Sales Archives - RetroNeo Games

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.

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 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.

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..

Spotify, Netflix, and Games

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

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

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

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

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

Squeezing out variety and fostering homogeneity

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same for games?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exceptions

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

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

The near future

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

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

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

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

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

Adapt, Engage, Survive

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

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

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

Wrapping up

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

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

Until next time…

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..

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.

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!

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..

PC Gaming on a budget (Part 2/2)

This is the second half of my blog on how to play more games for less money, or completely for free! My first 8 tips were in last week’s blog here.

Before I begin I want to alert you to some current offers. Last week I mentioned demos and a great one just went up on Steam during the week. Free-running zombie-smashing game Dying Light just put out a free demo on Steam. Go here and look for the ‘Download Demo’ button on the right.

You can skip below to “9” if you’re reading after 31 August 2015.

Last week I also mentioned the Steam Free Weekends. This weekend (28-31 August 2015) Mount & Blade Warband is free to play on Steam and discounted at 66% for the duration. This is one of my favourite games in recent years and I’m not even that big an RPG guy. It’s a combination of medieval strategy game, open world trading, RPG, and first person combat. You can do things like raise an army and join a faction or conquer lands and create your own Kingdom, fighting all battles in first or third person (or auto-resolve) as an archer or horse-mounted lancer, all while manipulating nobles and markets. And that’s just the single player! The multiplayer scene is amazing! It’s incredible, and the biggest sell for me is that it has the best sword/melee combat I’ve ever seen in a game! Check it out! The discounted price is €6.79 and you can play for free until Monday to see if you like it.

I also mentioned totally free games to look out for. Humble (who I’ll mention today) are giving away Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones: Humble Deluxe Edition totally free until Monday (Aug 31st 2015). They’re also in their Summer Sale with up to 90% discounts and you can make your own Codemasters or Telltale Games Bundles! That’s big!

9. Origin ‘Game Time’

Click to go to the Game Time page in your browser (new Window)

Back to Origin once more (note, this is EA’s store, and will be changing their name in the coming months away from Origin). Under their Free Games tab (pictured above) you can see “Game Time”. If they haven’t flashed this at you as soon as you launched the Origin client (then you’re probably on the web) then this is where to find it.

Again, Origin isn’t great on the amount of games on offer, and there’s only four there now, but these include Battlefield 4 and Titanfall. Definitely AAA games, by any definition. Hey, they may even work by now, it’s been long enough since their release dates (snark snark)!

Game Time is a bit like a Steam Free Weekend that you can start for yourself once, whenever you want. Once the game is installed, the first time you launch it will start a 48 hour countdown (148 hrs for Battlefield 4) in real-world time (not game time) before the game is locked again.

I haven’t done it myself yet, but if you ever find yourself with a guaranteed empty weekend, you could probably get some good mileage out of Battlefield 4, Titanfall, Plants vs Zombies, or whatever the other one is.. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no discount during this period. It’s still the normal store price.

10. Betas

This is something you have to look out for, really. Multiplayer games that will require some balance testing and server stress-testing tend to run Betas before the game launches. These might be open or closed, and that defines your ability to get in.

The conditions vary wildly. They may only be open to you if you’ve already pre-ordered the game, or pre-ordered one of the company’s other games, or it might be free to everybody who signs up via email, or signing up may only enter you into a draw for a beta key. It kind of depends on the size of the multiplayer aspect and the response they’ve gotten so far. Closed betas sometimes become open in order to further stress test the servers.

If you do get into a beta bear in mind that the game isn’t technically in a finished state, but you’ll likely see enough of the game to know if it’s for you or not, all while giving the developers valuable statistics just by being there. I used to be a huge fan of the Battlefield games, but I got on the Battlefield 4 Beta (which was after Planetside 2 came out, which was way better if you ask me) and while I had planned to get it, the Beta showed me that it wasn’t for me, thus saving me €60 + DLC costs.

Call of Duty Black Ops 3 is currently in Beta but it’s been there for a while and may be ending soon and it’s only open to you if you have pre-ordered.

In the coming year I imagine we’ll see multiplayer betas for Battleborn, Overwatch, possibly Rainbow Six Siege again, and maybe the new Unreal Tournament a bit later on. You never know, so just keep an eye out. The big ones are usually well advertised.

(EDIT: Star Wars Battlefront had a Beta earlier this year so I didn’t mention it, but they’re having another in early October before release. Here’s PC Gamer’s report.)

11. Pre-Order Bonuses

Getting a free and known game is one of the better pre-order deals you can find, but you're still trusting that the new game will be good. In the Phantom Pain's case, the reviews have already gone out and are generally 10/10, so rest easy here. — Getting a free and known game is one of the better pre-order deals you can find, but you’re still trusting that the new game will be good. In the Phantom Pain’s case, the reviews have already gone out and are generally 10/10, so rest easy here.

Pre-order culture is controversial. It requires the consumer to pay up front for a game that isn’t yet finished and hasn’t been reviewed by the media. In other words, it could be crap, and you’re being asked to trust that it won’t be. In recent years that trust has been eroded with terrible buggy products coming out, and developers have been getting away with it.

