The hot topic these past couple of weeks has been MMO pricing models, and you will have trouble finding better discussion than at Player Versus Developer this month. Even if you do not agree with Green Armadillo on all the points, these are the critical points for discussion. Skip the distracting side issues and cut to the core. Here is a post on Facebook game scams, with an article I’ve been meaning to discuss. How about the conflicts of interest inherent in running a game with a cash store? You don’t need to fix balance issues if your players can buy their way around them. And there is the question of what is left to do if you are one of us not necessarily thrilled with the shift to RMT.
This last one reminds me of last week’s elections, because there is a sense of inevitability about the item shop. I cannot see the trend moving in the opposite direction. There will definitely be a place for subscription games, but the paradigm shift is already over if your position is reduced to “there will still be a place for it” or “we are still the majority.” Yes, for now, but winning 53-47 when it would have been 93-7 a little while ago means you are about to get steamrolled.
: Zubon
Thanks for the shoutout. :)
I was actually thinking about raising the point you made about selling “catch-up” epics, but you beat me to it and covered it nicely.
Time will tell, but at the moment I see it as win-win. Free access for me to games I enjoy, with no temptation to spend money.
I am extremely good at delaying gratification, almost to the point of getting more pleasure out of the delay itself. Indeed I often get so much pleasure from anticipating doing something that the pleasure of actually doing it is a let-down, and I’ve learned that I don’t actually need to buy the object of desire at all. Consequently, I don’t anticipating ever seeing anything on sale in an item shop that I will “need” to pay for. I’ll get more pleasure from doing without, while I meanwhile play the game for nothing, or for the subscription I would have been paying anyway.
As a 100% non-competetive player, it’s immaterial to me what other people pay for. They can pay for all their levels and gear for all I care. It’s extremely unlikely I’ll even know what they are wearing/doing. I mind my own business and entertain myself. So long as the company provides sufficient base content of sufficient quality to keep me amused, the rest might as well not exist.
As for microtransactions allowing companies to ignore balance issues, I bloody hope so! Endless “rebalancing” is the bane of MMOs and has done more to ruin any number of MMOs I’ve played than all the RMT and Microtransactions put together. Just get the classes in and leave them the hell alone and leave it to players to decide which ones are “uber” or “gimped” and populate those classes accordingly. I like “broken” classes, personally. They are often the most fun to play.
Bottom line is the base game will have to work if it’s to hold an audience at all, and that’s pretty much been the standard for subscription MMOs for years. I think it unlikely standards will deteriorate on that front.
The future for MMOs is niche. Every other entertainment medium works on niche-marketing and the sooner MMOs develop their own network of niche products, the better. If I find my game-of-choice, why would I care if there are 5 million people playing it or 5,000? I’m only ever going to “meet” a few hundred of them at most. So long as a game can attract enough players to keep the game profitable, paying through whatever means the developer find appropriate, then the players of that game should be well served.
“So long as a game can attract enough players to keep the game profitable”
But that’s the crux of the issue right there and it has everything to do with development costs and how they’ve been steadily spiraling up over the last 20 years.
The current model of development cannot be sustained long-term, and we’ve begun to see the cracks in this post-WoW landscape. Unfortunately, I think we (as players) have largely been the enablers of this. The industry is largely reactive and responds to this input.
We, as players, cannot demand over 30 AAA titles per year or, barring that, 30 niche titles per year with AAA quality. It’s one or the other and the problem is that both these approaches end up causing the same problem: Dev costs go up.
We largely (and quite naturally) pass on or refuse to play games which are “not as good” as the ones that came before. The direct consequence of this is dev costs going up because the bar for profitability, or if you will the investment/risk ratio, is constantly being raised; investors can’t afford to fund a game which is not going to be as good as previous games because everybody knows (ourselves included) that it won’t sell. In the same way, they can’t afford to underfund it and see what happens because they end up in the same spot.
So over time projects get larger, teams get bigger, more and more, better assets are needed. And all those salaries have to come from somewhere.
Look, I won’t mince words here: We are directly responsible for the fact that 20 years ago teams were a tenth of the size of today’s teams. By always demanding better and refusing to support (even minimally in some cases) offers which are found lacking. By the way, well within our rights to do so. But there’s a responsibility attached to that right and we can’t ignore it.
Otherwise we can’t really explain why all the technological advancements in development tools, the power of the hardware, increased shared knowledge, etc… has gone up, and team size has also gone up when it logically should have remained the same or even decreased. We have computing power that 20 years ago would have been considered sci-fi-ish, tools that let us do things which were unheard of and so on, but we’re the only industry in the planet that the more access it has to better technology, the bigger our costs get.
I don’t think the solution has anything to do with playing niche or mainstream games, but it has a lot to do with the player expectations the industry reads. If we wanna change the industry and make it healthier, we need to get healthy first.
Caveat: I’m not talking about garage initiatives here. Bless them, we need them, and I don’t think they’ll ever go away. I’m talking over a certain level here.
Sure, we can explain basic economics. The substitution effect is that as something gets cheaper, we use more of it. The wealth effect is that as we get richer, we use more of everything. Those both combine in software development: better tools, hardware, etc. lead to more effort being devoted to development, not less, because we get more from it.
If something was not possible 20 years ago but is now, you should trivially expect to see a lot more effort going towards it. You could not do it at all 20 years ago.
Standard should go up, although I would most likely settle for something as entertaining as Master of Orion II.
Agreed, but I’m talking purely from a headcount/salary perspective which is (?) the bulk of development costs in normal situations (as in, you don’t have to pay 20M to license the IP for the “Butt Pirates from Space” books).
It’s deceptive to talk about man hours because the situation is not quite like that, but it servers to illustrate a point. If 20 years ago it took, say, 5 artists 1 year to create 1,000 art assets, and now those artists with the current power of their tools can create 10,000 in the same time, the only way to explain that the team has grown to 20 artists is that the design and the project is now calling for 50,000 art assets.
We got to this situation by constantly rewarding ‘more’ instead of ‘better’ (huge can of worms there, but hey). 20 years of this reinforcement… yeah, that’ll teach any industry that ‘more’ sells, but ‘better’ not as much.
It’s not as simple as that, though.
Mmm… MOO2.
Gameplay is what opens my wallet. Bling, not so much. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m just stingy or because I’m an artist in the game industry. The visuals just play a vast second fiddle to fun gameplay in my book. It’s ironic, perhaps, because I *make* pretty graphics, but at the same time, I’m probably oversaturated with prettiness, and just want to get on with playing something fun.
Damn you two. Now I wanna fire up MOO2 and I can’t find it anywhere in the house. I’d hate to think it got lost during a move. :(
While it is probably still illegal, if you have a physical copy somewhere in your house, it would not be immoral to download a copy somewhere. It’s not a huge program.
I keep my copy within arm’s reach, just in case.
Yeah, but it -pisses me off- that I can’t find the damn box anywhere! :(
I keep hoping that with the release of Guild Wars 2, Arenanet’s model of non-subscription, not-quite cash shop, and packaged “campaigns” continues to be viable and other companies actually try copying them this time around (instead of using its instanced format as the explanation for why subscriptions are “needed”).
Yeah, I’m hoping GW2 is the standard bearer for the next generation. The market has changed.
You’d think by now, that if that business model were to be copied or tweaked, and therefore arenanets success were to be copied, somebody would be on that by now. everyones too busy copying WoW