Citizen never comes out or if No Man’s Sky can’t live up to the ridiculous levels of hype surrounding it. (I’m not saying that either of those things are likely, just possible).
  • Tekken 7 was announced, and actually is coming to PC and consoles.
  • Forza Horizon 3 is set in beautiful Australia, looking fantastic, and is coming to PC and consoles.
  • Fallout Shelter will have a PC edition, if you haven’t played it on mobile yet (it’s free but a tiny phone screen can be a bit awkward).
  • Dropzone is a Real Time Strategy (RTS) based on 15-minute rounds.
  • Warhammer’s Dawn of War 3  RTS was announced a couple of weeks earlier, but showed its first gameplay at E3.
  • There’s a new ArmA 3 expansion called Apex.
  • Alienware showed off a portable PC for VR. It’s nice that they’re trying to solve the cabling problem, but I really think that this is not the way. The weight of the laptop on your back for extended sessions as well as the heat an Alienware laptop generates running high-end graphics would make this horrible to use. No thanks, guys.

There are so many more games that I didn’t mention. I didn’t go particularly deep on Nintendo, Playstation or Xbox exclusives or on smaller games that were announced before this E3. It may not have felt as impressive as last year overall, but there are some great games coming out soon, and you should be particularly excited if you’re a VR evangelist.

Thanks for reading. I hope my E3 summary gave you something to get excited about and look into. I’ll be back to more opinionated blogging next month. 

Until next time..

Playing Romero’s New Game

Okay sorry, you’ve been click baited a little. I haven’t played John Romero’s new shooter – of course I haven’t! The ‘game’ I refer to is following the stealth marketing campaign that surrounds the new shooter, and uncovering its mysteries.

Once a month I take time out of developing my Asteroids-like game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest to blog on gaming news. I’ve been following this story with great curiosity recently.

Last weekend I did a hefty amount of research into Hoxar, the mysterious (and fictional) augmented reality company that lies at the heart of this mystery. During this past week a lot has been hinted and teased, including the fact that “On April 25th at 11 am EDT, the full details of Night Work’s upcoming game will be revealed”.

What I’m writing down today is a summary of what’s happened, what’s known, and (a little bit) what I think the new Romero shooter is going to be. While I may be proven wrong in just two days, this is something of a snapshot in time for posterity’s sake. Plus if I’m right, I’ll seem like an awesome games journalist and PC Gamer should probably think about giving me a job (if they’re reading.. hint hint).

The one thing I’ll give you for free before we kick off is that the new game is NOT called ‘Hoxar’. A reliable source high up in the studio confirmed that to me.

The Return

On April 20th, John Romero’s YouTube Channel released the video above and the gaming press have picked it up. It’s the most visible element in the campaign leading to the announcement of the new shooter.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve already seen it and know its significance, but hopefully I’ll tell you some things you don’t know.

Adrian Carmack opens the video, playing a role analogous to Rey from Star Wars Episode 7. Adrian (artist) was the co-founder of id Software with John Romero, Tom Hall and John Carmack (no relation) where they pioneered the shooter genre with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He’s also credited with coining the term “gibs” – short for “giblets”. 

None of the original four co-founders work at id any more and to the best of my knowledge, Romero and Adrian haven’t done a game together since Quake in 1996.
The same source that I mentioned before has confirmed that Adrian is involved in the production of the new shooter – not just this teaser.

In the video, Adrian’s ‘Rey’ character approaches Romero’s ‘Luke Skywalker’ and proffers him a keyboard and mouse (lightsaber), initiating Romero’s “Return”. John Romero hasn’t stopped working in games, so the presumption is that, instead of a return to game development, it’s a return specifically to the genre that they pioneered together – First Person Shooters.

As proof, The Return points towards the new Night Work Games Ltd whose currently sparse website does prominently display the text “A NEW FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER IS BEING BUILT AT NIGHT WORK GAMES LTD. IN GALWAY, IRELAND”.

According to the same site “Night Work Games Ltd. is the dark and violent subsidiary of Romero Games Ltd”, which is also now based in Galway.

As trivia; the video was created by 2 Player Productions, the same team that did the Double Fine Documentary and Minecraft: The Story of Mojang. Apparently, hearing that Romero was now based in Ireland, they decided to mimic the famous scene from the end of The Force Awakens. The final scene from Episode 7 was filmed on Sceilig Mhicíl (Skellig Michael) in County Kerry off the West coast of Ireland. This video was filmed in Connemara, about 200km North of the Skelligs, and on the mainland.

Adrian Carmack has also had an Irish base of operations for a little while, having bought a 5-star hotel in County Laois in 2014.