On the other hand, developers, particularly smaller ones, sometimes need that cash flow to finish or market the game, so it’s not greed driving the pre-order culture. It’s practical business: cash flow! There’s nearly always a reward for the consumer for their trust and early cash. Some of the time these are just insulting, or they’re a part of the game you should have been given anyway but are only being given if you buy in advance or pay more after. This adds to the bad name of pre-orders, but there’s plenty of good out there too.

Often, you’ll get a Season Pass for free with a pre-order, which means you’ll get more content and/or missions over time as they become available. Your mileage may vary here.

My favourite pre-order bonus I’ve gotten so far was ALL of the X-Com games. I think it was the pre-order bonus for X-Com Enemy Unknown, which was excellent, or it might have been for The Bureau: X-Com Declassified, which was less good, but still alright by me.

Make your own choices here. If the bonus is worth it to you, and you “just know” you’ll love the game no matter what, and you trust the developer, don’t leave money on the table, so to speak. Get that bonus!

12. Mods

Mods are modifications to existing games that, in the past, have nearly always been free additions to a game made by the community. They could be as little as a new hat, or as big as a whole new game built around the core engine. Counterstrike started life as just a multiplayer mod for Half Life and now it’s one of the biggest games in the world! If you find a good mod you can really breathe new life into a game you already own, for free! Some are very easy to install. Some can be quite tricky, and so make sure you follow the instructions very closely.

Skyrim is a hugely modded game. So are all the Grand Theft Auto games and Minecraft. Cities Skylines is getting some great mods too! You should be aware that in certain multiplayer or online games you can get your account banned if you have mods installed, as it detects that the game has been modified and thinks you’re cheating. Other games are designed around allowing mods and this isn’t a problem.

My all-time favourite mod is the excellent Brutal Doom for Doom (video above). It’s ranked #5 (at time of writing) on Mod DB’s top 100 mods (do check out that list. Very interesting). Note also that the top 3 mods on the list are currently for Mount & Blade Warband. As I said at the start of this blog, you should try that game!! Also the Long War Mod for X-Com is fantastic if you like the game.

As a rule of thumb, the older the game, the better the mods. This is because the modders are people working in their spare time to change the game, and to make big changes can take years.

There’s a lot of talk around charging for mods right now, and Steam tried unsuccessfully to kick it off earlier this year, but the backlash stopped it in its tracks. That’s a topic for another day, but since modders are game fans, not companies, you can be relatively sure that there will always be free mods available for some games, even if the better ones go paid. Still, it might be wise to get the most out of it now.

13. Let’s Plays

This may be cheating a little, but I’ve found some value in it of late. I used to think listening to Audiobooks was cheating as you’re not reading a book, but you’re still getting a story in at a time when you couldn’t be reading (like when walking or cooking dinner). Let’s Plays are a little like that for games.

YouTube Let’s Plays, and their counterpart live streams on Twitch TV (which often get uploaded to YouTube once they’re recorded anyway) are when you watch somebody else play a game. Sometimes they’re just trying it out for the first time. Sometimes they’re replaying a classic, and sometimes they’ve got an angle, like playing hard games drunk or currently, Danny O’Dwyer (Gamespot’s famous personality and Waterford-man) playing Fallout 3 ‘Naked and Gunless’.

Some personalities are silent, some are loud and really annoying, some are funny, and some only think they are (see ‘annoying’). The video and audio quality can vary as much as the personalities but there are enough streamers doing Lets Plays as their day job (yes, you can do that! We live in the future!) and enough aiming to, that you can usually find good quality videos of whatever you’re looking for, particularly if the game is newer.

The value I get out of these varies. If there’s an older game that simply isn’t available any more, or that I own but won’t run on the new Windows, I could watch somebody else play it. It’s not the same as playing yourself, but it depends what you’re after. In a linear game that’s more about the story, you may not mind letting somebody else have the controls as long as they don’t talk over the important bits. In a strategy game, you probably want the streamer to discuss what they’re thinking, as there may be a lot of information on the screen and they’re clicking too quickly for you to see what’s going on because they’re familiar with the controls and you’re not.

Recently I was interested in playing Until Dawn but it’s only on the PS4 and I don’t have one. This is a narrative-heavy horror game but one where your choices play a big part in the game. I watched Mary Kish (again of Gamespot) play the whole game in one video (I paused and came back a lot) and I got the gist of the game. I’d like to play myself and make some different choices, but I got a great experience for free either way.

In another case I didn’t want to take the time to play the Xcom Long War mod (which is free) so I watched BeagleRush do it on a second screen while I worked, and I only paid real attention when interesting things happened. Over the course of a couple of months, this saved me like 120 hours of playing it myself!

It’s also a great way of getting past a level you’re stuck on in a game you have, or of seeing what a game is like for real before you decide buy it for yourself.

In related news, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming this week. It’s a branch of YouTube totally focussed on gaming and hosts the same game videos you can get on the normal YouTube but it’s also competing with Twitch by offering live streaming services.

14. Humble Bundles

The Humble Store is another online store like Steam and GOG and Origin, but this one sells Steam Keys (so you’ll play the game in Steam ultimately) but some of your purchase goes to charity. The Store has its own occasional sales (like right now) but the remarkable aspect is the Humble Bundles.

This is a pay what you want type of sale with different tiers of games, and if you pay more than a certain amount you get all games in the next tier. You might get 4 games for anything up to $5, or 8 games if you go beyond $5. Or even less!

The games offered are generally fixed (bundled, though in special promotions like the Summer Sale you can build your own bundles to a degree) and the costs vary. Typically you won’t have heard of most of the games in the weekly bundle but occasionally there’ll be a very good deal. Again, charity is the main winner with these offers but you can get like $150 worth of games for $3! Whether you like any of them is up to you. I’ve never actually bought a bundle as I don’t want a lot of games I’ve never heard of that I feel I have to play, but that’s just me.

15. Browser Games

Part of saving money is knowing when not to spend, and recognising your moods. I know that sometimes I really want some distraction. I want to play something new, and I’ve a bad habit of just opening up Steam and looking around for something to buy, when really I just want to spend a few minutes doing something else. I could as easily go on YouTube or Reddit here but since this is about games I should also mention some of the sites that host browser games.

On sites like Kongregate, Itch.io, IndieDB, Newgrounds, Gamejolt, Y8.com, Addicting Games, AGame.com, and more you can find more free games than you could ever play! The quality will vary wildly, but without a shadow of a doubt, the best stuff on these sites is better than half the paid stuff on Steam. For your convenience, most of the sites have user ratings for the games and they’re arranged by genre, so you can quickly see if they have something you’re looking for.

These games tend to be smaller in scope than paid games, but not always. A game could last anywhere from under 1 minute up to an hour or more. You should be able to find something to interest you without digging into your wallet when the mood takes you to these sites.

Also, on sites like Itch.io and IndieDB (and some of the others) you’re probably playing early builds of games that will become full releases later on in their lives. Look for Floaty Ball on Itch.io. It’s an extremely fun party game for 1-4 players made by Irish devs GoodManLads. Its early life was on Itch.io and it’s currently looking for your vote on Steam Greenlight on its way to becoming an all-growed-up game.

Remember that some of these sites may be using the Unity Web Player which no longer works in Chrome. If the game won’t run, paste the link into Firefox or another browser and play away.

16. Your Own Games

Okay maybe I'll just replay one of you guys tonight.. PS Congratulations to the Onikira team who launched during the week! — Okay maybe I’ll just replay one of you guys tonight.. PS Congratulations to the Onikira team who launched during the week!

I can almost guarantee you that you’ve bought or been given/awarded some games that you’ve never taken a look at. Or ones that you started but didn’t give fair time to and moved on before you got the most out of them. Bioshock is a big one for me. I’ve started it I think 3 times before, liked it but not loved it and then started playing something else like a newer release and not come back to it for a long time. I know the game is great (according to critical acclaim) and I like shooters so there’s no reason I shouldn’t play this game when I want something new. It’s already paid for and I shouldn’t spend more money to get a new experience when I’ve yet to experience one of the top rated games of the last ten years!

I’m sure you’ve a few in your own library that you could go to.

The same goes for replaying games. If you just want to kill some time, don’t feel you have to buy a new game. Look back at games you used to love and try them out again for the evening, or try to go for 100% completion in some open world game where you stopped exploring after beating the main quest.

17. <Removed> (26 Sep, 2015)

I formerly recommended key reselling vendors here. I had explained that I looked into the legality of their business and found that it wasn’t illegal. At the time of this edit, that is still technically true, but I’ve learned that it’s a legally ambiguous area that has yet to have a clear-cut result in course that would give us a final answer. Also these case results may vary from territory to territory.

I’m no longer comfortable recommending something that, while beneficial for the consumer, may be illegal and does seem to harm developers. In some cases the keys being resold are unused review keys which developers were never expecting to be paid for. However, in the spirit of things, they expected each key given away to generate more sales through review, not for a third party to turn a profit from a consumer at the developer’s expense.

It might take a long time, but until there’s a clear legal stance on the issue of digital reselling (as there is with reselling physical console games), I can’t recommend this method of discounting. It appears that the consumer takes on legal risk and can have their keys deactivated at a later date (when the source of the code has been tracked down), even if it worked in the first place. I can’t recommend anything that currently leaves the purchaser at risk like this. Even if you’re willing to take that risk, know that I’ve seen discounts misquoted at times (misleading and illegal in most countries) and known of keys that didn’t work (though the vendor refunded or replaced these).

Piracy is illegal. Key reselling may be illegal. Both DO put the consumer at risk and DO harm developers, which ultimately means less great games get made, harming the consumer again.

There’s a great article on the topic here.

In Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, as well as reading last week’s blog, thank you, and I sincerely hope it was worth it for you. I tried to throw in practical general knowledge as well as psychological and habitual tricks so that there should be something there for everybody. I even learned a few things myself in researching for it.