Hoxar

Anyone who signed up to the Night Work Games newsletter or who’s been following John or Brenda Romero’s Twitter feeds will have caught wind of something called ‘Hoxar’. It’s been floating around for a few weeks before we knew anything about Night Work Games or The Return.

Shack News seem to have scooped the Hoxar story on April 15th, with Romero confirming (in a way) the validity via Twitter.

Hoxar’s website (registered in February this year), at a casual glance, appears to be just some technology company interested in revolutionary VR. But if you read a little into it, you realise that they’re calling VR (which is only just getting started) “a thing of the past”.

The biggest clue that they’re not real is probably that their technology has “sight, sound, smell, and touch components”.. nobody in their right minds is working on smellovision. That train has sailed. (although – that’s what they said about VR..)

If you Google Image search any of the photos on the site you can see that they come from stock photo websites or similar, and you won’t find any of the supposed employees on LinkedIn or anywhere else.

A lot of detail has gone into the site, and there’s even job openings. Apparently, a PR company is helping with this game, so presumably this whole Hoxar thing is part of their brief while Night Work Games makes the actual game.

What the company supposedly do is develop “BLACKROOM”, an extremely (impossibly) advanced virtual reality experience that doesn’t require any headsets. It includes advanced AI and uses hoxels (holographic pixels). It has entertainment, therapeutic, and military applications. The kicker though is their PMT (Predictive Memory Technology). Read the site’s info itself if you want, but essentially, in the fiction, it reads people’s memories and extrapolates more realistic experiences based on what the user would expect to happen.

The Social Media Fiction

Again, you can track it all down in detail yourself but in short; Through the Hoxar Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as their various newsletters, they’ve told us of how their tests with the technology are proceeding. A woman got to reunite with her dead mother and find closure – great!

There was also a military test that went wrong and is basically being examined – not so great! But this is why you test! Nothing to worry a bout..

This smacks of the kind of thing you hear on the TV or radio at the start of a horror movie before the hero turns it off, thinking nothing of it, only to have it start chewing on his or her leg thirty minutes later.

Hoxar certainly seems to be this game’s equivalent of Doom‘s UAC (Union Aerospace Corporation). When will the scientists learn?!

The other thing to note is that the dates mentioned in all posts are in April 2036. Presumably, many people have glanced right past the dates, not noticing that there’s one digit out of place. So while we’re getting ‘live’ updates every other day, the fiction presumes that we’re in 2036.

The Invitation

In the Hoxar newsletter of April 24th, they have a post about Curse of the Ebon Raven, an “entertainment HoloSim” horror game so intense that nobody has yet made it through.

The end of the announcement said “To arrange an engagement, contact please contact Thexder Roy at thexder@hoxar-inc.com”.

I find this curious because it’s the only mention of this so far, and the game is about to be announced in two days. I’m not sure where they can go with this one (unless the hauntings turn out to be real! – ooooohhh). Nevertheless, I bit, and answered the email. To my surprise, I got a response. See below.

This email was sent out 1 minute after yesterday’s newsletter from Night Work Games. A minute is 60 seconds. 6 times 10. Ignore 10. 6. The first, second, and third numbers in ‘666’, the number of the beast! Coincidence? Wake up people!!

Okay so I’m not sure what to make of that one, but I know I’m not flying to Scottsdale to drive up 3 miles of road to an empty construction site. I put this down to just an extra level of detail to the crafting of the game’s mystique, and I have to say that I’m impressed. The reason I say that is actually my next point.

The Address

One of the most curious things that I found (and I haven’t seen any other media mention it so far) is the company address. Other media have rightly claimed that the company is registered in Scottsdale, Arizona (note that the company name isn’t trademarked with the USPTO, which would have been done for a real company of this size), but they haven’t examined the address.

11666 East Del Cielo Drive. The 666 seems like an obvious hint towards devilish themes (‘del cielo’ means ‘from the sky’), but it goes deeper than that. This is remote. 5 miles outside of Scottsdale, and 3 miles from the nearest road that the Google Street View car has visited. 

Because I couldn’t get a look through Street View, I used the satellite photos (I feel like such a spy! I love living in the future!). See the photos below.

There’s nothing there! How curious. There is a reasonably sizeable structure built into the side of the hill a little bit down the road. If I was feeling particularly conspiratorial, I’d accuse it of being a bunker built into the hillside. This is a real satellite photo, remember. You can go to Google Maps and find this yourself.

Companies can put their addresses into Google Maps, so I think it’s probable that 11666 was deliberately placed there by the game’s marketers, and not that the address was pre-existing. But, that said, you can also find results for 11665, 11664, etc. If you explore the satellite views on the way up this road, there are a few (very large, very nice) homes built nearby.