Gaming can be a very expensive hobby if you want it to be, but you can also play games every day for the rest of your life for free if you want to, and that’s without turning to piracy, which you shouldn’t do. It hurts the industry you’re such a fan of and damages you back ultimately. Gaming is a great hobby with something in it for everyone and hopefully I’ll have helped you get a bit more out of it.

If you’ve any tips that I missed or any games you want to recommend for being worth the investment, do please share in the comments.

Stay tuned as I blog every weekend and will be continuing my series “Player Too” as well as soon doing a piece on sword fighting in games.

Until next time..

PC Gaming on a budget (Part 1/2)

Some of my blogs have been running a little long and this one was going the same way so I’ve decided to make this a two-parter. Read on for my tips on how to save money, or even spend no money at all, in your PC gaming life.

While top end gaming PCs to match the XB1 or PS4 can be quite expensive up-front (but totally worth it if you ask me), you can run the majority of games on laptops that are cheaper than these consoles themselves. Chances are you already have one. Another advantage is that the PC is an open platform with competition. Nobody (so far) is charging us a monthly fee to play multiplayer games. On Playstation or Xbox you’ve to pay to be on Playstation Network or Xbox Live in order to play multiplayer. Admittedly they do now give you a free older game occasionally for being a member, but it’s still a “free” game in exchange for your paid subscription, and you don’t get much choice as to what that game is. On the PC we can just play away.

By the way, forgive me for rarely mentioning Nintendo. I consider it its own thing really, as with many many games you can choose to play them either the PC, Xbox or Playstation. But if you want to play what Nintendo’s got, you need to buy a Nintendo, so comparisons can be less relevant, depending on what you’re talking about.

Lastly, in Ireland you have to pay a TV license just to own a TV in the house, which you need for console gaming. Many countries probably have their equivalent licenses too. We recently got our letter that we hadn’t paid. We wrote back that we don’t have a TV (which is true; just the PC monitor and a laptop) and that was accepted. Happy days!

Of course, console owners of hard-copy games can go down to Game Stop or equivalent and trade in their old games for money off new ones, or even cash. This does reduce the ‘real’ price of each game for console owners, but considering that a new current-gen game can cost €80 even without the so-common Season Pass they try to squeeze you for, I think that’s small compensation when the same games on PC likely cost €60.

The laws for ownership of digital products has a long way to come to catch up with the physical world, but it is happening, and wheels are turning to allow us to “trade in” our own digital copies of games in a similar way. This may never actually happen, though, and if it does it could still be a long way off.

I should get on with the advice, but just to give you some context let me describe my habits and spending. I keep a budget (because I’m that kind of person). I don’t keep TO a budget per se, but I find it useful to know what I’m spending on things and to remember if I’ve paid bills, etc. In keeping my budget I observe that I spend an average of about €45 per month on games. You might guess that that’s 1 new AAA game every other month (meaning big expensive releases from big companies that sit on the Top 10 list for months). It isn’t. In fact, while I do play plenty of AAA games, I’ve only paid full price (meaning €60) for one game in the last two years, and that’s the PC release of GTA V, which was something I simply couldn’t wait any longer for (I hadn’t played it on consoles in the 18 months it had been out). I also play at least a few minutes of a game every day, if not a couple of hours. It has become my primary hobby in recent years and I’ve learned a few money-saving tricks that I’d like to share. Some may be obvious, some may just serve as reminders, and some things will hopefully be new to you.

1. Don’t Buy What You Won’t Play

This may be obvious, but thinking that you’re saving money by buying something in a sale is still wasting money if you never use it. This applies to any products or services, and whether they’re on sale or not. Don’t buy anything at any price ever if you know you’re not likely to use it.

A staggering 37% of games sold on Steam remain unplayed. Of my own library I think I install and at least play a few minutes of everything I get, so it’s probably technically 0% of my own library, though I’ll admit I’ve bought things cheap and then only played a few minutes.

If you’re in the middle of an epic RPG like the Witcher 3 or you’re about to start The Phantom Pain next week, don’t bother picking up anything else until you’re sick of them or finished them. You know you’re not going to get to play it for weeks, or months! At that stage you’ll have forgotten about it or have bought something newer.

2. Take Advantage of Sales, namely, Steam ones

Okay, obvious again, but pair this with #1 and only buy what you actually wanted in the first place. Don’t let fear of missing out rule you. I did a blog a few weeks ago about the damage sales could do to the games industry and the damage they do to our own perceptions of what a game is worth to us. I argued against sales a bit there, but let me be a total hypocrite… no wait, devil’s advocate. That sounds way more objective and professional. Let me play devil’s advocate now and argue for sales.

While sales may be doing negative things to the industry, they are there to be taken advantage of if you so desire. Steam are the best/worst for sales. If you ever want to buy a game that isn’t a new release, and you’re prepared to wait a few weeks, then just put the game on your Wishlist in the Steam browser, and check back every few days to see if anything you wanted to get is on sale. Steam have two several-week-long mega sales in the year (Summer and Winter) that, when added together, mean Steam is massively discounting games roughly 10% of the year, and only six months apart. Six months is the longest you need to wait to get something cheap on Steam.

That’s ignoring their “Midweek Madness” sale and their “Weekend Deals”. Midweek is about Tuesday – Thursday, and Steam’s “weekend”, I’ve noticed, starts on Thursday and runs until Monday night (Irish time). So on Thursday you’ve simultaneously got a mid-week and weekend sale happening. It’s ludicrous! There’s far less on sale at these times than at seasonal sale time, but if what you’re after comes along here then it might be a good time to pick it up. Again, make use of the wishlist to build a list of games you’d like but can wait for, then check it every now and again, as it shows at a glance whether the price is currently discounted or not. I think it’s also meant to email you if your wishlisted game goes on sale, but I rarely get that email, personally.

Found this when I Googled for images of Steam Summer Sale. It'll do! — Found this when I Googled for images of Steam Summer Sale. It’ll do!

EA’s store (currently named Origin but soon re-branding to something else) also do the occasional sale but given that they pretty much only sell €60+ games to start with, they’re probably worth avoiding unless you want something very specific. We’ll get back to Origin later, though.

Good Old Games (GOG.com) are a fast-growing alternative to Steam who do plenty of their own sales in order to compete. They have an optional shopping/gaming platform (GOG Galaxy), whereas Steam is required in order to play, though both stores can be viewed in an ordinary browser. GOG also has a wishlist function so make use of that similarly to how I recommended with Steam.

3. The Little Differences

GOG also offer, on some titles, a small amount of store credit back just for buying a game. This isn’t unique to GOG but Steam aren’t doing it.

What Steam do is tend to give you trading cards for playing their games or buying on Steam. These go into your ‘inventory’ (it’ll flash green to notify you if you get something new in there). Supposedly you use the trading cards to trade and craft badges and increase your Steam user level (as if Steam itself were a game). It’s total bullshit, and I say that with the only caveat being that since they don’t seem to know what they’re doing with it and are always changing the rules, they may some day become worth doing, but for now, just get into your inventory, and put the trading cards up for auction on the Steam store. You can speculate here, as with stocks, but for this level of pennies it’s not worth your time. Just look at what the most recent selling price was (usually 8-12 cent) and set your desired price to that or a cent lower, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to sell in a few minutes. Do this consistently and you can easily find enough credit it your Steam “wallet” (store credit) to afford one of the cheaper on-sale games without having to drop any cash at all. Free game for the win! I admit, though, it’s more hassle than GOG’s version of just giving you the store credit.

4. Use Refunds

Steam Refunds are a new development, with you able to return any purchase for any reason within two weeks of purchase, if you’ve played less than two hours of the game. Outside of these parameters, Steam will consider the refund request also. Info here.

If you do get taken for a sucker during a sale period and know you’re not going to play the games, then take advantage of the refund. There’s no shame in it! I’ll admit I bought a couple of games in the Summer Sale because they were cheap and I’d heard of them, even though I thought they weren’t the genres I’d be interested in. Sure enough, after a few minutes of playing them, I realised I didn’t like this kind of game, and didn’t want to play more. I’d only bought because it was cheap. I returned the games and no more was said. You do only get store credit, and it doesn’t appear for a few days, but that’s fine by me.

EA (Origin), GOG, and Ubisoft all have returns policies, I believe, though the terms are all different, and Steam’s is now the most consumer-friendly. Check them out if you’re interested.

Steam don't need your reason, though they ask. Just be within the terms and you're good. — Steam don’t need your reason, though they ask. Just be within the terms and you’re good.

5. Demos

Okay, so this one is a bit of a shocker to me sometimes. We used to get PC magazines with CDs or DVDs and several free demos to play every month. They used to be common but hardly anybody does demos any more, and it’s not just just a death-of-print thing. Demos can be distributed digitally, of course. They’re just far less common than they used to be. That said, they do still exist, and some stores categories just for them. They’re a great way to try before you buy, or to just play something new and free for a half an hour with no intention of getting the game.

Where to find Steam's Demos. Did you ever see that before? It's been there the whole time! There's enough demos in there to play for months without paying a penny! — Where to find Steam’s Demos. Did you ever see that before? It’s been there the whole time! There’s enough demos in there to play for months without paying a penny!

Granted, most of the demos are ones you’ll never have heard of, but there could be some good stuff in there. I have to alert you to The Stanley Parable and The Talos Principle demos, though. Both are major games with free demos, and the content is unique to the demo. You won’t find those levels in the real game (Okay I could be wrong about Talos, not having beaten it yet, but I’m pretty sure the demo levels aren’t in the main game).

GOG don’t seem to offer demos. Origin do but with an extremely narrow selection. There’s 8 games at present and 4 of them are football. There’s some fun to be had there though.

6. Totally Free Games

This one’s special. Occasionally you can find entire games, for keeps, for free! They’re nearly always old, but there are fantastic older games out there so don’t discount this option. Origin typically have one on the go at a time, and it’s the same one for a few months. See the picture above. It’s the “On The House” option.

I don’t believe GOG or Ubisoft (Uplay) have this offer.