I do think there’s something to this, but I couldn’t say what, exactly. Why didn’t Romero and co just completely make up an address? It didn’t have to be searchable on Google Maps. It wouldn’t be the first conspiracy theory to come out of the deserts of the Western United States though. Most likely it’s all just part of the theme building and the fact that it’s searchable is just another layer of game-detail for the curious gamer to appreciate. It’s good design to reward Explorer-type players, because they spread stories about their findings (like I am now) and hype the game for just a small amount of content creation.

The Timing

How ready could this game be? Is it just starting out or has it been happening for years under our noses? In 2012, John Romero told Eurogamer “Yes, I’m definitely going to be making another shooter and it will be on PC first,” he explained. Read the article here. If the game he mentioned in that article is the one he’s about to announce, it could almost be done.
It would also mean that it was developed in the US, since that’s where the Romeros were based until moving to Ireland in 2015, a decision they apparently only made after visiting Ireland in 2014. Night Work Games is based in Ireland, as I’ve mentioned.

Could it be a coincidence that this new game will be announced to the world less than 3 weeks before the new Doom game releases on May 13th? 

May will also see the release of shooters Homefront: The Revolution (single & multi player open world game), Overwatch and Battleborn (both largely multiplayer ‘cutesy’ shooters). This year will also give us Cliff Bleszinski’s Lawbreakers as well as possibly the new Unreal Tournament, the original of which Bleszinski also created.

I find the timing curious. It’s doubtful that those big titles were looking over their shoulder for what Romero could be doing, since he’s been involved more in mobile and social games for years. Gearbox were more concerned with what Blizzard were doing, and vice versa. Then rises a phoenix from the ashes. A small new company (like id was) set to blow the comfortable competition out of the water.. maybe..

I speculate, but regardless of whether the timing was deliberate or not, the new Doom and the new Romero shooter will definitely be compared. If Romero’s shooter is actually close to releasing, the two games will be locking horns in a comic-book style grudge match for the ages. This could be a real life Batman vs Superman for games (though hopefully good).

What type of shooter could it be?

Theme?

Well this is all speculation now, but the Hoxar stuff certainly hints at experimental technology gone wrong and has military and horror overtones. Doom and Quake certainly match those descriptions. Add to that the fact that Adrian Carmack is involved and I’d certainly say that we’re looking at some sort of demonic, mutant, or alien sci-fi horror shooter.

Indeed, Night Work Games’ website background is the surface of the moon, and the ‘o’ in ‘Work’ is a picture of the moon. Of course this could just be in reference to “Night”, but it’s quite possible that it’s a double entendre, since this studio has only recently been founded in order to put out this one specific game.

Single or Multi Player?

There’s no way in Hell that John Romero is teasing a “Return” to the first person shooter if it doesn’t at least include multiplayer Deathmatch. Call that confirmed right now!
The aforementioned Eurogamer article from 2012 did say “Romero also hinted at a “MMO-ish” style of play, with a persistent world and data” so if that’s anything to go by we can expect some PvP action, but hopefully also the option for some solo quests.

Tech Level?

Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake were all famous for pushing technical boundaries, and while Hoxar hints at high-tech augmented reality, I think the obvious fallacy of that site doesn’t point us reliably at a cutting-edge technology or a VR based game. It still could be, but I don’t think anything hints at it.

The original id games were all driven by John Carmack’s ground-breaking tech, but he’s currently working with Oculus and has been for years. It seems very unlikely that he’s involved or that this will be a VR shooter.

On the other hand, it’s stated that this is a PC FPS, with no mention of consoles. Could this be because it’ll require a high-end PC to run? It does seem possible.

Style?

Romero has said over the past few years that he craves the speed and skill of the old shooters, and that modern cover shooters don’t satisfy him, so we can certainly expect this game to be fast and have heavy retro influences. I wish it would be sprite-based, like Doom, but Romero said in the Eurogamer article that it won’t be.

I’m sure of one thing, though: Knowing John Romero’s renowned penchant for spectacle and his love of first person shooters, we can expect this to be something special!

In Conclusion

Stealth marketing campaigns are fun (if you care about the content). In effect, they’re the meta-game already begun.

For anyone who’s been participating, they’re basically playing the prologue of the game. Sure, it happens to be a detective game and not a shooter, but the slow building of anticipation, and the excitement when you read into a new clue and imagine the implications – that’s marketing gamified! Romero has always been an exceptional game designer, able to empathise with the player’s experience. 

The Hoxar campaign is, to me, early evidence of a legendary game designer back in the saddle, and I’m excited to see what news comes on Monday, April 25th 2016, at 8am Pacific Time, 11am Eastern, or 4pm Irish.

Until next time..