Steam’s free games are, sadly, lumped into the Free To Play category, which is a different thing that I’ll talk about next. To find it, go here:

After clicking “Free To Play”, you’ll have four new tabs. Choose the “Most Popular” tab to display all 267 results in order of popularity. The other tabs will only give you a few games.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to really know what you’re looking at here in order to get a truly free game. Look at release dates, or even graphics for a clue. Currently, 90s shoot-em-up Shadow Warrior (Classic) can be gotten for free. In this case, there was a remaster done to make the game more palatable which is on sale, but they made the original version free. There are probably a few properly free full games to be found amongst the 267, but I haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet.

(EDIT: I found a great list of the free games here. At a glance, it does include some that are in fact Free To Play (you can spend money) games and not “free games” (full game for free) but it’s still narrowed down from 267. Alien Swarm was fun (and includes local/online coop) and Fistful Of Frags has good review scores.)

(EDIT: GOG has also very occasionally offered a free game for a short period of time, but there’s no section for it. Just keep an eye out.)

7. Free To Play

Love it or hate it, the free to play model is here to stay. And who do we have to thank? Well you could either say “mobile” or “shareware”. I tend to avoid F2P because they tend to be designed a bit like slot machines, and suck you into an endless gameplay loop that will bleed you of time at least, if not time and money. They’re never truly free. They’re often multiplayer games that don’t end. You just keep fighting/competing/warring so that you can stay in the game and keep spending money on optional extras. At least with a single player game you usually pay once, play a story, then put it down. You’re not at risk of having your time and money bled away.

You can start the game and make your character for free, and even play a few rounds to see if it’s for you. Most of these games though will hold a significant amount of gameplay, or a significant advantage, behind a pay wall. The latter are accused of being “Pay To Win”. Avoid these.

That said, these games can be designed very fairly too, and be truly great experiences. One of my all-time favourite games is Planetside 2. You can play all parts of the game for free and paying won’t give you any major advantage.

Heroes & Generals I like, concept and gameplay-wise, but everything is very expensive and realistically, unless you have literally thousands of hours, you HAVE to spend money to be able to play as a pilot or tank driver or sniper. You can only play as infantry for free. This can be fun, but it’s quite an expensive game if you’re going to get into it for real. Even as a pilot, you can rarely use the pilot because many matches won’t have had an air force brought into them, so despite my paying €20, I can rarely even play what I paid for. Be wary of this kind of free to play.

Approach with caution, basically. If you’ve an addictive personality, or are undisciplined with your credit card, then Free To Play is not for you!!

8. Steam Free Weekends

These are great! They don’t happen every weekend, but often enough to make it worth logging on on a Thursday night or Friday to see if anything is happening. For example, this weekend (21-24 August 2015) Payday 2 and Zombie Army Trilogy were free to play. That’s the full games (multiplayer shooters, one about ultra-shootey bank heists and the other about Nazi Zombies, because we need more zombie games) available to play for about 72 hours (or longer).

Take advantage of these! Payday 2 has been featured on this multiple times. Civilization: Beyond Earth has been on once or twice also. With a game like that, you could actually complete a full campaign in the weekend and feel you’ve done the game, without having to drop €40+ on it. No matter what’s on offer, you might have a lot of fun for free and feel like you’re done with it by Monday. Good deal!

If you didn’t like it, no great loss, but if you did and want more, the game tends to be discounted at 50-75% off!!

The absolute best-case though is this: An increasingly common promotional tactic for (usually) Early-Access multiplayer games, is to increase their user base by doing a free weekend, but to be more sure of retaining it, they let you keep the full game, just for having installed it on that weekend!

My first post to this blog was on Fractured Space who were doing such a promotion back in May. I now have that game, just because I played it on that weekend. It’s still in Early Access (meaning it’s not “finished” but you can play it) but when it’s officially released, I’ve got me a full and polished game, and I can still play it whenever I want anyway, I just tend to minimise my exposure to Early Access, lest it spoil me for the real game.

Definitely one of my favourite things on this list!

I’m going to leave it here for this week, but come back next week for Origin’s equivalent of Steam’s Free Weekend and much more. I’ve saved some of the best stuff for last!

Perpetual Sale Demon casts 96HP damage on unsuspecting party

It’s that time of year again. Assuming you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Summer! Meaning the Sun is out, and you’re likely incarcerating yourself inside buying dozens of ludicrously cheap games and racing to put enough hours into them to feel like you’ve gotten your 99c of value before the next flash sale pops up 6 hours later.

That’s right! It’s the Summer Sales. I’d have said Steam Summer Sale but GOG are currently doing one too and Humble just finished up with one also – not that you’d know as, without scrolling, I can see the word ‘sale’ three times on the Humble home page right now.

For laughs, and I haven’t planned this in advance (having written the blog title after the article), I’m going to give you, dear reader, 100 HP (hit points / health – but if you don’t know that you’re probably not reading this blog), and each time we discover damage, I’ll subtract HP and see if you make it through this blog-dungeon intact.

I’m going to subtract -7HP now for the aforementioned time of year and the fact that Summer sales are making you miss good weather. If you live in Australia I’m still subtracting those points because it’s probably sunny and warm there too right now, chances are.

To set the scene, there are two major sales periods on Steam annually; Summer and Winter. These sales are huge, nearly everything gets a discount, and they last about 10 days. The rest of the year there is something on sale every day, and the weekends are always worth looking at too for free-weekends where you can install the game and play it normally for free all weekend, then buy it at a hefty discount if you want.
Humble Bundles are always selling games, though the selection is far more limited, and GOG are a quickly-growing competitor to Steam who are following suit with very regular sales as well as larger seasonal ones.
In short, if you don’t have to play a game on day-one, and you keep an eye on these sites or just drop in for the big sales, you need never pay full price for a game. Ever!

Great for us, sure, in the short term, but let’s look at the problems this might cause.

As consumers, and I’m as guilty as anyone here, we don’t often pay full price for games any more. This means that retailers and developers can expect to never really get full price. Considering that games make us gamers happy, and developers and retailers make and sell the games while they’re happy (financially speaking) to do so, we can agree that it’s best that everyone is as happy as possible. Lower selling prices make consumers happier (supposedly, we’ll look at that) but can thin out developers’ profits, making them less happy, when we want to be aiming for win-win.
In the past year, there’s only one game that I’ve bought at full price, and that’s GTA V for the PC. It wasn’t offered on sale, wasn’t likely to be soon, and I’d been wanting to play it for years while it was out on consoles, but waited for the PC version. Furthermore it’s actually worth the money by any measure. Amazing game! Apart from that, though, I couldn’t tell you the last game I paid full price for, and I’ve bought new AAA games like Far Cry 4, Alien Isolation, Watchdogs and Wolfenstein. I suppose I paid “full price” for Sid Meier’s Starships, but that was only €15 (actually, my 1-sentence review: Just about worth €15 but there’s not a full game there).

The reason for this is not that I wouldn’t pay full price for some of the games I have bought, but because I don’t need to. I’m still busy playing the last lot of games I got on sale by the time the next one comes around, and I’m mostly pretty good at limiting what I buy to what I’m actually going to play. Many people buy games on sale and never play them at all. This is bad for the games as innocuous art pieces, as nobody is enjoying them. Poor games. -6HP there.
It’s bad for the consumer too as they will regret their purchase. €1 wasted is still money wasted, after all. Even if they do get around to playing them, until they do they’ve added a task to their mental To-Do list and this adds to our stress levels. Whichever of the two is your problem, that’s -11HP.

You’d think that for consumers, particularly cash-strapped ones, that it’s great there are so many sales, and in a way it is. For the same money we get to play more games. We like games and we like saving money. But the amount of games most of us want to play is far longer than the amount of games that we can play, especially if we want to both do the game justice and get maximum value for ourselves by completing it!
I could easily argue here that the benefit to consumers is illusory. The cake is a lie! For me, who likes to beat games I feel it is, though I acknowledge that people might buy games cheaply in a shotgun approach, try them all for a little bit, and play the one they found themselves to like. I just find it hard not to fuss over the games left underplayed.
Whichever your problem there I think you’ll find games are taking up more of your time than they perhaps ought to. The lowered price point makes them “too cheap not to buy” and you’re going waste hours playing games that you know aren’t really for you (everyone has their own taste) just because people recommend it, though they’re maybe an RPG player and you’re an action guy. -9HP for leisure hours spent doing something you knew you didn’t really want to do.
(edit: I’m all for trying new games, but sometimes you just already know, you know?)

Moving on, are the sales good for the vendors? Sales obviously have their origins in the physical goods industries, where vendors need to clear stock either before it perishes, or just to clear room for newer seasonal stock. Sales make sense there. They make zero sense for digital distribution, looking at it that way. Bricks and mortar game shops had discount bins because they needed to clear the shelves of ageing stock, not to give gamers better value or to boost sales particularly. It’s likely that the marketers, in their divine, short-sighted wisdom, decided to apply sales to the online stores purely because of the psychological effect it has on consumers. People are more likely to buy something if it’s discounted, and to feel good about it. This would have started as 10% off, say, but if you look on Steam today, you can find multiple titles, some of them really good games, with 90% off! It’s a race to the bottom! Once your competitor is doing sales, you have to do them too, and do them better, if you can! So Steam and GOG, for example, now have to out-do each other in discounts every day of the year, and especially at the arbitrarily-set bi-annual mega sales times. So while they may have increased volumes of sales, the cash-value of each sale is lowered, and so even for them, they’re potentially doing themselves more harm than good in the long run. -11HP for opening that Pandora’s Box, because that monkey won’t go back in his cage too easily.. not to mix metaphors or anything.

Following on from that is the stupidest example of all of this. The meta-sales games. I don’t want to get too into it because I’ve never wasted my time with the nonsense, but during Steam’s big sales, you can get reward cards for voting on what sales are next, or buying games on sale, or other random stuff. The rules change each time as they try newer and stupider ways of making a game out of the very selling of games. Essentially you turn the cards into badges, or gems, when you collect enough, and you use those to.. craft more badges? Or something? Oh and you’re on a team now.. and can trade the cards with other people so you can… what?! Look, I feel I did it all the justice it deserved with that explanation and I’m not looking further into it. All I know is that somebody actually buys these stupid cards so I can actually sell the ones I get (for doing nothing) for about 10c a go to some joker, and thus I get maybe €1 store credit when all’s said and done that I can put towards my next purchase. That’s after Steam’s commission, of course, clever bastards. Make something out of nothing, give it to somebody for doing nothing, then get someone else to pay you and the the first somebody just so they can be the one to have that nothing. Genius! That’s the easiest to understand version anyway. But the existence of such a system is ludicrous! Constantly selling the product (which is games, Steam! remember?) so low has made even the sales unexciting and Steam feel they have to jazz them up with this marketing tripe.
GOG’s current equivalent makes more sense, at least. If you spend a certain amount during the sale period, you’ll get a free game. A higher amount means another, better free game. This, at least, I can understand, but it’s symptomatic of the race to the bottom and it really hits me hard in the sense part of my brain. Let’s say -15HP.
(edit: have you figured out that my numbers are arbitrary yet? I’m not even rolling a dice here!)

What is this shite?! Click the picture to go read the full rules.. if you want to..

Having established that serious gamers like myself would actually pay full price for many games but never really have to, it’s clear that games are becoming less and less valuable. I actually now always check how long a game will take to beat before I consider buying it on sale. I’d like the experience, but not if it takes more than 8 hours. Kid-me would hate me for that. -5HP for making your kid-self cry with your first-world “problems”.

Finally, I want to look at it from the developers’ viewpoint. Games are very expensive to make, and individual games being less valuable means you can’t count on getting your RRP (recommended retail price) for each unit. Or even close to it! So AAA publishers releasing the big games, in the knowledge that many people must have them on day one, are pushing that RRP higher and higher, and adding on day-one DLC and season passes. A standard game is pushing past €60 now, while with DLC and a Season Pass for more of it, games like Evolve can break the €100 mark. Arkham City is €80 if I want to play the ‘whole game’. Which I do. But I’m not going to pay that much. -18HP for either taking more from our wallets, pushing games out of our price range, or withholding content behind a pay wall.

Batman can't save you when soaring prices, season passes, and day-1 DLC join forces! — Batman can’t save you when soaring prices, season passes, and day-1 DLC join forces!

It also tends to normalise the games that are being made, with big studios less and less likely to take risks because they need to know what their sales are likely to be for a given game-formula. This results in less interesting games coming out from the AAA side. Ever wonder why Assassin’s Creed is (debatably) the same game every year? -5HP.

Wait a second; rising prices, less and less value per unit currency, product not worth what you’re paying for it? Sounds familiar, particularly if you bought a house between 1990 and 2007. It’s not unrealistic to suppose that the AAA bubble might be going to burst in the next few years. It’s worth noting that EA actually shy away from doing too many of these major sales on Origin. They know the harm that the perpetual sale is doing to their sector and they’re not contributing, or trying not to. They do seem extremely unwilling to takes risks with their games franchises though (unless you count risking shipping them as unfinished buggy messes).

On the indie side, where a full price game is rarely more than €20 and DLC is rare, they don’t have far to go to the bottom. Before long they might not be able to count on selling at more than €5 per unit average (and that’s before vendor commission – often 30% – and before all other costs) on their €20 RRP game. (As a disclaimer, the numbers are my own fabrication as I’m hypothesising on the future.)
-9HP for making it harder on the little guy. It’s notoriously hard to make a living as an indie game developer unless you have that big success. Indies need to stand out to have that success though, so on the positive side, this does at least result in more interesting games being made, rather than a normalisation (if you exclude the myriad zombie survival games out there). This would be true with or without sales though so I can’t really add back any HP, sorry. Healing spell failed!

Final tally: Since we had 100HP to begin with we're still alive, but we've taken some serious hits. I didn't plan the numbers, I just took points based on how bad I reckoned things were relative to each other. Interesting that we got as low as 4HP remaining. — Final tally: Since we had 100HP to begin with we’re still alive, but we’ve taken some serious hits. I didn’t plan the numbers, I just took points based on how bad I reckoned things were relative to each other. Interesting that we got as low as 4HP remaining.

In all areas of life, it’s very hard to be a responsible consumer. We know we should recycle, we don’t want to support slave labour or animal cruelty, or the killing of the bees, or the harming of our beloved industries, but it’s not always easy to see how we’re doing these things as the end consumer. I do think we should stop and think once in a while instead of always jumping for the carrot. Do I have a useful suggestion though? No. Am I going to stop buying games on sale? No, probably not, although I’ll buy them full price if I’m ready for a new game and it’s not on sale.

Short of all parties agreeing to stop sales and get back to selling games at reasonable recommended retail prices (and there are laws against collusion like that, see ‘cartels’) I think we’ll just have to ride this wave until it crashes into the shore and see what the industry looks like after that. Change is not always a bad thing, after all, even if it can be painful. Just make no mistake, these perpetual sales are definitely driving a change in how we perceive, play, purchase, and create games, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. We behave like the consumer is king, but even the all-consuming bushfire can run out of fuel and burn itself out.